Otto von Busch

The point of progression

The action line is in fact not one single line, but one and several lines. They keep shape and form by following simple protocols or rules. Such rules assemble the lines into what seems like a singular line, and not an explosion of coal as the graphite of the pencil tip disintegrates microscopically on the paper surface. However, one should be careful not to think that ludus is full of rules and paidia is anarchic. Rather one should think of how the rules are defined, how flexible they are, and how they interact to shape the format of the game. In ludic games the rules are defined beforehand and are strict parameters, usually set to discipline the paidiaic tendencies. Ludic rules in turn generate innovative behaviours of escape or avoidance towards the explicit goals of the game. The paidiaic game is more playful but has tacit rules defined by cultural assumptions and representations. But instead of avoiding them, the paidiaic game offers opportunities to challenge and remodel the tacit rules together with the other players.

Ludic rules do not reduce possibilities. For example, even within the strict format of chess there are more possible legal moves than there are atoms on earth (Holland 1998: 37). Rather, the ludic format proposes what possibilities are legal, or possibilities that are com-possible with the rest of the rules. To compose, in this sense, is to move legally within the existing formats or protocols, still playing the game the players have agreed to play, or improvising in a specific music scale along with the band. Illegal moves however, are ­in-compossible, breaking the order of the game, which limits or encircles action spaces (Deleuze 2006: 67ff).

Yet, tinkering with rules opens new doors to spaces beyond control. There is thus always at least one complementary ‘line of flight’ accompanying the action line, circumventing, intersecting, stretching and twisting it. But for this line to make a difference, it too has to offer new compossible means, new harmonies to discover, new worlds made possible to inhabit, new ludic spaces for players to engage with in a paidiaic way.

The action line is drawn by a moving point of progression. This point of progression is not steady, but in continuous movement, a circulation, loop or playful refrain. It is in constant negotiation with the surroundings and has no expressed goal.

Negotiations between the rigid and resilient mind

It is easy to imagine research as a straight line from question to answer, often proving a hypothesis and documenting the process to make the result accurate and repeatable. As noted by Deleuze and Guattari, this is the ‘royal science’ of reproduction, deduction, induction and grand theorems of categories (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 401f). Yet, such a process leaves little room for serendipity or unplanned adventures and discoveries. The ideal of royal sciences favours a journey that exhibits rigidity. What is the hypothesis? What are the planned outcomes? What calculated conclusions can be drawn? How is the work demonstrably systematic and rigorous? How is the experiment iterated and reproduced accurately?

However, as Paul Feyerabend points out, the problem is that methods, implemented to conquer the abundance of reality, often also filter out the interesting parts of research and its findings (1999). Rigid method is created to keep clear of trouble, not too dissimilar to how a Lonely Planet guidebook takes the pleasant discoveries out of a holiday.

We could say that the royal sciences favour the rigid mind of predictability and reductionism, the dead reckoning of research. This is a research that wants to draw straight lines and which falters if it encounters unpredictable elements of data not fitting into the format of the question.

On the opposite end of the royal sciences, Deleuze and Guattari places the ‘ambulant’ or ‘nomad’ sciences, which consists of ‘following a flow in a vectorial field across which singularities are scattered’  (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 411). This nomadic method, ‘vague’ as in vagabond and ‘unexact yet rigorous’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 405), resonated with that of the Polynesian mariner who advocates a resilient mind, a mind of integrative flexibility. The rigid mind builds walls, defends its position and digs deep wells of specialization in its desert of reality with the help of analytical thinking. The resilient mind rides lines in a world of abundance with associative thinking, constantly on the move, just like ‘nomadic thought’:

What we have, rather, are two formally different conceptions of science, and, ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science while nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science loose. (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 405).

