Conversations — Dialogue and Discourse from Relational Design by Tim Holloway

Conversations Dialogue and Discourse from Relational Design

Conversations Dialogue and Discourse from Relational Design

Curated and Edited by Timothy Holloway with Monika Parrinder Esa Matinvesi Nathalie Alv책ng Sheena Calvert Joshua Trees

Curated and Edited by Timothy Holloway 2012 timoholloway@gmail.com timoholloway.wordpress.com

Contents 6 Introduction: Relational Design as Connected Conversations

By Timothy Holloway 8 Relational versus Instrumental: Relational Design As Feedback Culture A conversation with Monika Parrinder 20 Designing With or Designing For: Removing the Surface of Design A conversation with Esa Matinvesi 28 Holistic Thinking: Desingers as Meaning Makers A conversation with Nathalie AlvĂĽng 36 Designing Dialogical Discourse: Facilitation as Outcome A conversation with Sheena Calvert 50 Users & Abusers: Building Affordances for Improvisation A conversation with Joshua Trees

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Introduction: Relational Design as Connected Conversations

By Timothy Holloway Relational Design operates in the sphere of inter-human interaction, it is the facilitation of platforms and systems which not only allow for this interaction but live off it.

The engagement with, and between people creates the design and allows it to thrive. It is something which is not prescribed wholly by the designer, but is defined by this interaction, and whatever path that may take.

This project aims to consolidate a years worth of my research into the topics of Altermodernism and out of that, Relational Design. Furthermore, it aims to expand upon that research by taking these ideas I have theorised, studied and appropriated into an uncertain space; and allowing them to change accordingly. By opening up my ideas into curated conversations with my peers, tutors, and other writer and thinkers, I have allowed my original ideas to expand and evolve along new paths.

This project is not only literally about the act of conversation, relations and exchange, but also a direct manifestation of those concepts.

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I spoke to Monika Parrinder, lecturer at the Royal College of Art and co-found of Limited Language, about design functioning as feedback. I went to the pub with Esa Matinvesi, fellow student at Central Saint Martins, to talk about removing the surface of design by working in four dimensions. I had coffee with Nathalie AlvĂĽng, also a student at CSM, where we chatted about approaching design holistically, where we become meaning makers. I had breakfast with Sheena Calvert, my tutor at CSM, to discuss the possibility of facilitation as outcome. Finally, I met with Joshua Trees, tutor of New Genres, where we thought about how to build affordances into design for misuse and abuse.

Design is a form of exchange, these conversations explore how we can work with dialogue and relationships to push the future possibilities of design.

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Relational versus Instrumental: Relational Design As Feedback Culture A conversation with Monika Parrinder. at the Royal College Of Art, on Thursday 29 March, 14:17, 2012.

Timothy Holloway I wanted to talk to you about Limited Language, where did the idea originally come from and how did you set it up?

Monik a Parrinder Limited Language developed in a very much processional way. Now with hindsight I can say, in a method that was responding to things going on around it. But at the time we were simply responding to an immediate problem that we had writing that didn’t fit into the then, this is 2005, trade journal writing—so for industry like creative review, and Eye where you were known journalists—or for academic journals. We wanted to write between design journalism and academic writing. However nobody would have it.So we just thought, we’ll set up a website and put our stuff out there on the internet.

The internet is very interesting because you don’t know who your audience are, you open up the problem of trying to find an audience or they find you. Its a much looser construct. Then in practical terms we realised “oh damn,” with the internet you need to be writing a lot. All the time. Its not like a magazine where you can write once a month or a book once a year, you need to have a speed of writing which requires you to write in a different way. With blogging there’s no point not having the comments facility on, so in response to that we said “well

lets invite other people to write for us as well.”

We immediately realised what a brilliant idea: in a sense Limited Language wasn’t us two [Monica founded

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Limited Language with Colin Davies], it was the idea of a brand. An umbrella name, that in fact any one could write under. That fell under the same philosophy—why would it need to be us? Its not just us speaking, its a philosophy about design. We realised much later that

the philosophy was to engage with process. And so we asked other people to write.

And then why stop at design writing? We were working with designers, architects, sound designers…so

we set up the 3-way structure deliberately [referring to the three column structure of the website]. At that time most blogs were written down in a linear structure, where you prioritise the newest post. Whereas the idea of writing across three columns—its so simple that you might read across them. We found that was what people did: somebody commenting on one section would say “oh, in fact there’s something similar going on in the other post.” We realised that people would naturally make connections and the way the design is structured to facilitate connections.

T.H Transforming the act of reading from

a linear process towards lateral reading.

M.P In the same way writing can facilitate connections or it can stop them. The traditional way of writing for magazines would be “here are my brilliant ideas— read them.” The old magazine structure was that people could write letters but they would come back a month later and would be largely ignored. Whereas the comment structure of the blog is saying we want your comments and we want them now. In fact the next person who reads my article wont only read my article but they’ll read your slightly antagonistic comment.

It brings the feedback into the reading of the article. It’s quite a challenge to writers—they don’t like to be challenged, they quite like the letter structure.

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T.H The authorial hierarchy of it?

M.P Exactly, we were saying there’s so many relational, feedback based collaborative processes going on in design practise that if we are writing about design its

madness that we’d keep an old authorial, non-relational, non-collaborative way of writing.

The idea of the website was simply to see how processes already happening in design could be used to rethink the writing processes. I think now, looking back, post-rationalisation says thats where we are interested, not in outcomes but in process. It was very simple: bringing in an open amount of authors, comments, disciplines to comment, rather than seeing that as a challenge on what we were doing.

T.H But something to enrich it instead?

M.P I wouldn’t use the word enriches, because that can be authorial: you enrich what I say but I bring it under my name. No, it opens up new potential that didn’t exist before.

T.H Its more about the connections that you can create.

In that sense relational is dialogical. By opening up other influences you M.P

create something that couldn’t have existed before.

If you enrich something you take the original structure and make it better but what happens here is that it changes things away from their original structure.

One example would be, because originally some comment­ators would, being designers, respond with practical ideas. For instance, someone took a bit of the text and cut it up and made it into a series of i’s and o’s and somebody else has said I’ve done a project

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to respond to what you’re saying. I thought isn’t it amazing, a writing in journalism could never have had a visual response like that before. Blogging opens up the platform, why cant you respond in images? You realise you’re working on something where the

has changed.

structure

T.H I was wondering, what happened with the site after the book came out in 2010?

M.P The book was such a mega effort, if Colin and I were 20 years younger, and we existed in a place where you’re used to constantly updating your status and tweeting then it would be really lively, but we have concentrated on putting things in print and its become quite imbalanced now.

Ive been teaching around this, the difference between print and digital is that the connections you make in the digital are very shallow: you have many connec­ tions, but there is no depth. It’s

about the immediacy. The minute that immediacy dies,

everything disappears and you realise there’s nothing there behind it. Which is why if you’re friends don’t respond to you quickly on Facebook the whole thing dissipates. It loses momentum. The same with a blog, if you don’t have that critical mass then it dies very quickly.

