Designers = Meta-epistemologists? Questions of practicing design in the spaces of beyond-knowledge and the not-yet. Presented at the IASDR, Seoul, Korea 2009. By Hyaesook Yang, Ayako Fukuuchi, and Jordan Dalladay-Simpson.

1. 22nd October 2009
Design⎢Rigor & Relevance
IASDR conference
Designers = Meta-epistemologists?
Questions of practicing design in the spaces of beyond-knowledge and the not-yet.
Ayako Fukuuchi, Hyaesook Yang & Jordan Dalladay-Simpson Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

2. Contents
Introduction
The self-reflective designer?
Prospect-offering within the design professions?
Design process as ecological growth?
Shifts in the values of the design professions?
An ethics of design?
Toward a common future?
Beyond-knowledge and future praxis?
Eudemonic future-action?

3. Introduction
The purpose of this paper
 To propose and ask questions about the future of our discipline.
 Encourage a state of positive growth through the paper.
 We believe that designers can play a more positive role in today’s world.
 We do not propose this paper as a truth-claim but as an
example of
questions and issues we believe important to finding and manifesting
a currently unthinkable, but possible and preferable future for both our
industry and our world.

4. The self-reflective designer?

5. Social
level
A design
professional
individual
level
The self-reflective designer

6. Recursive iteration
This is because any situated experience from an activity in flux
is itself relational to its surroundings.

7. Personal questions of professional practice…
“ So, I’ve learn a designer’s role through
whole my surrounding and the endless
loop. Yes, I was a designer. I am a
designer and may be I will be a designer
in the future… I might know it all but
what I’ve done with this and what I have
to do with this? ”( Hyaesook Yang, 2009)

8. Prospect-offering within the design professions?

9. on average 68 bikes were stolen in London every day in 2007/08
www.designcouncil.org.uk

10. Bike Lock: Out of Reach, Out of Harm,
Dominic Hargreaves
Problem-solving >
Biking schemes such as Bycyklen in Copenhagen, velib in Paris and bicing in Barcelona
possibility-finding >
prospect-offering

11. Synergy 1
WIN
WIN
designer
environment
Sy
Synergy 3
ne
rg
y
gy
er
n
Sy 6
5
Synergy 4
Synergy 2
WIN
WIN
client
society
Wood (2007) calls the win-win-win-win scenario in which
the client, society, environment and designer are all
in balance

12. Design process as ecological growth?

13. A design process model: seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding.
change through use
seeding thing
evolved thing
reseeding thing
Reflection towards reseeding
Design process
The process model based on The Seeding, Evolutionary Growth, and Reseeding (SER) Process
Model,1994 (c., L3D, University of Colorado). Giaccardi, E. (2005), Metadesign as an Emergent
Design Culture, p.11

14. A design process model: seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding.

15. the immediate need of
‘metadesign’
“extensive, holistic, consensual, ethical,
eco-mimetic practice of design” Wood (2007)
- multidisciplinary design approaches will be very
useful to maximise the seeding practice.
- knowledge and actions of the other expertises will be
essential for the designers’ role.

16. Shifts in the values of the design professions?

17. We are surrounded by design artifacts, from products to
lifestyles
“ design has placed itself more and more at the direct service of private interest.
”Clive Dilnot (2008)

18. Balancing sense and sensibility :
To negotiate double-edges factors into practice

19. using artifice
Flux coefficient
from past-state society
towards future-state society
current-state
society
Iterative binding
designing artifice
possible socio-cultural
evolutionary path
Design and use of artifice diagram – The remaking of socio-cultural values
All in all, the design process is never complete and alters its own further
action by manifesting unpredictable factors.
To make it simple, a
design can be a reflection of the
world manifested through a space of ‘not-yet’.

20. An ethics of design?

21. “To design is no longer to increase the stability of the
manmade world: it is to alter, for good or ill,
things that determine the course of its development.”
John Chris Jones (1970)

22. Design effects
larger contexts than it was originally configured for

23. “ Defuturing ” Tony Fry (1999)
actions of sustaining the unsustainable literally individual actions against a
collective future.

24. “ Futuring ” Tony Fry (2009)
corrective and redirective action towards the Sustainment,
specifically aiming towards creating a more eudemonic future.

25. Need a
world?
paradigm-shif t to sustain a future for our
Sustainability’?
‘

26. Towards a common future?

27. COMMON ?
Single voice of
‘I’ moving to an adjacent ‘we’.

28. Languaging
“Language is a
manner of living together
in a flow of consensual coordination of coordinations
of consensual behaviors, and it is as such a domain of
coordinations of coordinations of doings. So, all that
we human beings do we do it in language.”
Matuarana (1997)
Need to langauge!!!

29. Co-authoring as a process for building consensus
through ‘languaging’
Julia Lockheart
Writing PAD Project Director
Writing PAD Website:www.writing-pad.ac.uk

30. Beyond-knowledge and future praxis?

31. ➜
Design-languaging
is using elements of a language as a specific design tool for orienting
oneself in a space of thinking that is yet-to-be grounded, or yet to exist.

32. Apoietic
to stand for a pure abstract, a concept or idea that is yet to be
made and continually remade. Apoietic things are implicit when dealing with
activities of bringing about the not-yet

33. Purposing
is to design (a) purpose rather than to design artifacts

34. Wisdoming is when a virtuous design process or praxis is folded back
upon itself, shaping other practices around it both within and beyond it’s

35. 2.9 Eudemonic future-action?

36. ‘ eudemonia ’
a choice to act for and with good-spirit,
with the presumption that such actions will
bring about both a future happiness and
will-to-happiness.

37. Therefore…
we should be encouraging designs practitioners to
reflect on their knowledge-action, and
hopefully allow them to identify how their values are
reflected and brought-about through their design practice.
Through this we can open the door to prudent design,
the designer as
the virtuous agent of
eudemonic change.
With

38. Designers = Meta-epistemologists?
Reflect…

39. Thank you.
Ayako Fukuuchi, Hyaesook Yang & Jordan Dalladay-Simpson
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
ayakko_@hotmail.com
hyaesook.yang@gmail.com
hi@jordandalladaysimpson.co.uk