Likewise, we could see similarities between this division and those that traditionally exist between art and design, exemplified by the image of design as user-guided and artistic inspiration and expression as reliant on romantic genius. In the words of designer Rich Gold:

For an artist user-testing is a joke. For a designer it is fundamental… An artist paints a painting, stares at it, and says, ‘isn’t it beautiful, it expresses my inner vision perfectly.’ The designer paints a painting, stares at it, then turns it around to the audience and asks ‘Do you like it? No? Then I’ll change it.’ (Gold 2007: 22)

Gold addresses a question of influence; is your work allowed to be influenced by other sources, by forces outside your control? Can you surrender control but still influence the journey? Indeed, it seems that the difference Gold discusses resembles the difference between dead reckoning or a rigid hypothesis and surfing the associative lines of Polynesian navigation in constant negotiation with the changing elements, or continuous testing.

I do not want use Gold’s example as a way to deride either art or scientific method, but as an inspiration from which to observe an amalgamated design practice. A research journey can use the intensity of both these lines of practice to find new passages between the sciences and design. It can do this by using the confidence of Gold’s artist, for inspiring vision from other fields and innovation, to reach new ground beyond the user’s (and often also the designer’s) initial imagination. This means creating what interaction designer Preben Mogensen calls a ‘provotype’ which can challenge the preconceptions of the participants in the design process and make them lift their gaze to see further (Mogensen 1992: 15f). Yet, it is a process driven by participation, testing and user engagement.

This double action grounds vision, keeping the eyes on the horizon, engaging with practice, dipping the hand in the water to feel the temperature. It roots the event in the shared experiences together with participants or co-travellers. This is done through workshops, trials or feedback on studio work, resulting in some form of prototype, provotype or mock-up, which comes alive in the event.

The journey progresses in loops of improvisation, quite like the koans of Zen Buddhism, questions or stories which meaning cannot be understood by rational thinking. There is no problem requiring a logical answer, no puzzle or riddle to be solved, but rather the koan is supposed to train the practitioner for a path of inclusive attention and a situated reply in every subject. Here, knowledge can be seen as a form of attention that reduces separation and fosters loops of curiosity.

Zen-master Shunryu Suzuki frames such curiosity in what he calls the beginner’s mind: ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’ (Suzuki 2006: 1)

One could easily think Suzuki favours amateurs and ignorance, but I think a better answer comes from a Spinozan reading of the quote above: ‘We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 284) The craft of curiosity is not an experience of a mind, it is a disciplined preparation of a body, a training to be affected, to not be limited by the rigidity of the expert’s mind.

We could thus paraphrase Suzuki’s quote with an imaginary Spinozan one: ‘In the beginner’s body there are few possibilities, but in the expert’s there are many.’ It is in the expert’s body we find the carefully crafted curiosity of continuous improvisation, and we cannot plan, foresee or know where it will take us. That is the point of progression along the action line; the resilient mind of the navigator.

Pedagocial diagrams

We all live in a rich world, full of expressive qualities, and it is too damn real. To cope with this profusion we apply filters to reduce the intake of stimuli. We then cast the leftovers into cognitive dummies on which we try to agree the best we can. This is a crucial issue, especially in research; how to lower the amount of noise in an inquiry but still make it look like a representation of reality in all its complexity. The next step is to render this representation as part of a metaphysical model of what reality is. These are rough generalizations of some of the key points of Paul Feyerabend in his book The Conquest of Abundance (1999). Feyerabend identifies an abundance of reality, which scientific research tries to address by on the one hand cutting it down with tools of reduction and on the other producing tools and concepts with which to render the world understandable. Through experiments ‘scientists […] are sculptors of reality’ as they ‘create semantic conditions’ for testable effects (Feyerabend 1999: 144). Likewise, artistic research can create the conditions for its experiments, but keeps proportional the belief in these experiments to the evidence they produce. However, it is not primarily evidence we are after here, but rather the ability to render the possible, or aspects of reality, visible and discussable.