T.H Because the speed of the response you need to keep it going.

M.P There’s only something there if people are really responding, without that the energy thats needed dissipates.

Atrophy—that idea that of things slowing down— kills writing on the web. Whereas in print and in

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everyday relationships you don’t have that problem. If you’re best friend of 20 years doesn’t contact you for a year you don’t think “well, thats it then”. Because you have a depth of connection. That depth allows things to slow down. This is the same with print, you have this object thats static, one that gains in resonance over time, rather than losing it.

T.H By the physicality of the object itself, the fact that it exists with a physical pressence.

M.P Exactly. It became important to take this discursive nature of the web and see what happened in print.

The problem with the web is that people are having the same discussions agin and again. You never have a point of taking stock. Where the good thing about physical print is that you can say “where are we at?”

This is where the authorial comes back, its important to ask “what do I think?” You make space to

make

sense of all the connections and relationships. Print takes them and puts them in stone, which enables reflection.

T.H Do you think there’s a step beyond, you spoke in your article, Part of the Process (EYE 59, Spring 2006) about the exits of the Turner Prize designed by A2, where they created a physical discussion space. However it was almost one-dimensional, because there people could come through the space and were allowed to comment on what others had done and the work they had seen. But then no one could come back in and see responses to their comments.

There was no discussion. Just people spouting opinions, and people shouting back at dear ears. The back and forth of a discussion wasn’t catered for. Do you think there’s a possibility for Limited Language to have a physical presence? A way of combing

the digital side with a the physical nature of discussions.

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M.P Yes, but how do you combine them? Thats hard to say, in our book we had weblinks back to the site that said if you want to comment further you could go back into the original post and leave comments. But there would be no way of feeding them back into the book—that would entail another book.

Thinking about the A2’s Turner Prize room, I don’t think thats a perfect example of a relational project, the problem with Relational Design is that theory is good but finding

projects that are truly relational is much harder.

The point there is that people had commented on other peoples cards. as much as they had created their own.

You’re building up comments upon comments, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

T.H It reminds me of this quote from Christopher Baker, who has a show at the Saatchi gallery at the moment.

He has created a video wall of thousands of youtube clips show people’s recorded rants and diaries. You can not hear one voice but all, and see thousands talking. He made this comment: “We have created technology

that

allows us to amplify our voices to a global audience but how have we enhanced our ability to listen

no one is capable of listening to what any of those thoughtfully.” So many people are talking but people are saying.

M.P Youtube is essentially just a voice piece, but I think a better example of a Relational platform now would be Twitter. Where memes are going round and people are responding to each other. I think you’re right, the critique of artwork there is that lots of people are talking becomes an aesthetic. We just go and watch other people talking. That isn’t relational, because the definition, and Bourriaud is quite good on this,

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he says that the difference between participation and relation is that participation is where you are just involved, but Relation

is where you’re actions allow the work to change.

T.H In the form of a feed back loop, you’re actions affect the consequent outcome.

M.P Yes, and if you look on Twitter, and especially the event of the Arab Spring: that is a brilliant example of conversations spiralling, responding, creating something enormous , new and different—out of what appears like a few small events. You wouldn’t have had the Arab Spring based on amplifying publicity technologies like Youtube.

T.H Because you don’t have the connections of responses that build the momentum of the dialogue.

M.P I would agree that not all web 2.0 technologies have the same facility. Youtube seems like really old technology now, Facebook doesn’t seem to work quite so well because its still in little closed community groups. I think that the ones which are more open, like Twitter, can create more unexpected communities and happenings, they are the ones that will win out.

Interesting though, when [Bourriaud] wrote that quote...

T.H Back in 1998.

M.P …None of these things existed. He couldn’t have imagined where we are now with the internet. A lot of those technologies can be used for shouting and publicity.

T.H But they only become meaningful when you have the response. That goes back to the definition of Relational Design. The purpose of this project was to try and found

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out what makes something ‘Relational’. I liked the idea of creating a piece of Relational Design with this participatory social aspect. But then to actually work out what relational design is…I came up with the definition: that its a 3rd form of design, you have Fixed Design, something like a book, it has totally closed parameters for engagement; you then have Interactive Design, that would be the second tier, you can engage with the design to make it do what you want to do, you can create a different experience to someone else using the same thing, but the actual system remains the same. The designer lays down set parameters that you can operate within; Relational Design would be a third tier, there are no parameters, the

designer facilitates a starting point which opens up for contributions and allows the project to then develop on its own. Would you agree thats where relational design sits?

M.P Yes and no, broadly your 1st , 2nd, 3rd level descriptions are correct, they are about the level of participation, where the highest level is where you set up a platform for communication instead of filling it yourself. You

become a conduit for conver­sation. It’s hard to say thats not relational, but I wouldn’t argue that they are separate forms, and they are not separate points in history. Andrew Blauvelt tried to have this elaborate theory looking historically, saying that we are in the ‘third era of modernity’. I just find that mad. Because you could go back and look at the Roman Agora, and say that was a brilliant relational structure. So the idea that we have only now achieved this evolved form, T.H Because Relational Design almost seems the basic level, its something that comes before designed objects, it starts at conversational dialogues and communities.

M.P The problem with modernist design, it has grown up as being based on didactic communication. Modernist

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design has tended to be instrumental, which is the exact opposite of relational. Instrumental design knows what it wants to do then designs that outcome.

I make the difference that you have instru­­mental design and relational design. A road sign is an example of instrumental design, you could be as relational as you want about it, but its either going to be an art project or there’s going to be a crash. I am not trying to build a grand design history based on evolved higher levels, I would argue that they are different structural practises, and they are all going on simultaneously.

T.H Each with their own appropriate context.

M.P I think its a matter of finding the most appropriate structure. Where modernism fell down is that it had this idea of authored one-way communication in everything.

Now we would argue that this is sometimes good, for example signage design, but other forms need to evolve in a different way.

T.H This idea of over simplifying everything, the idea of reductionism—that you take something down to its most basic level, even if you’re abstracting it beyond all recognition and the reality of how it would realistically function.

So sometimes this is appropriate, as you say in signage, but other situations call for a relational approach, when you’re dealing with something really complex, like a social context. Such as road systems, as you say the naked street system.

M.P Thats a really good example of relational design proving that didactic design—or instrumental design— doesn’t always work, or that there is an alternative.

Of course, in design there are always alternatives but you can see that there is much more of a stretch to realise relational practises in road signage but its

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turns out to be very effective. But there are some areas where its easily implemented, which is why branding has jumped on this concept very early. Down here in Exhibition Road they have implemented Shared Space, they wouldn’t call it relational design.

T.H What would it be called?

M.P It’s spatial design, with relationships being the most important consideration. With Relational Design it is the shared

connections and relationships that are most important, they are not a secondary consideration.

T.H They are the fundamental aspect that defines what you are actually creating. It is the relationships themselves that are actually important.

