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INTERMINABLE
DESIGN: TECHNÉ AND TIME IN THE DESIGN OF SUSTAINABLE SERVICE
SYSTEMS Abstract
Drawing on Martin Heidegger's accounts of the Ancient Greek productivism that continues to inform modern designing, I argue that the design of more sustainable product-service systems will need to pay greater heed to how things change over time. Since designers tend to exemplify Marxist theories of alienated labour with their desire to create 'once-and-for-all's, something like 'extended-designer-responsibility' is needed, where designers are required to engage with their output beyond its production and sale/use. As
an epilogue, the paper discusses the way design students invest
heavily in the production of finished products for assessment, but
then invariably never pick them up, satisfied merely with the intangible
mark they receive. How could this situation be exploited to educe
designers of sustainable systems rather than technicians more unsustainable
stuff?
We are beginning to become conscious of the temporal nature of all forms (and thus of all creation). Since entropy is beginning to obstruct us at least as much as objects of use are. The question of responsibility and freedom (this being the essential question of creation) arises not only in the process of designing but also in the process of throwing away objects of use. It may be that consciousness of the temporality of all creation (even that of immaterial designs) will contribute to a future situation in which things will be designed a bit more responsibly, resulting in a culture with less and less room for objects of use to act as obstacles and more and more room for them to serve as vehicles for interpersonal contact. Vilém Flusser 'Design: Obstacle for/to the Removal of Obstacles' 1 [Endnotes open in a seperate window.] Prologue The assignment is tossed onto pile which falls over, spreading over the floor. We can see that nearly every essay is about a mobile phone. Scene 2 Scene 3
However, it is now apparent that this approach to ecodesign is inadequate. The focus on only minimising a few of the most direct sources of ecological damage in the development of each new product, has delivered results that are too piece-meal (McDonough & Braungart, 2001). The environmental improvements achieved through DfE and eco-efficiency more generally have not only been eroded by economic growth, but, it appears, have fuelled economic growth through Rebound Effects (Jalas, Plepys & Elander, 2001) 3. The task remains for designers to maximise the creation and promotion of more sustainable ways of living, by working with complexes of indirect and consequential impacts 4. Compared to this brief, DfE has been far too 'one-at-a-time'. Put another way, it has been far too technical, shying away from cultural change programs. DfE's technical solutions have been distinct from any form of behaviour change (eg user-studies are used to determine what will work, rather than what uses need to be changed) let alone value change (eg designers produce neutral instruction manuals, and marketers produce 'green' brands, rather than both working together to persuade users of the value of the new lifestyles opened up by new products and services) 5. This paper will argue that proceeding 'one-at-a-time' and proceeding technically is the same thing, the same obstacle blocking design for sustainability. I will be suggesting the DfE's 'now-this-now-that' approach is not just the pragmatics of every journey starting with the first steps. To stretch the metaphor, there is an ontological barrier to building up speed, from walking (per unit) to running (per system). I will argue that a qualitative leap is needed, out of the technique that ecodesign qua design is locked in. This gap between current technical attempts at developing sustainability and the sort of designing required is however not that which is conventionally identified between working with parts and holism, nor that between material entities and immateriality. It is rather a question of time, of working with or against changes over time.