Such renderings have been done in various ways over the years, and art has usually been among the main contributors in this endeavour. But any rendering technique that best represents reality is in constant flux and historically imitation itself has been understood in highly abstract ways. For example, as Feyerabend points out, during Byzantine times:

The Eucharist was a true image (of Christ) in this sense; a painted picture was either mockery or an idol. (Feyerabend 1999: 92)

Paul Klee’s credo, mentioned before, that ‘art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible’ resonates well with the rendering of Christ in the Eucharist; it is a ritual which makes a reality visible to some senses, even if this reality is not what some natural scientists would regard as objective. The Eucharist renders an aspect of reality perceptible to the taste buds.

In his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1972), Paul Klee illuminates a dynamic investigation into what he identified as formal principles in visual art. The book is a collection of Klee’s sketches produced throughout his teaching at the Bauhaus, during the school’s transition from an esoteric perspective to technical formalism at a crucial time of post-war artistic and artisanal exploration. In the coming sections I will use some of Klee’s conceptual illustrations to draw a possible approach to the dynamics of an artistic research journey.

Autopoietic loops

The point of progression is in itself a small living system; it is the ‘now’ of the workshop, the hands-on event, discussion, social gathering or paidiaic plane. What draws the point is this circular movement of a living and energetic system. If it was not energetic it would hardly draw a line. To understand this tracing movement we can turn to the science of living, self-reproducing, or autopoietic systems as a reference.

Autopoietic systems are at the core of all living systems according to biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Maturana & Varela 1987). Closed within a flexible and porous membrane or boundary a dynamic metabolism loops and the unit is alive – be it a cell, fungi, anthill or social system. This is the ‘machine’ of a living system, producing life in an ‘ontogenic’ process; the ‘structural change in a unity without loss of organization in that unit’. (Maturana & Varela 1987: 74) It occurs in continuous interaction with the environment and with the inner dynamics of the autopoietic unit, and also between separate ontogenic processes (which forms larger ontogenic loops).

The biologic cognitivism of Maturana and Varela is at the risk of being solipsistic or even considered a radical socio-biological constructivism. Their emphasis on how the biological senses ‘bring forth’ reality can easily sound like an abundance of subjective or even illusionary worlds, unique to each and everyone. But the focus of Maturana and Varela is not on the individual, or how the individual imposes its will on the world, but on how living systems interact to create worlds, experienced and shared among every organism involved.

It is in the interplay between autopoietic systems the ideas of Maturana and Varela touch upon some crucial issues of research navigations. Together, in interplay, ontogenic loops undergo ‘structural coupling’; a ‘history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems’ (Maturana & Varela 1987: 75). Two or more interacting systems form coupled patterns of behaviour from which they start coordinating their evolution. Here we come to an important point: structural coupling does not happen according to a master plan or following strict guidelines. Structural coupling is enacted continuously, for example, in cells by interchange of substances, or among ants by trophallaxis, the flow of secretions between the members of the ant colony (Maturana & Varela 1987: 186). The shared stomach acid of the ant colony is the media, or super-organism, helping to coordinate the colony, not the queen or any other individual ant. Social coupling is enacted in the same way by communication which ‘coordinates behaviours mutually triggered among the members of a social unity’ (Maturana & Varela 1987: 193).  From the biological perspective of Maturana and Varela, ‘there is no “transmitted information” in communication. Communication takes place each time there is behavioural coordination in a realm of structural coupling’ (Maturana & Varela 1987: 196). Just like the trophallaxis coordinating behaviours between ants, language only exists as ‘languaging’, an ongoing process of ontogenic coordination (Maturana & Varela 1987: 210).

For Maturana and Varela it is the emergent and epigenic cellular interactions in structural coupling that creates the mutations and natural drift we call evolution, not the simple and linear recoding of the DNA code so commonly described in popular biology. To illustrate their attitude to DNA one should not think of sheet music dictating a concert, but an ongoing orchestration or jazz improvisation on the DNA theme; a paidiaic process to pick themes and collaborate, arranging them in a living process rather than a linear execution of program code. It is the dynamics of an event.