M.P Yes. I don’t use the word ‘Relational’, we picked up on the Bourriaud thing because, ten years ago, it seemed to give words and theory that design needed that we didn’t have words for. Now I slightly regret it because you get tied to the words. We were just saying

that if there’s this new kind of structural relationship in design we need to be able to talk about it. So what are the words? Relational, Contextual…

But I would stick to Feedback Culture. Because thats something you can measure. Is there Relational Design?

I don’t know, but is

there a Culture of Feedback? Yes, it’s something you can put your finger on. You can say “well here there is genuine feedback,” and you allow it to be taken notice of, and you can say “here there is no feedback, there is no provision for it.” That is something one can evaluate.

A book we read, can talk about feedback culture, but a book can not show it, whereas a website can.

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T.H Because you lack the response system that is inherent in the site. So that is the word you would prefer?

M.P Yes, design in a Feedback Culture. You know what you are testing yourself against, you know that you are

prioritising feedback over the design itself. The design is there to facilitate feedback.

You can evaluate, do you get feedback and do you take it into account and change because of it? Whereas

the problem with relational is that everything becomes relational. So there’s all this work where its like lets all have a nice meal together, or cup of tea. Its relational because its an event and there are people.

T.H But you cant measure how effective it is.

M.P Exactly, I think that now, having been part of saying all that I am backtracking a little bit, because I am a historian and writer, and have to try and evaluate things, these words become useful and then they become overused.

T.H With the term feedback it does seem to incorporate all the things you want to achieve. You’re putting something out and seeing how it works and seeing how it works in the context you put it in, and then you’re making it respond to what happened when it was there.

M.P It works really well, you can talk about literal feedback but also if you look at the theory of feedback technology, its operates an iterative process. here there’s all the noise around something and you feedback and take it into account. You have loops: action—feedback—reaction.

T.H Where it always feeds into itself. It becomes generative.

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M.P Yes, generative and iterative. That puts us in the right territory, then if we’re talking about people, its asking if you listen, so we know that structures implement feedback because they like to be seen to do so, but do you listen.

I get a bit tied up with the word Relational, its a brilliant term and its easy to say what isn’t relational.

T.H But to say what is relational is much harder. It depends heavily on how you define it. Its taken on so many rouge definitions that it loses its significance.

M.P It got tied up because is it about facilitating relationships? Yes. So you could set up a tea party facilitating relationships, T.H But then what value do these relationships have?

M.P Thats what Rick Poynor’s criticism was, he said its not enough to have these relationships: you

have to gauge the quality of them. I suppose

thats the same as me saying what evidence is there that it changes anything. The problems occurred when it became trendy, and that the relational nature of an event was enough, rather than having to actually say what is the quality or effect of those relations. I think now

I am much more interested in what the effects are.

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Designing With or Designing For: Removing the Surface of Design A conversation with Esa Matinvesi at the Paxtons Head Public House, Knightsbridge on Thursday 29 March, 18:45, 2012.

Timothy Holloway You don’t like the idea of Andrew Blauvelt’s version of Relational Design?

E sa M atinvesi The fault I find with his idea is that all design should be relational, in the sense that he explains it.

T.H His idea was object based, that any relation you have with something, could be conceived as Relational.

But then that could be anything at all—if you take it on the level that your act of viewing something in parts your experience on to the object and creates a relationship,

then you can say everything in the world is Relational.

E.M Thats the problem with the word relational, because its relational to what? You can start linking it to everything.

T.H

The idea I was talking about today with Monika

[Parrinder], its

not relationships between objects, but inter-human relationships.

E.M That was my conclusion when I wrote about the topic in my Dissertation. It depends what you want to do with it, open ended solutions done with that approach are less controlled, but can be more effective.

The RSA has been running work shops where designers are working with people who have spinal cord injuries.

These people are then practically helping the designers to help themselves. How can you know what its like for someone with a spinal cord injury, how does it feel?

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These people will know how it feels, so then the designer is there only to help them understand how their condition can be improved. They use this practical relationship to better the design process. I feel that, yes it might be relational between designers collaborating together but only when you have an outside factor.

It’s the outside factor that makes it relational. You need that open-endedness, uncertainty T.H

and unpredictability. Not as a add on, or an outcome of the thing you’ve made, but as the actual thing itself. If you’re doing a workshop, its not what you make at the end, its the process of doing it and the act of creating that is important.

That is the purpose of the exercise.

E.M The publishing workshops I did were more process led than outcome led, but the main point in those cases, there had to be an outcome. Because the process couldn’t exist without leading to an outcome. The point is the form was less important than the experience people

involved got out of the exercise. Researching,

talking and trying to do something together. I would go as far to say that a design process doesn’t need to have an physical outcome. This is what I asked yesterday at the RCA to students who study Product Design, how do you address the problem that we should make less, if you’re in a course that your purpose is to produce stuff. When I say that I don’t agree with some designers say that because they want to skip the work and just talk bullshit…

T.H

There are ways of designing ‘nothing’.

E.M Recently my favourite sentence has been

“imagining possible futures”. I think that is what design is doing. It’s trying to do something that isn’t there all ready. Design has the power of asking: “What if?” Like open sourcing, when you say an idea out

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loud and start talking to people about it, its on the table, then somebody else can take it further. In the ted

x csm

lecture we saw this week…

T.H On emergent systems, that was using open source to allow a project to develop laterally—you have a number of people working in parallel on the same problem, coming up with different solutions that can then merge back into one outcome. Operating with an awareness of what everyone else is doing.

E.M The interesting point was given by a guy who was not a designer, Dr Jamie Brassett, he gave a more historical view: he said there are no bad ideas, just ideas which are poorly timed. They don’t work in the current world or they fail, that doesn’t mean it was bad.

T.H He was looking at the boundaries of how an idea can be allowed to develop, using an analogy of chaos theory. If you push an idea hard in one direction only, you’ll only ever

allow outside influences to direct and expand your thought laterally and take on different get one train of thought out of it. It is when you

routes…

E.M Thats when I think that you shouldn’t be afraid to design something that can’t exist now. By putting something into existence, even as a just an idea, you allow for someone else to look at it later and think “now this is possible.”

T.H Looking at something from a fresh angle. He gave the example of play-doh, designed originally for something like cleaning wallpaper…from a new perspective ideas can take on new meanings.

E.M That aspect in relational design is interesting.

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T.H You allow the open-endedness of your design being used to determine what happens next. Thats what rela-

it only exists meaningfully when people are using it. When people aren’t tional design is,

using it we don’t have the interaction or engagement necessary for it to take on any sort of meaning. Moniker was saying, instead of using the word relational, and basing the methodology on relationships, you should instead base it on Feedback. You call it Feedback Culture rather than Relational Aesthetics. Do you think thats a better word?

E.M Feedback design? Kind of…for me that doesn’t quite explain it, feedback happens because of the relations, but I don’t think it wholly describes the process…

T.H When you have a feedback system, it emits some kind of output, which is then interpreted within the context it exists, this information, their reaction to your action, comes back into the system, and changes it’s course.