Much work is now emerging about how we can begin to reduce our MIPS - Materials Intensity Per unit of Service. It is important to recognise that MIPS can be reduced not only by reducing the amount of materials required to deliver a fixed amount of service, but also by increasing the amount of service delivered by any fixed amount of material. Rather than the purely technological challenge of getting more uses out of each product (multi-functionality) 6, the latter can refer to the large gains that can be made by getting more use out of things, that is the longer use-lives made possible by design-for-reliability, -maintainability, -repairability, -upgradeability, for example, and/or getting more users for each thing, that is multiple users through business-to-consumer professional services rather than product purchase, business-to-consumer facilitated product sharing (leasing), or consumer-to-consumer product sharing (for one of the clearest schematics of dematerialisation strategies, see Cooper, 2002). Before moving on, allow me to underline the point just made about MIPS reduction strategies. In line with heuristics emerging from more than a decade of Life Cycle Assessments 7, in addition to conventional decreases in operational energy consumption and pollution, increased use-life remains the greatest opportunity for gains in sustainability (Cooper, 1994) 8. To achieve longer and more intense use-lives however requires the sort of reliability that often only comes from increased initial materials intensity. In these cases, what could be called 'rematerialisation' can afford a net whole-of-life dematerialisation strategy. I will return to this below. Across all these emerging ways of designing for sustainability is the encompassing notion of Product-Service Systems (PSS) 9. This term recognizes that what is axial is less the product per se, than the function that it delivers over time, as the vehicle for a system of services 10. Design for Sustainability's brief is then the design of dematerialising PSSs. Following Ezio Manzini's lead (eg Manzini, 1999; Manzini, Vezzoli & Clark, 2001) 11, strong research is now generating guidelines for the DfS of PSSs (see www.suspronet.org and www.pss-info.com). Whilst noting that 'From a design perspective the development of PSS represents a new challenge because the focus of the design activity shifts from the definition of new products to the re-organisation of existing elements on the basis of new needs and values' (Morelli, 2003: 75), Nicola Morelli, in one of a series of articles on this issue (Morelli and Loi, 2001; Morelli, 2002), maintains that 'designing a new PSS requires an extension [my italics] of the traditional designer's competence into new logical domains, such as the social construction of technological systems, market-oriented and organisational domains' (Morelli, 2003: 98) 12. But is dematerialisation design merely an 'extension'
of current design practices? Are current design practices technically
capable of designing sustainable systems? And if it is possible
to design Product Service Systems in an enlarged, but essentially
similar, way to the design of Products, is this adequate for the
larger problem of sustainability? Will the products of such design
techniques, namely services, be sustainable? The Function of Design History Materials efficiency - or in this case, in order to capture the net efficiency that is being sought, let's call it materials effectivity - has always been considered part of good design. This is also the case with multi-functionality and reliability. To this extent, it could be argued that modern industrial design, at least that of European origins, rooted in functionalism, has always been inspired by the ideal of dematerialisation design 13. Certainly Alain Findeli's design education insights and recommendations about cultivating a visual intelligence for praxical social system interventions make this lineage explicit (Findeli, 2001) 14, as to a lesser extent do Richard Buchanan's historically inspired arguments for the broadening of design beyond the orders of signs and products, and into process and culture (Buchanan, 1995). More directly, the design of services, as something that should be inherent to contemporary design practice, is also not recent. The way Chris Jones and Christopher Alexander followed design's methods into different forms of wholism that took design 'beyond the object' (Thackara, 1988) has been well documented, by C. Thomas Mitchell for example (Mitchell, 1993; Jones, 1996). These ambitions converged with the discourses of post-industrialism on the one hand (Cross, 1981, but also the Italian perspective from Branzi, Diani, and Morello) and the emergence of systems theory on the other (Jonas, 1993). Representative of this constellation was the work Abraham Moles, who was advocating Product-Service-System design a decade before merely reformist ecodesign got its act together. I single Moles out, not merely to honour his foresight, but because I will be engaging below with a particular aspect of his version of this imperative. The question then perhaps needs to be asked, why, given these decades of work on expanding design into the delivery of less materials intensive ways of living and working, is design still the proliferator of stuff. There are clearly some stubborn obstacles persisting beyond the analysis of these many dematerialisation advocates. Some of these may be external to designers. Perceptions of design within the current politico-economic dispositif may constrain its ambitions to expanded influence. However, displacing these issues for the time being, I would like to explore what I believe to be internal constraints to design's capacity for taking up these calls to service system design. By thinking through the nature of design, we will see that, theoretically, there are some structural horizons that need to be surpassed to undertake DfS.