The autopoietic systems are our world: ‘the world everyone sees is not the world, but a world which we bring forth with others’ ( Maturana & Varela 1987: 245). By playing with the ontogenic loops we can bring forth new worlds, we can play with new language games, not because they mean something else in a deeper sense, but because they hook into each other and evolve together. We sculpt them out of reality. A new social plasticity is possible and it is this process that renders the world visible. And along the journey we play with the process of becoming.

Action, Ludus and Paidia

The approach of interpreting and negotiating with the forces at sea, as well as those of orientation, could perhaps be better compared to a playful game than that of rigid science. It is continuous improvisation and association, rather than the reference to fixed positions and analysis. Games and play are not chaotic. On the contrary, they follow micro-protocols and are perhaps more like jazz improvisation than the execution of a written score for a symphony.

Over the last decades a lot of research has been made on understanding the interplay and dynamics of games and play, especially within the field of Human-Computer Interaction.  The multifaceted culture of role-playing games, both table-top and on-line, has evolved into a rich ecology of perspectives. Some of those outlooks can shed light on how to orchestrate the dynamics of the polyphonics of artistic practice.

In his book Man, Play, Games (2001), French intellectual Roger Caillois identified four patterns of play – ‘Agon’ (competition), ‘Alea’ (chance), ‘Mimicry’ (simulation), and ‘Ilinx’ (vertigo, altering perception). He also set out to distinguish between two elements of play, positioned at two opposite poles:

At one extreme an almost indivisible principle, common to diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrollable fantasy that can be designated by the term paidia. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complimentary, and in some respects inverse, tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature [...] I call this second component ludus. (Caillois 2001: 13)

For Caillois, ‘ludus’ is the feature in games that produce winners and losers, with enforced rules and procedures (it could be the scale of music), while on the other hand ‘paidia’ situates the process of unrestrained playfulness (the jam session). In other words ludus is the game of ‘calculation, contrivance and subordination to rules’ and paidia is the play of ‘the active, tumultuous, exuberant and spontaneous’ (Caillois 2001: x). Paidia is the force of exploration, the curious play with becomings and the emerging now. Paidia is the force that creates blue notes.

To describe the development and continuation of a research journey, or more specifically a design workshop, we could draw an action line. This line illustrates the progression of the journey. If everything runs smoothly, or too smoothly, and nothing much happens, the line is straight. Such a journey would be the ideal of rigidity, predictable and under control, arriving according to plan. But as we deal with other people, unexpected things happen and the line winds and twists. Sometimes this happens because of conflicts or insecurity, but most often simply because of interplay. If the participants have a great time and start to improvise and take their own initiative the line bends according to their steering. My best experiences from participatory workshops has happened when the right energy kicks in and the action starts flowing, like in a swinging jam session; players listen to each other, build upon each other’s scales and tones and trigger new improvisations. There is no leader, but leadership lies in the relay of initiative, where the scale allows all band members to play one solo after each other. This is the social paidiaic plane, it is the wave on which the paidiaic event surfs.

Decision loops

The autopoietic loop does not have any planned goal, it has no written score to follow, no question and answer. It is a perpetual improvisation in close coordination with the surrounding environment. As it is responsive and dynamic it is also a circle of inter-coordination and impromptu decision-making. In this way the autopoietic loop looks very much like the OODA-loop of operational control, described by fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd (Corham 2002). The OODA-loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act, was conceptualized by Boyd to describe dynamic decision-making processes. Boyd’s concept was originally created for aerial combat training where fast acting is a matter of life and death, and a disciplined action-loop is needed for cutting through an abundance of accelerated stimuli.

Educators and leaders in the armed forces today face similar issues as researchers do; outside the study of historic campaigns and simulators, reality is complex. Like military strategists basing present-day tactics on old battles, researchers try to prove ideas by dead reckoning; drawing up future scenarios with the knowledge they already know. Serendipities and complexity are welcome neither in the war room nor in the research lab. The OODA loop is an attempt to change this, to introduce a method of improvisation and adaptation.