By building in the users reaction and putting it back in,

its about listening, and iterating the design in response. if we look at this on a personable level,

This conversation is a traditional feedback loop, it goes two ways. I felt thats what E.M

relational design does. However its not a feedback loop that is just two ways, you need to add a third person, or a third variable. Then it becomes far more complicated which allow it to open up so many more possibilities.

T.H Thats like Chaos Theory: when you have non-linear systems, if you have two variables interacting with each other, you can predict what they’ll do, you can measure them against each other easily. When you add a third variable, you

can no longer measure or predict what will happen. The patterns become unstable, it can do anything. Like three way pendulums.

If you have a standard simple pendulum you can know

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where it will be in 10 minutes, and how fast it will be moving, thats why they are used in clock mechanisms.

But if you have two joints on the pendulums swing, then it can spin madly in a totally chaotic manner.

something that you can not do on your own. You E.M So in design this translates as

need more than two people involved in the system.

There is the difficulty that the quality is then harder to maintain.

T.H When you have collaborative process you leave more chances for it to go wrong. It’s much harder to control.

E.M It depends what you talk about, how you define the purpose of design, if you put aesthetics before content then that might be true, but I think if you have the content there then visuals will follow. I love good looking design, but if it doesn’t have good content or context it becomes meaningless. I’ve started to realise this about my blog, when I started it was just about taking graphic

design out of context, placing it as a visual porn. Later I began to analyse this process and look at it in a very different way. I made a project on this, splicing together nice Swiss typography with pornography. Funnily enough there is now a blog called Grids and Tits. Every other post is a nice piece of graphic design followed by a naked girl. I think that sums up my old attitude to design, I only cared if it looked good. It should communicate but I wasn’t concerned if that was in a really deep way…

T.H All about the aesthetics

at surface level.

When you have a design that sits in-between people talking or an experience, you remove that surface completely, you then don’t have a visual surface. You have a 4D experience, people operating in a space within a time span. You no

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longer have a neat designed 2D surface that you can control with nice Swiss grids.

E.M If I think about this process, I used the word enabler, instead of designer. Designers

are enablers; they provide the playground “this is what

we have made, we don’t know how it will be used, but we would like you to play.”

T.H If you put this into the form of the original idea of Relational Aesthetics, and the reason it was so heavily criticised, is because you get to a point where you can create relationships easily enough—you could stage a dinner party or a tea party in a gallery where you are creating relationships between the people that are present.

But the relationships have no value. They are just surface, they are there because the event existed. If you put that into design, the reason I think it could still be a useful term to explore new ways of working, you are using the relationships towards some kind of purpose. You are taking relationships that exist, and creating parameters around them that steer them towards a goal.

E.M Yes, there needs to be a direction of some kind, it must be allowed to change course but its very easy to drift away.

T.H This is like Jamie Barnettts lecture that its fine to steer an idea, as long as you allow inputs around it to be taken into account, creating parameters to achieve your goals but not to the point that you then shut off the idea to what it could potentially become.

[Next round, two more pints of Stella] E.M There was a lecture yesterday where they were talking about time, that there are multiple times existing, there’s linear time, but there’s more complex time.

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They were talking about now being comprised of the past, present and future. What we are now, its partly our thoughts, what we think of the future and how we want it to be, and also recognising what came before.

T.H And reacting to the moment that you are in?

E.M I really like that thought. I think that sums up what I feel. The typography lecture we’re about to go to is strictly visual, its not thinking about design, its not at a deeper level of where it should go but its talking about aesthetics and how type communicates. Even with this event, its

designers talking to designers, and guessing how everyone else thinks.

We went to the Redesign Education event with Joshua Trees and Agostino Carrea.

T.H Designers talking about design to designers, and thats

It should be for other people. Otherwise design becomes an entirely surface not what it should be. based clique.

E.M Somebody in that conference said, its

always designing for. What we should be talking about Design with.

T.H Thats a really great way of putting it. Designing with and designing for. When you are designing for, you’re prescribing an idea of what the user should do. It’s didactic, the modernist one to many approach. But if you’re designing with, you take whats there, you take the situation and the context, you allow that to actively shape your design.

The thing that exists afterwards exists for everyone who is involved. The

designer takes the role of enabling this situation for others to respond.

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Holistic Thinking: Desingers as Meaning Makers A conversation with Nathalie Alvång at The Old Shoreditch Station Bar On Friday 13 April, 15:36M 2012 Timothy Holloway We started talking about facilitating experiences and spaces for participation design.

Nathalie A lvång My dissertation was about place making, I was looking at how architecture can tell

a story with graphics and how the participation

becomes the experience. As a designer

you should always design something with an awareness of how the user will experience it. I have been looking architecturally by doing that through angles, scale, placement and spatial arrangement.

T.H So you don’t design what the people do, you arrange a space for them N.A Yes in that sense its open ended. I would describe Morag Myerscough’s graphics in this way because they wouldn’t have looked that way or bend around that corner if it wasn’t for the building. She allowed her design to be adapted by the space—it was open ended for the building with the people in mind.

T.H I have been thinking about the idea of designing experiences, can

you actually design experience? You can design something that may guess what will happen or manipulate what people will do, but you can never fully design someones experience in a given situation.

Do you think there is any way of measuring the experiences you design?

N.A Well you can’t, as a designer all you can do is have a good gut feeling, and by experience something

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for yourself. Designers should aim to create Intervention rather than force change on something. You

are placing it there to be experienced.

I don’t think you can make an experience happen but you can place something with purpose, but you always know that what happens will be different for each person present.

The designer acts as a someone who is steering people, rather than controlling T.H

them. Do you think its better to allow it to be completely open ended, where you don’t prescribe any sort of outcome, you just allow for people to actively engage with what you created?

N.A It’s never completely open ended if you have created something and placed it there. You do have a purpose with it, you create a framework around it.

Unless you want complete chaos...

T.H But thats not very useful!

N.A You are bound to placing certain tools in a space knowing that people are going to use them a certain way, but you don’t know how exactly. Like my recent project, I left a steel etching plate with a hammer, a nail and a brush in a room. You can assume that people will start making marks on the plate when presented with the tools, but it is open ended as to what they then create. It’s open ended but there’s always a limit.

T.H

You allow for an intuitive direction

to what you have made. You make it possible for people to engage with it as they’d like.

N.A Yes, but you can pose a situation to someone, like a projection on a wall—it doesn’t mean that they will

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resound in the way you expect—someone might not see it, or they might not want to see it, or maybe they have sunglasses on and are talking to someone, or whatever.

[Laughs] T.H If you’re designing something that does live in this open ended world, what do look for and value most:

Do you value the experience itself—that someone has whilst they live through that space you have created? Or,

do you value the effects that

comes out of it—what that person takes away from what you have created afterwards?

N.A I value the effect. With my work, I want to improve things. You can not improve anything if all the user only takes away with them is something spectacular.

An experience is good if you leave the person feeling better, but that only has value when the person learns something from it, and knows what to do with that information afterwards. Its the aftermath.