Maintaining Changing Things As I indicated before, I want to draw on the work of Abraham Moles, who in 1985 (in English), two years before the Bruntland Report, was advocating what is now termed 'extended producer responsibility'. Working within the discourse of the time around the expanding 'service economy' 16, Moles calls for 'The Comprehensive Guarantee' (Moles, 1985). Noting the clear whole-of-life cost involved when owners of products have to go to the trouble of getting broken products repaired or replaced, Moles proposes that all bills of sale be accompanied by a contract ensuring for a fixed period not only full repair whenever needed but also compensation for inconvenience and loss of product use time. Moles then notes that the consequence of such a mandated requirement would be the substitution of 'the concept of a maintenance process for one of repair,' (59) 'a transformation from a society that supplies goods to one that supplies services centred on goods,' (60) a shift from ownership through 'functional ownership with a time limit', to 'a world of rent' (62) and 'a society of functions rather than of objects that support them.' (63) Having noted the resistances in 'consumers' to such a vision, Moles goes on to note that 'it is by no means certain, in fact it is obviously unlikely, that industrial producers will agree without resistance to new forms of specifications that stretch their social role far beyond their present capacities.' (64) The nature of those stretching specifications is spelled out by Moles in his subsequent article on 'Immateriality' (Moles, 1988), where the topic is the obverse of that of 'The Comprehensive Guarantee', namely, that since 'Any immaterial civilization will be heavily materialized because its immaterial products are necessarily linked to the mechanical infrastructure that generates, stabilizes and governs them' (30), then 'The immaterial civilization must be reliable' (27). That reliability comes not from creating ''new' objects' (31) but from 'a maintenance mentality' (26), 'whereby designers will need to take into account the micropsychological analysis of the object/user binome and deduce from each aspect of this interaction not only the conditions in which the object will fulfil what was traditionally called its function, but also the conditions of its permanence [my italics] with respect to the role it is to play in the life of the user' (Moles, 1988: 64). It is designing toward this 'maintenance mentality' 17, dematerialising by lengthening the use-life of products through proactive servicing and repair, on which I want to focus. This is not only because it lies close to the conventional design of products, but also because it contains a strong vision of sustainability; not a once-and-for-all sustainability, but rather a process of sustainment: maintenance, repair, adjustment. Chris Jones calls this 'Continuous Design and Redesign' (Jones, 1983). Allow me to name this 'Interminable Design' after Freud 18, to underscore that what is at issue is never finishing with the design of anything. It is this 'designing with finitude' that appears to offer a clear route to the holistic source-problem of unsustainability. What then is the designing that could initiate
and sustain this process of sustainment? What sort of PSSs could
be designed to facilitate this? And, how stretched would designers
need to be to be up to this challenge? To what extent do their current
techniques allow or prevent the development of these changing-in-time
products?
Mass Production versus Customisation In this regard, techné is most often contrasted unfavourably with the more situated practices of political judgement. The deliberative qualities of phronesis remain more open to case-by-case details, acknowledging autonomous difference in all that such acumen dialogically negotiates 20. For Aristotle, the unpredictability of politics is no place for the homogenising calculations of techné. Plato's attempt to design a system of ordered social interactions following the model of the craftsman betrayed something fundamental about society, according to his student Aristotle 21. Given that PSSs tend to require greater direct people-to-people interaction than standard designs aiming only at comparatively more predictable person-to-product relations, it would seem that the logic of design techniques may not be appropriate to the task of dematerialisation. PSSs require the recovery, cultivation and sustainment of what is these days called 'social capital'. Such enablement requires the sort of flexible prudence for which there are no rules, no techniques 22. However, I believe that this account of techné
is too stark, too modern. By back-projecting current accounts of
'technology', it misses both the alogical aspects of techné
- artful craft - in Ancient Greece, and more pertinently, the phronesic
aspects of modern design practice.
But are bedsteads and garments, shields and houses moving things? Indeed they are, but usually we encounter them in the kind of movement that typifies things at rest and therefore is hard to perceive. Their 'rest' has the character of having-been-completed, having-been-produced, and, on the basis of these determinations, as standing 'there' and lying present before. Today we easily overlook this special kind of rest and so too the movedness that corresponds to it, or at least, we do not take it essentially enough as the proper and distinguishing characteristic of the being of these beings. And why? Because under the spell of our modern way of being, we are addicted to thinking of beings as objects and allowing the being of beings to be exhausted in the objectivity of the object (Heidegger, 1998: 192). To reveal this 'movedness', Heidegger is at pains to refuse the common misinterpretation of Aristotle, that the difference between phüsis and techné is that between the autopoietic and the allopoietic. What we today call 'nature' is not that which makes itself, as opposed to everything else which is the product of human making, ie the artefactual, because phüsis is in no way a form of making. The difference lies not in who or what does the making, but between the completed product of making and what just is. Now, in typical Heidegger fashion, this distinction is the opposite of what it at first seems. In terms of movedness, the previous quotation indicated that things that are as a result of poiesis, eg besteads and the like, are at rest. They lie present (are pre-sent), finished. By contrast, phüsical things 'just are, but in a way that manifests a dynamic presence (a presencing). Far from being cast as something permanently present, phüsis must be understood as always already in-formation; at any one time they are capable of being some things and resisting being others; at every moment they are becoming and withdrawing (at the same time, i.e. becoming X by withdrawing from being Y). Heidegger notes that to 'lead the way toward'
this sense of being phüsically, Aristotle invented a term:
entelécheia. Heidegger translates this term as 'holding (echei)
itself (en) in its end (telos)' (217). Again, meaning the opposite
of the way it is immediately read, entelécheia designates
not that which has reached its end, as if its end were different
from what it has, up until that time, been, but that which is, at
all times in its becoming, what it is and aims to be. With this
term, a clear distinction can now be drawn between the outcomes
of techné and phüsis. Appropriators of Aristotle like Arendt have pointed out that this enteléchial quality of phüsis is not denied to humans, who as deinon are invariably 'contra phüsis.' Humans manifest the complete-in-being-incomplete-ness of phüsis when dealing with each other, i.e. when engaged in praxis, as opposed to when they make phüsical beings into artefacts, i.e. when engaged in poiesis 26. Phronesis, the discernment required for praxis, is then analogous to the entelécheia of phüsis. The difference between techné and phronesis is not that between efficient and prudent action, making something according to a model and making oneself according to improvisation, but between that which aims to finish something and that which aims to sustain something.