The OODA loop describes the process from observation to action, and the crucial advantage of the fighter who goes through the process faster than his enemy and thus gets inside the opponents loop, making him act upon outdated observations. As Boyd briefly put it in “New Conceptions for Air to Air Combat”, a 1976 briefing: ‘He who can handle the quickest rate of change survives’ (Coram 2002: 328).

As pointed out by military strategist Frans Osinga (2007), the OODA concept of Boyd is not about speed or agility, but about perfecting the improvisational thinking required in decision-making. Several loops are interacting and continuously developing, requiring fast conceptualization and unceasing reiterations. By using shifting patterns one’s behaviour will seem unpredictable to the opponent, as his existing models will no longer apply to the new situation. With faster cycles the opponent finds he is losing control of the situation as his countermeasures are quickly overcome and his command circuits become overloaded.

By mastering such human skills and behaviours, with questions of cultural analysis, contextualization and experience at the front, the performance of military equipment becomes of lesser importance. Boyd wanted strategy beyond firepower and air superiority, emphasizing:

non-linear tactics, avoiding and bypassing enemy positions, venturing deep into enemy territory without too much concern for one’s own flanks. The prize was not territory but time, surprise and shock. Such tactics would force the enemy to react. They would create the impression that US troops were everywhere and could strike anytime anyplace. (Osinga 2007: 45)

This may sound like the military theories of ‘deep battle’, prototyped by Soviet commander Mikhail Tukashevsky, or the German ‘blitzkrieg’, the contested term often attributed to Heinz Guderian. Yet, Boyd’s concept is not primarily aimed at doctrine, but rather at operational thinking, and has inspired later military theorists, influencing concepts like the ‘systemic-operational-design’ or ‘rhizomatic maneuver’ of Shimon Naveh of the Israeli Defence Forces (Naveh 2006), or the ‘systemic operational design’ of Huba Wass de Czege of the US Army (2009).

Huba Wass de Czege, a retired Brigade General and founder of the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) at the U.S. Army War College, is one of the inspirations behind the inclusion, for the first time, of ‘design’ as a core component of the latest US Army Field Manual (FM 5-0) on operations process. This move is described as an attempt to reduce the impact of mechanistic, idealistic and reductive thinking within operations planning. Military organizations have always been complicated, that is, made up of many parts arranged in linear and predictable ways, but for today’s conflicts the armed forces need to adapt to a new kind of complex environment. Wass de Czege is convinced that adaptive learning cycles are needed, which must be networked into the interconnected operational environment, coordinating a wide variety of decisions and units (Wass de Czege 2009).

Adaptive campaigning is the art of continually making sense of dynamic situations and evolving designs, plans, modes of learning, and actions to keep pace. (Wass de Czege 2009:4)

In the new field manual, design acts as a cognitive tool or a methodological link between battle command and the practice of action in the operational environment of the army, which no longer takes place only on the battlefield.  Just to highlight the complexity of a battle today, a US commander’s checklist before a brigade-size counterattack in Afghanistan can look like this:

– What infrastructure damage could the counterattack incur?

– How would that impact on the different actors and tribal groups in the region?

– Are we creating a disaffected minority by upsetting the power balance, risking a refugee crisis that would overwhelm the regional humanitarian capacity, or create other unintended consequences? […]

– What is the logic of the guidance?

– What are the sources of legitimacy of the different power bases within the enemy’s social system? (Banach & Ryan 2009: 108)

In the Field Manual, ‘design’ means the innovative skill and holistic vision with which to face the implications of the OODA loop as an operation evolves, a continuous improvisation and adaptation to unforeseeable events where no plotted or dead reckoned course can help. Thus classic military thinking, in resonance with engineering, finds itself short-handed in contemporary conflicts, missing a clear strategic goal, or a capital to invade, to finish a war.