T.H So you’d look for more tangible effects. Then that comes to this new phrase that Monika Parrinder introduced me to—instead of using the word relational and coming up against all these problems of creating relationships— you talk about Feedback Design. Where you are focusing not on the intangible parts—the relationships and experiences created in the moment—but on the effects. You allow your design to listen

to this feedback and facilitate a way for it to respond and change direction. The design functions as a system of feedback loops.

N.A Like websites where users add content?

T.H Yes, twitter is quite a good example of Feedback

Design. It facilitates conversation. The design of it is an

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empty platform for people to contribute and fill with content. The more that is put into it the more people read it, respond, and put back—driving it forward. Its quite obvious using web based examples to illustrate this idea because the entire structure of Web 2.0 technologies is set up towards feedback, allowing people to put back in. But I think there is a lot of scope for doing that with environmental or spatial design.

N.A You set up a system or situation, an event where people engage with each other. It

uses basic instincts. We all have them, its to do with our

physical bodies, how we use them and how we think, also what we are trained to think. I think its about

acknowledging these instincts and designing with them, you do not try to force something. You can know certain things when it comes to peoples behaviour.

T.H Esa summed this up perfectly, we are no longer designing for but designing with. It’s designing in a way that does not try to create new behaviours, but it makes use of behaviours that people already have. I really like the idea you were talking about earlier, that

we are

all natural story tellers. When you build

narratives into something people engage with it on a much higher level. I remember seeing a documentary on the man who broke the guineas world record for reciting a list from memory, he described his technique for processing and storing this huge amount of information in his mind by creating stories with it, turning the unrelated items into a journey through somewhere familiar.

It’s making sense of your environment—thats a big part of design. Wether we’re N.A

talking about a book cover, or staging a discussion, everything around it is important. Where you receive a book is, the way it comes, what kind of shop you find it

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in, how heavy is it, All of these things. The same with a discussion, if you have a conversation that people are listening to then what does the space look like, how are the chairs arranged, where is the mic placed, what are the people wearing? We

design holistically.

are starting to

T.H Thinking about all of the aspects around something, all those tiny influences. Looking at how you create a full message with all of that contextual information. I definitely feel that is the way things seem to be heading, not just design. You no longer just look at the most straightforward way of doing something, you look at all the small initial condition, all the intangible things, the aesthetics, the environment. A good metaphor to describe it would be ecosystems, all

of the elements coming together to form a larger whole.

N.A When I said the metaphor maker earlier, having the ability to use something that you are familiar with to say something else. In our last conversation I mentioned my problems with information design, when it just delivers information without telling you what its for. When you use languages and formats that people are familiar with you can make the viewer aware of the connections. If you were using computer language to show something like…the softness of an orange. That becomes interesting as suddenly people start realising new potential in computer language.

[Laughs]

The indirect route is a more effective way of communication, by taking more T.H

elemental ideas, and avoiding abstract quantities, you take things that people directly associate, you know the experiences people have with certain forms, its not then about designing those but making sense of their connections.

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N.A My friend and I were talking yesterday about how more and more people are starting to read philosophy.

There is an urge for meaning.

T.H We’re in an age where information is everywhere, in its raw form it no longer has any value. Whereas before the holder of information would possess power, now with the universal accessibility we all have because of the internet, the power is shifted towards those that can create connections between this information, Bourriuad’s concept of the Artist as Semionaut.

N.A Its information overload, we don’t really know what to do with all of it. People

are starting to look for meaning, so they do yoga, and they read philosophy, they talk more on blogs trying to make sense of their lives! Design can create meaning out of everyday objects or situations. Lets take that example the other way around, if you have an orange and you explain how a blog works on it…suddenly peoples view of an orange are going to be greater.

[Laughs] T.H It’s a nice idea: you’re

not a designer, you’re a meaning maker.

N.A Yeah!

T.H Its about connecting disparate pieces of information and making something meaningful from them.

N.A I think there’s a lot of potential in that. People are going to start asking how can you be a designer how are you going to get a job, how are you going to get paid for that, if you are making things that perhaps aren’t, say a book, that can be easily sold. We have to work for a living, and its working with companies that realise the

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value in someone appreciating experience. Even if its something simple like how they open a folded note…at Song Dong’s exhibition at the Barbican Curve Gallery, Waste Not, the brochure is distributed by tearing it from bolts on the wall, and the visitor folds it and makes it themselves. It’s a really satisfying gesture and its turning the brochure into part of the physical experience of the exhibition. All of these things are important.

Its moving

away from the surface of what we see, and looking into how we see.

T.H This really comes back to this idea of Feedback Design, it’s no longer about designing just an object, but responding to everything around it. That you allow something to respond to what is around it. Do you think feedback is a good word to use?

N.A Are you designing in a way that you can follow up on the feedback?

T.H Yes, its not so much in the object that you initially create, but you are interested in creating the feedback that then pushes it somewhere new.

N.A You should always be interested in what happens after you release something into the world. Yes… feedback…

T.H It’s a good working title.

N.A …It’s not about us telling people, so much graphic design is concerned with flashy graphics to tell people stuff.

T.H Didactic design, telling someone “you should buy this.” Its should be about instigating dialogue.

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N.A And starting conversations. We conditioned to like didactic design because its so aesthetic and cool… we want to own it, we don’t want anything more than to own it.

T.H It’s a top down message. You proclaim an idea or a product and you tell people to buy into it. Thats partly why I was looking into relational design, the reason I still

it is about conversation. Its the opposite of a didactic think that word is effective on some levels, because

approach. You are not telling someone something directly.

You are asking them something, and they are bringing something back to it.

N.A Joshua asked Alex [Hook] and I to send him a photo of us in the midst of interviewing someone to represent the Graphic’s course Study Abroad program.

He didn’t want a sleek portfolio look, that maybe would have fit 10 or 20 years…instead to show research, but in the form of a conversation, its not just about students sketching and making anymore.

T.H Its what Paul Rennie says at the very beginning of our courses in our first term at Central Saint Martins, we are entering one huge conversation. Its all come round in one big circle!

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Designing Dialogical Discourse: Facilitation as Outcome A conversation with Sheena Calvert at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design on Thursday 17 April, 10:17, 2012 Timothy Holloway I’d like to tell you a bit about the project I have been working on over the past month: the idea was to continue my research into the concept of relational design by conducting conversations with people with an interest in the topic, and using

‘Relational Design’ as a starting point for new ideas. Hoping that by opening the ideas up to discussion would either prove some of

the theories I have come up with or come up with new ideas around them. The project so far seems to have touched on a number of new ideas. The conversations themselves are also acting as a ‘Relational piece’ of my practice too, as the work comes out of dialogue.

I firstly went to talk to Monika Parrinder at the Royal College of Art, we spoke about how ‘Relational’ was perhaps not the best word to use, using the word Feedback as an alternative. Instead of valuing at relationships that you create in the time span of your piece, you look at the after effects of those relationships, and how those feedback into the process.

Talking to Esa afterwards, we realised that we are no longer designing for someone, but designing with someone.

Sheena C alvert There’s a theory which relates to that called co-design, which is design

that happens within that co-operative collaborative space. The use of ‘with’ collapses the hierarchy. It becomes a horizontal form of design, rather than vertical relationships where someone has more control.

