technologies. And we value novel
applications. So why would we want
to “undesign” the types of things we
create—even the very things that you
or I have literally designed?
The motivation for undesigning
comes from two directions. There are
things we might consider bad, evil, or
merely unnecessary. We might desire
to completely eliminate such things,
or wish they had never been designed
in the first place: Nuclear power plants
that, in retrospect, were not safe
enough. Interactive children’s toys
made with toxic materials. Consumer
electronics waste (that does the
greatest immediate harm to distant
others). The skyscraper that could have
been a park and now blocks someone’s
view. The newest software update that
runs slower and works no better than
the old version.
Then there are things we consider
to be good, useful, or even necessary,
but might be even better in restricted
or lesser forms: Massive archives
of digital images (compared to
ephemeral Snapchats or a handful
of printed photos). iPad games for
children or adults (instead of playing
outside). 24/7 Internet access (versus
a voluntary or imposed hiatus from
email or Facebook). Driving or flying
everywhere (rather than walking,
biking, or staying put). Choosing
among 100,000+ streaming videos
(or choosing one of 10 films currently
playing at the movie theater). Googling
an answer (rather than figuring it out,
or wondering).
Threats to our health, our
environment, our core values, and
our collective future represent design
imperatives. From the other direction,
design opportunity is suggested by
the subtly subversive character of
using Snapchat or a Polaroid camera
today. And the shaky moral ground in
between represents an entanglement
of design ambiguity: Is less technology
better? Is “green design” actually
sustainable? Are we too busy? Do we
spend too much time online? Do we
actually want the newest thing? 3
Through design, we can shift this
moral ambiguity in either the direction
of a negative design imperative or
positive design opportunity. Or else we
can give form to this ambiguity itself,
creating designs that function to ask
questions, foreground issues, engage
people politically, and encourage
personal reflection. (Think critical and
adversarial design4.)
UNDESIGN (IN THEORY)
In one important sense, undesigning
can be understood as an intrinsic,
inexorable counterpart to a positive
characterization of design. For
example, designing a new mobile
app undesigns what otherwise might
have existed in its place (other apps,
technologies, interactions, experiences,
skills, practices, values, and so on). And
undesign decisions to remove, omit,
or discard aspects of a design always
factor into a typical design process. 5
But the point of the term undesigning
is to emphasize an intentional and
explicit focus on the negative portion of
the equation: Design is creation (and
destruction). 6 Harold Nelson and Erik
Stolterman aptly characterize design
as a form of inquiry and intentional
action: “Design is the ability to imagine
that-which-does-not-yet-exist, to make
it appear in concrete form as a new,
purposeful addition to the real world.” 7
Undesign suggests a conceptual
inversion: design as the ability to
understand that-which-currently-exists,
to make it disappear in concrete form as
a new, purposeful subtraction from the
real world.
But undesigning is not a black-and-white, either/or proposition. Instead
we need to think in terms of gradations
of undesign. In more familiar terms, we
can think about inhibiting technology
at the level of individual interactions.
More broadly, we can think about
displacing technology at the level of
routine social practices. And in the
most absolute terms, we can think
about utterly erasing or foreclosing
technology at the societal or existential
level.
Inhibiting, displacing, and erasing
and foreclosing can be viewed as
a spectrum of undesigning. 8 As a
conceptual framework, it’s a tool for
thinking about what we design and
what we don’t. This spectrum ranges
from things we’re already familiar
and presented in relation to bringing
goods into being fails to grasp design’s
ambiguity as an agent of both creation and
destruction…”
Fry, T. Design Futuring: Sustainability,
Ethics, and New Practice. Berg Publishers
Ltd., Oxford, 2008.
7. Nelson, H.G. and Stolterman, E.
The Design Way: Intentional Change in an
Unpredictable World, 2nd Edition, MIT
Press, 2012.
8. For a critical treatment of sustainable
design focused on the more extreme end of
this spectrum, see Tony Fry’s writings on
elimination design (see note 6, Fry 2008) as
well as Cameron Tonkinwise’s forthcoming
book chapter.
Tonkinwise, C. Design away. In Design
as Future-Making. S. Yelavich and B.
Adams, eds. Bloomsbury, 2014, in press.
9.
“What we re-quire is
silence ; but what silence requires
Cage, J. Lecture on nothing. In Cage,
Silence. Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, 1961, 105.
10. Conceptual cleverness and poetic
expression can be instructive sources of
inspiration and guidance, especially when
the object of concern is as amorphous
as material absence and negation itself.
Artists have published books consisting
entirely of footnotes to absent text, articles
consisting of missing pages, and works
consisting of blank sheets of paper. And in
the opening of this article I promised no
pictures, and plenty of notes and negative
space (even though Interactions magazine
“strongly encourage all authors to supply
photos, illustrations, or illustrative
concepts along with their manuscripts”).
Design inaction—as a conceptual
practice—suggests inaction that is
intentional, thoughtful, purposeful,
and impactful. Design inaction that
is un articulated in any form can be
impactful, at least momentarily;
refraining from designing some thing can
result in the maintenance and deferral of
something else. But for design inaction
to be lasting, it needs to be continually
articulated in some manner (through
thought, gesture, speech, behavior,
text, image, object, environment, and
so on). And for design inaction to be
acknowledged and recognized as such, it
must be materialized.
Introduced absence—as a conceptual
design outcome—is materially
ambiguous. What are the material
forms of absence? One of the practical
problems with literally not designing
anything is that nothing is made, nothing
is perceptible, and hence nothing can
be referred to or credited. You can’t
win design contracts or contests by
literally not designing anything at all.
To overcome or instead play into this