This US Army Field Manual is where the swell chart meets the institutionalized war machine, and conflict navigation is based on operational initiative and interaction, rather than brute firepower, military engineering or attrition warfare. Even here an associative ‘art of design’ is called upon. (Banach & Ryan 2009; Hernández 2010)

Swell charts

Stick charts, which can be found around Micronesia and Polynesia, are intriguing geometric constructions and were for long an enigma among western researchers. These charts are models of the world constructed from palm ribs bound by coconut fibre and incorporating shells indicating islands. However, they are not representations of positions in relation to the planet and stars, but rather diagrams of elemental patterns and intensities: waves, swells and currents.

The mattang stick charts of the Marshall Islands, as David Lewis points out, ‘are not charts in the Western sense, but are instructional and mnemonic devices concerned with swell patterns’. (Lewis 1994:245) These differ from European charts in three important respects;

There is first the obvious fact that it is constructed for the purpose of indicating swell lines, which European charts ignore. Next, the shells attached to it are able to represent any islands, and the chart may be oriented at whatever angle is most convenient for the particular circumstances being illustrated. Third, mattang are utterly individual artifacts, constructed by navigators to suit their own requirements.  (Lewis 1994: 247)

The mattang is a diagram exposing the interplay of intensities; wind and current pressing the sea towards the shore and the refracting and diffracting wave and swell patterns shaping out to sea (the bent fibres in the middle of the mattang). It is in the interplay between such patterns one finds directions, or one can get bearings. Even in a dynamic element, such as the ocean, the traces of these forces are exposed to the navigator. The mattang is a help to decipher the mechanical protocols of the ocean’s ‘abstract machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004). It puts emphasis on the diffracting swell patterns the navigator sees as he or she is riding along the waves, in the very element on which the vessel floats.

Nomadic action

Let’s have a look at the first diagram in Klee’s book, the movement of lines. For Klee, a line is a meandering progression of a point in motion. Klee puts it like this:

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent, is a point, shifting its position forward. (Klee 1972: 16)

In his book The Fold, Gilles Deleuze uses Klee’s line to illustrate the movement and spontaneity of what Klee called ‘cosmogenesis’ a journey ‘between dimensions’. Deleuze stresses how Klee’s lines are very different from the firm angles and points of the Cartesian Wassily Kandinsky (Deleuze 2006: 15f). The action line of Klee, Deleuze argues, is a point in continuous movement, and it shapes the core component in the ‘nomadic thought’ which rides upon lines, rather than on fixed positions. It references evolving processes, or ‘becomings’, rather than the geometry of fixed meanings or essences. It is a line of practice: continuously evolving from observation, intervention, interaction and it moves through the world, not as a rigid and prophetic geometry, but as an emergent event. The active line moves along the paper (or in this case the screen), as the traced journey of a raft at sea.

As we observe such a line we should not ask: what does it mean? But: what does it do, with what does it resonate, what does it make possible?

We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what does it function with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed […] (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 4)

In practice-based research it is common to refer to ‘reflective’ practice, following the epic book The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schön (1983). If we were to depict this, we would get an accompanying line parallel to the original line. If it would not be too far removed and it would appear as a more marked or thicker line. Perhaps a more self-conscious line, but not very aware or related to the world around it as the accompanying line only mirrors the original line’s behaviour.

We could suggest other forms of lines, for example one depicting the ‘diffractive’ practice suggested by Donna Haraway. This would not be a reflection of the author-subject, but several meandering lines with emerging intersections and a reorientation of situated perspectives. As Haraway points out:

Reflexivity has been much recommended as a critical practice, but my suspicion is that reflexivity, like reflection, only displaces the same elsewhere, setting up the worries about copy and original and the search for the authentic and really real. Reflexivity is a bad trope for escaping the false choice between realism and relativism in thinking about strong objectivity and situated knowledges in technoscientific knowledge. What we need is to make a difference in material-semiotic apparatuses, to diffract the rays of technoscience so that we get more promising interference patterns on the recording films of our lives and bodies. Diffraction is an optical metaphor for the effort to make a difference in the world. (Haraway 1997: 16)

So how can we draw explorative lines of practice, lines that make a difference and can ground action anew? If the old English proverb is true, that one can’t find a new land with an old map, how should we find our way?