Disposing of What is Taken for Granted Heidegger was of course concerned with being and time. He attempted to deconstruct the tendency of humans to let what they encounter lapse into being merely beings, things just present, as if outside time. The symptoms of this are that: 1) such merely present things are neither impressively there, shining forth in their thereness at the moments when they are; 2) nor is the way that they are not always there, noticed; their not-always-being-there, their phusical coming-to-be and unbecoming, is not acknowledged as being also there along with them. Produced things then, as finished, as merely present, even lose their having-been-produced-ness. They become alienated as so much stuff, seemingly constantly there at hand. In a later essay (Heidegger, [1954] 1977), Heidegger charts this transition:
The objectiveness [Gegenständige] of the world becomes constant [ständig] in representational production… In this, it is true, there is another transformation of things into the inward and invisible. However, this transformation substitutes for the frailty of things the factitious constructions of calculated objects. These objects are produced for consumption. The more quickly they are consumed, the more necessary it becomes to replace them ever more quickly and easily. That which is enduring about the presence of objective things is not their resting-in-themselves in their own world. What is constant about things produced as mere objects of consumption is the substitute [Ersatz]. (Heidegger, [1946] (2002): 228, 231) I have cited extensively here because it is crucial to see that it is the technical making of things that leads those things to being received as permanent; that they were made, that is, that they have not always been what they now are, is forgotten. Instead, we take these objects for granted, assuming that they just are. It is therefore this very presumption of permanence that allows us to consume these objects, shuffling between them at an increasing rate. It is the very finishedness of modern-made things, the way they are cast out into the world as from then on unchanging, that, far from granting them long lives, destines them to short use-lives and disposal. They can be cycled through in a relay of never complete means and ends only because they are technical beings. Now, all this is how things are treated, but it is not how they are. As Heidegger famously revealed in Being and Time, we are constantly surprised by things not being constantly there for us. We only notice their being, and their having-been-produced, when they break down. At these times, products re-assert their being-in-time, withdrawing phüsically from time to time from the technical system into which they have been requisitioned. This has frustrating consequences for our no-time-out economy, but if we were Presocratics, we would, according to Heidegger, consider such wear and tear the norm rather than the exception. It is the way of things to egress, evade and elude, rather than stay put, no matter how technologically sophisticated we get 29. Something there is that seems to resist being present. 30 Three vital points emerge from all this: Firstly, here is a clear account of our societies' unsustainability. Our 'taking for granted what we have made because we have made it seem complete', allows us to proliferate our world with things, some disappearing in use, but most just hanging around disused, persisting in unproductive or polluting ways. We are then literally unsustainable, unable to sustain all that we scatter about ourselves. We are only ever able to produce more presents, each quickly neglected. Heidegger's Aristotlean account of techné richly captures these contradictions of consumerism, the constant manufacturing of durables for temporary use. Exemplary of this technical feat, making permanent even what we intend only to be transient, is of course plastic. It is also inherent in that paradigm of technical making, obsolescence. Nuri Bilgin, in an article on which Moles relies, captures this perpetual re-production of the perpetual with a quite Heideggerian term, 'temporary eternity' (Bilgin, 1980: 122). Secondly, what is at issue is not demonic humans as compared to nature. The problem lies merely with the dominance of one of the many ways that humans are currently doing what they do. The solution is not, as Heidegger is often misinterpreted as advocating, merely to let things be, in their state of dilapidation for example. A 1941 lecture by Heidegger begins with 'guidewords' of Periander: 'take into care beings as a whole'. Humans have a responsibility to sustain the presencing of their world. It is incumbent upon us to maintain and repair the beings that sustain us, while heeding that 'permanence is contrary to the egressively enjoined essence of being' (Heidegger, 1993: 102) 31. Thirdly though, we do appear to have an addiction to this imperialism of techné's way of finishing things off. It is not coming to us naturally anymore to abide with what we make, sustaining its changing ways of being. Rather than respond to the changes-in-things-over-time, we react, with increasing violence. We replace or displace the offending item. We reimpose our technical framework on this refusal of things to stay as we made them. To this extent, the failure of developed nations to foster a post-industrial society becomes evidence of the correctness of Heidegger's Aristotlean diagnosis of our techné-fix. Far from evolving to systems of sustaining services, we have redoubled industrialism with such a surplus of products that replacement is now more efficient (on a per unit rather than holistic basis) than repair.
