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