The Ludic Loop: playing with the possible

Design theorist Håkan Edeholt maintains that design operates with a double action. One side is how things ‘are’, which is an engineering perspective, and the other side is how things ‘ought to be’, which is an innovative attitude. In the everyday practice the designer constantly oscillates between these two sides (Edeholt 2004: 52f).

From Edeholt’s perspective, science is concerned with how things ‘are’. Since the Enlightenment, science has excavated this across time, where archaeologists examine how things ‘were’, and scientists how things ‘are’, experimenting with occurrences to also predict the future behaviour of materials and situations. This is the dead reckoning of science.

Edeholt warns that design might be trapped within how things ‘are’, and lose sight of what might be possible, or how things ‘ought to be’, or rather ‘ought to become’. Edeholt’s views on how things ‘ought to be’ takes the form of a set of proposals, gestures or offerings. They are designerly ways of pointing in the direction of the possible, or building towards the ‘micro-utopias’ proposed by another design theorist, John Wood.

To Wood, design is a practice which can render the future possible in terms of visualization. The possible becomes imaginable, the imaginable becomes discussable, and thus possible to work towards through collective action (Wood 2007). To coordinate change, communities and societies need to do languaging (like in the autopoietic loops), putting words to work, making wishes and ideas conceptual, visible and sharable. Design is here a tool for enacting possible futures and offering social coordination action towards such possible goals. Design research can here build a body of language around such endeavours to deepen and communicate practice amongst a wider body of practitioners and theorists.

The design of micro-utopias could be compared to the world-building in science fiction stories and games (often called conworlds or concultures, as in constructed worlds/cultures). These worlds usually evolve as collaborative work processes. Not only environments and characters are invented, but also languages (conlang or artlang), to act as cultural glue in the world-building process or sci-fi narrative (Conley & Cain 2006). Yet, most constructed languages are not science fiction, but are created as linguistic exercises and as hobbies; tinkering with any language structure is an excellent method to grasp how the hidden mechanisms of language function. A well-known example is Klingon from the world of Star Trek, fascinating both fans and academics, but others serve more mystical ends, like the esoteric Lingua Ignota of Hildegard of Bingen (Higley 2007). We do not need to swerve from our course to draw parallels to the construction of the communicative world or language that is clothes and fashion, the Lingua Ignota of the designed second skin.

Yet, world-building is also about producing infrastructure, rules and culture for a fictional world; the ludic parameters for shared imagination, the world in which explorative paidia is let loose.

The creation of micro-utopias (which in my practice often takes place in engaged workshops on participatory fashion design) oscillates between the abstract and the concrete: an abstract topic, the world-building process of shared imagination, discussing visions and cultural assumptions. This abstract process is matched with the hands-on workshop, the palpable work of crafting fabric into new garments, working with second hand clothes, unpicking, cutting, sewing. The interplay of these two spheres is at the core of the sketching process and also that of shared skill building.

The act of testing the new clothes is an integrative process between these two worlds; the feedback loop of trying out your new skin, feeling the morphogenetic shift, both in front of the mirror and among friends, the ‘what if’ question now exists. If complicated methods are avoided, a new concrete world can be touched and experienced after just a few hours of work. It becomes a lived and shared experience. Every participant actually leaves with a new skin, something to wear, proof of how new skills has been manifested, a new land discovered after an apprentice’s journey of discovery. They have produced their own swell charts after navigating in the elements, or in design-practice. Not reducing the real, but rending the possible visible.

Navigating the progression of lines

Navigation is the art of wayfinding. The word comes from Nautes, Greek for sailor, can be found in many forms, like aeronaut, the 18^th century balloonist, astronaut or Nicolas Bourriaud’s more contemporary discussion about the semionaut (2002).