An atechnical design of PSSs, working toward the longer, and therefore less materials intense over time, use-lives that only servicing and repair can grant, cannot involve the projection of complete schemes. The designs must instead always be conceived and realised as something that will forever need completion, a process that the designer must facilitate but not certify. And when those moments of redesign are needed, designers must respond to these phüsical resistances with a different disposition, one that seeks not to refix what appears incomplete, but rather work with the changes that are part of something's completeness, and are therefore changes that will occur again. These broken-down things must not, because they cannot, be rectified or restituted. Design must find ways of fostering them in their changed condition, their new oldness. Without going any further, a hint for what this might mean lies, I believe, in the metaphors of cultivation or shepherding 32. Design's Product Fixation I do not have time to substantiate this point, but initial surveys certainly suggest that most of the more radical advocates of broadening the scope of design still centre the process of designing on completing things, without any reference to how those things persist and mutate after completion. At best those seeking to change design follow Buchanan in seeking enlarged fields of operation, but such Fourth Order designing is not yet designing in the Fourth Dimension of time. These instances manifest wider issues about what motivates modern homo faber. For the Hegelian Marx, it is axial to modern humans that they make finished products that, in their independent objecthood, can attest to the subjectivity of their then alienated creators. Nuri Bilgin, in the article to which Moles refers, points out that maintenance tends to work against certain psychological theories that argue that 'any motivation toward completing a task engenders tension, which is usually relaxed only when the task has been accomplished. Now, since prevention is carried out without perceptible stimuli and without a direct goal, this state of tension persists, and the preventive action may bring about permanent frustration' (129). Both Marx's and Bilgin's points are affirmed in one of the few English philosophies of making (or more exactly the many ways of speaking about making), Andrew Harrison's Making and Thinking (Harrison, 1978) 34. And much of the productive work bringing Activity Theory to an understanding of the design process reaffirms the 'focusing' power of making the object of design processes an object (eg Houkes et al, 2002).
Alexander Sidorkin begins an intriguing essay on 'The Labour of Learning' (Sidorkin, 2001) noting that 'A teacher friend of mine jokes that whenever it is time to throw away his student's drawings, he feels guilty, as if the god of children was watching disapprovingly. Every teacher can probably share this sentiment. It is a sad moment in teaching when the cute and awkward things children produce end their short lives' (93). From this familiar yet 'ignore[d] on a theoretical level' scene, Sidorkin asserts that all education, not only design education, 'is largely a function of making things; it is a consequence of making something' (93). In particular, 'Learning is the production of useless things. The things that students produce while learning are never being consumed; no one needs them. In contrast to utilitarian production, learning can be defined as wasteful activity' (93). Without taking up Sidorkin's polemic against progressive education's desire to make all making-for-learning also useful, the article captures the extent to which learning, especially the learning of design which is proudly making-based, is thoroughly technical, producing things that are at an end after being made, without even a use-value. Here is the very opposite of learning to make things that need to be remade. And the pile of uncollected products forever accumulating outside my office attests to this. So, in conclusion - but this proposal is something that now needs to be developed, both theoretically and in practice - I would suggest that design education involve, not no making, and not the making of more useful things, but the remaking of things. Students should retrieve work from one semester and take it further the next, learning to perceive the inadequacy of what was submitted at one time, and the potential it retains to be refurbished and modified. This would be enhanced if students were required to recover other students' work and make it their own through repairs. Such retrievals and recoveries, such exposure to unfinishedness, would open their technical competencies to more phüsical prudence, and thereby dispose them to the cultivation of sustaining-PSSs, or sustainments.
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