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T.H It’s very much about non-didactic design. Design that does not rely on a top-down hierarchy but acts as a conversation. I spoke to Nathalie Alvång as well, we worked on this idea of design as conversation. That is what I wanted to talk to you about.

S.C

Dialogue rather than monologue.

A discussion and interaction rather than a system of separation: where you have a designer, a client and a user. They only speak when things get made, with a problem solving agenda, thats a very old Modernist idea of design—that you need to solve problems. I have always thought that design always prompts more problems than it solves them. Its a dialogic form in that sense, its about dialogue and development.

T.H This modernist idea of creating an absolute object, something that you tell people “this should be like this.”

Now you can have something where the actual ‘design’ exists only as a form of conversation. It is allowed to

evolve, change and respond. It’s why I like the word Feedback because it is something that is always looking at what it has made and bringing it back in to the system as a response.

S.C It’s interesting that you say that, I have been think­­ ing a lot about the project I have set to students here on photography, looking at the relationship between digital and analogue. They have all made individual web-spaces, and pieces of work in response to that topic.

But whats more interesting to me—not to say that I am not interested in the actual things, of course I am— for me they are all parts of a bigger conversation. About

the shift into new technologies.

About how people understand that shift and how they deal with it. The project itself acts as a nodal point or nexus for discussion and dialogue.

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T.H A starting point to expand from.

S.C Yes, and from that you have 15 different discussions.

T.H A lateral way of doing it. Its all on the same plane but along different paths.

S.C We are hoping to then make a joint site that is going to go out publicly, so that we allow other people to come in and participate in that dialogue. I think a lot of more interesting new

design work is moving towards facilitational dialogue. Rather than the old problem solving matrix of thinking.

T.H Designing spaces for that to happen in, rather than prescribing what you want an audience to do; you set up a space and allow them to interpret it as they please.

S.C Thats quite a brave thing to do. It takes yourself out as the primary author of the work, it removes you.

I saw the exhibition you put on in the corridor here at csm ,

suddenly that space was activated for me in a way

that it hadn’t been before. I became aware of it and aware of the work in context. You, yourself were there, and your authorship was in those decisions that created the space, and in the group of works you brought together, but it required you to step out, to take your ego out on some level. Which is a really quite brave thing to do. Art schools are moving more towards an understanding of that facilitatory form of design, but its hard for them to let go of the need outcomes. The difficulty is, how

do you show an outcome for experiential work? Its something that is hard to show outside of the experience itself, it must be frustrating to show your work in the outcome-led assessments here.

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T.H You find yourself inventing ways of documenting something that is just an experience. If you are trying to design work that is purely experiential, its only really for the people involved in that space, in that time. It

becomes about living through a space rather than looking at a space. How do you document that? It is very problematic.

S.C Within the learning outcomes of this course that is very difficult because there isn’t yet a space for assessing that mode of work. We find ways to do it

because we are creative with the learning outcomes, but the students are ahead of the game. Schools are trying to catch up on what is really happening with design.

T.H I definitely feel that we have to present our work towards a system that is not up to date with what students are actually doing.

S.C Absolutely. The institutions are always a couple of years behind. Can I ask you why you find this kind of work enriching?

T.H Its a very different way of working, I am driven by the idea to create something very new, very contemporary.

This project evolved from my research into Altermodernism, which is a new idea for ways of working.

S.C A new paradigm for art practice.

T.H Its come out of very contemporary issues. This project is the next iteration of how you apply those theories into outcomes. So firstly it seemed like a very new way of working, the idea of facilitating spaces, I like the idea of bringing a lot of work together. Acting

as a facilitator or curator gives you the opportunity to create work bigger than yourself, creating better work by inviting people to come into it. You allow it

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to develop on its own path. Thats another aspect I am really interested in, the unpredictable element. When you start bringing in other people you make everything much more complicated. You have conversations, you are not sure which way the project is going to go, and then it takes you places you don’t expect. I am realising this now, that a lot of

work looks towards chaos theory;

my

you make something a lot more complicated which enables it to go off in more complex patterns.

S.C But you can’t control it! The thing to realise now is that you don’t need to control it. That is a real shift in thinking. We keep going back to that modernist model— I was trained in Modernist design by people like Paul Rand, ‘It must be like this, it must look like that.’ He was a wonderful teacher but very, very didactic. ‘This is the way design is, this is how you do it.’ I was never fully on board with that model, because it has always been much more interesting to me to see the digressions and the mistakes

and the accidents that came out of process. I think thats driven a lot of my own work over the years. I am very interested in randomness. Things that come as a result of unexpected coalescences and unexpected juxtapositions. You get that a lot with Students. The unexpected coalitions that people make with each other around work creates a new dynamic. Do we really need to call that design? I am not particularly interested in the categories anymore, its a form of practise

which is hybrid. Its design,

its fine art, its anything you want it to be. It doesn’t need to have a name attached. The conceptual category doesn’t really…

T.H …It doesn’t bring anything to it. It just starts limiting things, this compulsion to split everything into its own set discipline. Wether its interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary, its about what works in the given situation.

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S.C Absolutely, its an attitude. For me the kind of work you do is an attitude of Relational Aesthetics, the relationships between things and building discourses and dialogues. Rather than pining things down and giving them an objective criteria by which they exist.

T.H It’s allowing things to take their own paths and evolve laterally. This idea of unpredictable design seems so relevant to today and the new technologies we are seeing emerge, ones that are beginning to definer this new era we are entering. No longer a post-modern era, but something else. Its about networks, its about being able to communicate with a vast number of people instantly, there’s so much openness in these connections. Its

no longer about fixed objects, its about journeys and movement, space in flux.

S.C It’s moving away objects and towards relationships.

T.H Bringing people together and see what comes out of that. Looking at Web 2.0 technologies is one of the most obvious examples of this. Because all of these platforms are set up for feedback. They only exist because people use them and bring something to them.

S.C Yes, Web 1.0 was read only whilst Web 2.0 is read and react and interact. The next stage is the Semantic Web. I remember seeing a lecture by Dame Wendy Hall, she was involved in the first iterations of the web, and she’s now talking about the Semantic web; which is where the computer will start to make decisions for you based on meaning. It will create interesting relationships between the things you are searching for, it will anticipate your next move and what you are looking for. Rather than it just being a straight forward method of you feeding in information and it feeding back, like in the blogosphere or social networking. There will be a whole other level where the machine will create

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relationships for you, in a way, curating

your activities. She said the problem with this at the moment is that when you google her name, you might get her as the academic, or you might get Wendy Hall the tennis player. There’s no way to differentiate names.

[Laughs] S.C I think this is going to be the next stage of the web.

Its a little scary because that means we are no longer fully in control of that space. It is in control of us.

T.H Yes, artificial intelligence and algorithms defining it rather than the human-element. Machines deciding for you based on what you have looked at.