There are however many different methods and traditions of wayfinding. European or western navigation has predominantly been based on the compass and dead reckoning. With tools like the compass and mariner’s astrolabe the navigators would find their position and from that calculate and deduce their speed and course to predict future positions with star charts and longitude tables. Mariners calculated latitude in the northern hemisphere by sighting the North Star, Polaris, and referencing its position with a sextant. Thanks to the invention of the marine chronometer, the longitude could also be calculated by using the precise time of a sighting.

This type of navigation depends on external phenomena in a stable state, compared with the rotation of the Earth. The point of reference is set apart from the position of the mariner, and the further removed they are the more accurate the bearings. The position of stars and the accuracy of time are the meta-parameters with which to fix a position at sea. It is from this geometric situation that the navigator draws out the course ahead by dead reckoning, planning the journey as a plotted straight line towards a postulated future position on the inert geography of the Earth.

Another method, used by the Polynesians, employed local phenomena and sighting; the chains of specific stars as they arrive over the horizon at night; weather and prevalent wind directions; seabird species, which congregate at particular positions and move along certain flyways; directions and patterns of swells on the ocean, and how the crew would feel their motion; colours of the sea and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some islands; even the temperature and salinity of the water (Lewis 1994). All these phenomena move together with the traveller, yet offer navigational help, without having to ‘go meta’, leaving the human situation for extending beyond lived experience for positions of stars and time, beyond our planet’s atmosphere. The elements are living forces with which the navigator creates associative cross-references, drawn from polyphonic phenomena, to find directions. The elements are not something that needs to be overcome to see the points of reference ‘out there’. Instead it is the diffraction of wave-patterns, which islands refract back out to sea, that are interpreted by the mariner, read in the very element on which the vessel travels.

The Polynesian navigator tests and rides intensities to find a way across the vastness of the ocean. The challenge is not to fix exact positions or points, but rather to ride vivid lines, using the forces of nature instead of framing the world by mathematical logic or measuring the journey’s progression by dead reckoning.

The Polynesian navigator connects lines with others, forming a meshwork of concepts and observations, of energies and forces, of theories, projects and examples. The sea is a rhizome of overlapping lines, where all the lines are of equal importance and space is smoothed out. This is very different to dead reckoning building on one royal hypothesis, based on the location of academic stars. The Polynesian mariner was a historic Deleuzoguatarrian and rhizomatic surfer, using the elements just as they used the intensity of thought in overlapping lines.

Homeward bound

Design and artistic research could use the navigational arts of the Polynesians as a tool for guidance. Practically or metaphorically, a research methodology that can embody an elastic or fluid course of experimentation, rather than linear rigidity, might offer assistance to deepen and share artistic or artisanal practice more efficiently. Being reflective will not be enough, as the reflective practitioner mainly sees and speaks to him or herself. I would come with some suggestions for the journey:

     – At least within the craft or practice-based fields we should explore applied forms of discussion and knowledge exchange: practical hands-on seminars. One could think of Polynesian navigation as some sort of tacit knowledge, but as David Lewis (1994) points out, it is a highly articulated craft while not abstracted into geometry or mathematics. It might have been secretive and shared only among a certain social group or guild, but among the navigators the knowledge (or attention to the elements) was shared by hands-on practice; observation of how weather could be read on trees and clouds, currents tasted by the salinity of the seawater, even weather forecasts by searching out and following the movement of crabs.

     – As artists we need to foster conscious references to our allies, the artists and artisans who do the same thing as we do, and avoid only stressing the uniqueness of our work. We need to better acknowledge currents within our own elements, how we use the present trade winds (trend winds?). Such alliances will build more stable vessels, our outrigger canoes.

     – We could be creating bold associations to other fields of practice, assembling meshworks of various lines of practice. Meshworks which in turn evoke different patterns of responses to our own practices. Just like, in my case, hacking has informed new fashion practices, in resonance with fan fiction and liberation theology, we might find new patterns of diffraction. By mapping these patterns we don’t have to predict where we are heading by dead reckoning. We have our own swell charts.

We’ll be safely homeward bound.

More information about Otto von Busch’s work: http://www.selfpassage.org/

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