S.C I remember thinking that was a very significant shift toward a new way of thinking. Meredith Davis gave a fantastic presentation a few years ago at

ual

on

the ways in which design is going to have to rethink its attitudes to teaching. Moving away

from instructions and lessons routed in objects; towards systems, structures and relationships. I see a tension between the momentum of new technology— moving towards systems, and this idea you’re talking about of relationality and building that possibility—as something in conflict with a move back toward analogue and physically making things. Do you see that in your cohort?

T.H What I see is, at csm there is a quite dominant trend of moving back toward hand-craft, and making analogue products with a nostalgic sensibility. I’m

not interested at all in the nostalgia of these processes, I think thats a pointless route to go down.

I think we need look at both. Like you say, I think we are at a y-point, a junction: there are a lot of people going one way and making nostalgic based things, and there’s

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another group going towards creating digital systems and platforms. I am interested in the point where these two paths meet again, when we get physical spaces—people actually in rooms, talking to each other and making things, but with this idea of systems and platforms—I think this is where the new

contemporary work will come from, the meeting of these two ideologies.

S.C Thats a really nice idea to think about, that junction where they come back together. For me that really has to do with the way we build relationships

between people, as well as relationships between work.

The work you had in the corridor here was interesting because it was a way of facilitating dialogue between people. What I am hearing people say about technology is that it is creating more distance between us as opposed to closeness through these connections.

Therefore there

is a desire for work that builds physical relationships between people, that allows people to come together and have a proper interaction.

T.H I was talking to Monika about that, the depth of relations on the internet. You have hundreds of friends on Facebook, and if someone doesn’t reply to you instantly on there it loses momentum and that conversation dies because the depth of relationship is very shallow. Whereas with your best friend of twenty years, you can always go back and talk to them after any length of time as you have established a depth of relationship. If we give weight to the depths of these relationships, we can see there is a critical mass from whence the relationships can maintain the momentum necessary to carry themselves forward, allowing them to build on their own.

S.C At some point you have to let it go—like with a child you have to say go off and live in the world on your

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own—you create the circumstances under which it can flourish but it has to be able to build momentum on its own.

T.H Without that momentum it just stops, this is very physical analogy to describe it; its like the question of the future of the universe, will it continue to expand indefinitely, or will its own critical mass be reached where it collapses back in on itself.

S.C It’s interesting, one of the other things I have had to do with my [educational course] work is preparing for online teaching. How

do you take courses of study and put them online? The difference between synchronous conversation—where its you and I talking at the same time— and asynchronous dialogue—like email where you have a delay in response.

I am not interested in the technology needed to facilitate online study but the method you might use to create these relationship, and that is very difficult in those web environments. There is no replacement for face to face teaching.

T.H The problem with online teaching in its current form—yes you can watch a video and you can learn from it—but that is again only one directional. It is imparting information onto you. Without

the feedback it doesn’t grow. Without that conversation, the feedback loop that face to face teaching offers is lost. Its like this idea of feedback design, you put something out, you see what it does and then you iterate on that response and you do it again.

You build, you change and it grows. I think you’re absolutely right, you and I and S.C

others in the class will watch a video together and then I can turn to you and ask “what do you think about that point? How does that relate to what you are doing?”

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We allow something to emerge from that dialogue.

Everyone thinks differently. I come away from school everyday thinking completely differently about what I am doing. Thats an amazing thing and its all to do with Feedback. I teach because I like to learn.

Now we are talking about relations in an educational setting, I have a question for you, how do you think these concepts of relational methods are applicable in the real world out there? How

do people understand this idea of relational work? Do you think people are just object focused?

I recently went to the Damien Hirst exhibition at the Tate, and everyone is oo-ing and arh-ing, at what Brian Sewell describes as the “Shiny Shit” in his scathing review of the show, but I was mesmerised by the way

people are so drawn to the objects.

His work is clearly not about relationships, its purely about the object. I wonder what you think about how your kind of work operates in the real world?

T.H I think it has the potential to work a lot more effectively. Perhaps it hasn’t yet, but I see there is the potential.

Relationality draws on more fundamental human needs and interactions. When you start using communities and environments that already exist as part of your design, things that are already so fundamental to us as people, then you allow your design to be far more complex. The idea of Holistic Design, that potentially if you can make something that actively responds to all these outside factors it can be much more effective than a static object. One of the obvious contemporary applications is creating brand experiences. Brands want to build a devoted community of like minded people to push their products. I think there is definitely always going to be a need for both object based work, and also the much less explored area of relational work.

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S.C That reminds me of my lessons on branding with Paul Rand, who of course did such amazing work, but his idea about branding was you begin with a logo.

He was a wonderful formal designer. You produce a design, and you tell the client that is what they need.

You don’t take on another round of feedback. It wasn’t to do with how the world at large views the brand, it was just about the formal qualities of the design. That is what has really changed: the emphasis on the designer as the person who dictates a design because of their specialist knowledge; to a much more lateral notion of design, where you are constantly in feedback. However it is much more confusing to do that kind of work.

T.H It’s much more complicated. But when it works well, it can be much more effective. Now companies are much less interested in being distilled into a clever symbol,

they want to know how to engage and attract 20,000 people on to their Facebook page.

There is a great desire to create content and communities as a means to selling a brand. I haven’t seen too many people carry that off effectively yet, there’s a lot of brands throwing money into Facebook but its not exactly clear how you get something useful back from that.

S.C A friend of mine has just started a project with the home office looking at the problem of identity theft, making people aware of just how easy it is to plunder your Facebook and steal your entire identity, and they are communicating that through the medium of Facebook applications. Its fascinating that even the government has realised that to

engage with contemporary society they need to use these platforms, that printed matter and fly-posting people is no longer effective.

T.H To reach a large audience there are no longer the easy options of buying expensive tv ads or spreads in the paper.

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S.C How do you get people to pay attention? Well, you work within the environments that they are already working in. You show them what the problem is and give them a direct experience of that problem.

Let me ask you something, going back to Bourriaud’s ideas for a second, there was a lot of controversy over his idea of the Altermodern, because people said he simply paraphrased post-modernism, or he tried to define a whole new art movement out of what is essentially postmodern theory by giving it a new name.

What do you think about that?

T.H There are a lot of problems with his Altermodern: he only talks about a very select group of artists that he works with in Paris, that exhibited at his Palais de Tokyo.

His theory of Relational Aesthetics is also criticised heavily because it is primarily about works that say “Look! I have staged a tea party in an art gallery and I am allowing people to come together, to chat and drink tea, look at all the relationships I have created.” Then

you ask what value do these relationships have? None. That is where it starts to fall down. I am not interested in his idea of an Altermodern movement, but I think a lot of the ideas he touches on are very relevant.

I summarise into 3 key points: creolisation, semionautism, and the shifting notions of temporality.

S.C Yes, you can use those as tools.

T.H By taking those important aspects from

Altermodern you can form a very direct response to what is happening right now. So I am not interested in his artists or his movement, but the core ideas that have emerged from it.

S.C That is a great way of looking at it, I agree completely. A lot of my artists and curator friends have

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criticised this work very heavily, but I think you are right, if you can let go of the specificity, you can take the operating ideas and use them. How do you think your work avoids that tea party relations trap? The emperors wears no clothes scenario.

T.H There is one clear point that has come out of this project for me, that its very easy to wax lyrical about the theory of relational design, but making something practical is very difficult. I think my exhibition did create relationships of value. It was designed to address the problem of a dormant, unused space that was originally intended to induce collaborative working. Using the space that existed and the people that already used it, I set out to change our perception of that space by causing discourse. All I set out to do was make people to stop in that space. Using the gallery space as a means to slow people down in that space to look at the work, because only when they begin to linger and chat that this intended collaboration can begin to occur. That is why I think that piece worked. Now

I use the term Relational Design rather than Relational Aesthetics, because you are designing something, you have an effect in mind, not really an outcome but definitely an effect. With that project, I wanted to make people stop in that space.

S.C Which you did.

T.H From that you can measure what happened, you can see the effect of it.

S.C Did you measure it? How did you feed it back in to produce new work?

T.H The idea of that project was that it would be able to carry on its own afterwards. I released the method of practically putting on the exhibition to other people as a set of open source instructions, so that someone else can put on

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the next event. The hope is that it will be an ongoing project that other people take on.

S.C Would you like to see more of an understanding of that kind of work coming through, an appreciation of its value in terms of the assessments here at csm?

My view is that a lot more of this kind of relationally based, experiential work will start coming through in the next 4-5 years, and the school needs to find ways of dealing with that.

T.H I think its a question of re-imagining

the way we document these experiences, without the documentation of the experience it can only ever live within that space-time amongst that select few people who experienced it. It has no life outside of that. Without that life outside of the experience it can not grow or develop.

You need a way of distributing the effect of that experience afterwards.

S.C Your work really operates in this liminal space, such a nice word, liminal. It articulates work that is on the edge. Its

on the edge of art, the edge of design.

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Users & Abusers: Building Affordances for Improvisation A conversation with Joshua Trees at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Desing on Friday 20 April, 16:37, 2012.

Timothy Holloway So this project has become a process of

thinking about new ideas, and ways of

working within design that take Relational design as a starting point. One of the main themes that has emerged out

design functioning as an open-ended conversation, of this project is looking at the shift of

as opposed to the didactic approach, the modernist model for design as a top down structure of asserting information on to people with a problem solving or instrumental role.

Instead, contemporary design would look to creating platforms for collaboration and for creating dialogue. Do you think this is a valid idea, from your perspective as a tutor?

Joshua Trees I would agree that there is definitely a tendency or a pulse at the moment around this interest in conversation. On some levels it seems like a revival of the 70’s performative zeitgeist. on the other hand, I do think that its less nostalgic, and more a case of timing.

Perhaps the 70’s was ahead of its time whilst now I think that the infrastructure is in place for things that were imagined then to actually take place.

T.H Like Myron Kruger’s book, Artificial Reality, published in 1973, he was inventing video walls and responsive art installations. He didn’t have any of the technology or equipment to actually do it, he over came this by working under the principle of “prototyping

experience rather than prototyping technology.”

He set up installations where the viewer would interact with a life size video wall, where they would see—what they assume to be—a computerised response to their movements, when really it was just a man behind a screen mimicking

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them in real time whilst being filmed. I agree what is happening now is definitely not a nostalgic response. One of the topics I have been looking into is the use of Web 2.0 technologies, the way new technology creates new possibilities. This idea of design as conversation seems to fit well with—or perhaps has even come out of—those new technologies.

J.T I do think that its coming from a genuine place, I am just not sure where its going. I don’t know if ‘conversation’ is the right word to describe it. But it does at least seem to imply

a certain kind of

exchange. I found that, after I dropped out

of Facebook, getting an email is almost like receiving a letter in the post. It’s something that rarely happens anymore. It’s as though I don’t exist anymore unless I participate in that form of conversation. I am happy that these ideas are coming up, they are starting to effect pedagogy of how we assess what are seeing. We are talking about how projects

are becoming

very intangible, that raises questions of how to you look in terms of analysing or evaluating success or

failure. Do we need new criteria to discuss this new form of work? My MA is in the subject of New Genres; a very non-formulaic approach, but it wasn’t by any means without structure.

T.H It looked for new structures?

J.T Yes, and it allowed individuals to define those structures, and to set their own criteria for evaluation.

T.H I suppose that is what I mean by conversation, taking it as a metaphor, it is about more than one way relationships. It is not you sending out a message and pushing it onto people. It would be a process of feedback: you create something, offer it up to other people and listen to what they say and how they react. You then take all of

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these responses and feed it back in. Its like a conversation in terms of it being two-way relationship of response and reaction.

J.T I think that if we look to branding, or large scale communication, it is starting to assume these new types of form because the old form—this one way communication—has for a long time now started to feel

outdated, heavy handed and invasive. They are instead starting to create opportunities for co-creation.

T.H The two most obvious examples of this are of course the web technologies that only exist by the engagement of the users uploading content, sharing, and discussing it; and as you say branding, where companies want to create an experience around their brands. I was talking to Sheena about this, brands are becoming less interested in being distilled into a clever symbol—that modernist idea of summarising and simplifying everything into a universal form—brands want to see themselves as a community of people talking about their brand on Facebook.

J.T Its been said by many commentators that we are all in that mode now, everyone

is behaving on a level playing field with brands. We are all

shaping our own personas, and distributing them using the old models that used to only be reserved for big budget companies.

T.H I like that term ‘level laying field’. All of these ideas seem to work on the basis that things function as networks; its about spread out connections rather than ideas filtering down. Ideas

expanding horizontally rather than vertically. I would say that is the key shift to how new ideas are being proliferated and circulated.

Its a peer to peer structure.

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J.T In your own research and theories that you are proposing, have you arrived at any reasons why Relational Design would be different to its precursor of Relational Art? T.H Yes, I have been saying that Relational Design is something quite different to the original ideas of Relational Aesthetics. Bourriaud’s ideas surrounding the aesthetic approach function on a surface level. The example I have been using frequently is of a tea party in a gallery, you’ve created relationships that hold no value after the experience. Whereas with

Relational Design, you are creating relationships for a reason, you are no longer designing an outcome or physical object, you are designing the possibility of an effect. To achieve that you are working with the people and relationships already present in a space. A really good example is the Naked Streets concept—where you remove all of the road signs and street furniture that separate road users— and you redesign the road space using the people who are present. You make use of the characteristics inherent in a space and of basic

human behaviours to govern that space—such as not wanting to run someone else over. Rather than trying to force a system that sepa-

rates everyone. I think that is what distinguishes Relational Aesthetics from Design, this persual of effect rather than creating relationships for the sake of it—its been described as Nokia Art—yes, you are connecting people, but why?

I think the design aspect gives it a purpose.

J.T The most interesting thing that I have read regarding design as conversation comes from the publication, Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice [2009], where contributors were paired up to instigate discussions. One contributor, Experimental Jetset, used this platform to question the idea of a conversation.

They said something to the effect that: conversations imply both parties are coming to an agreement. That

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makes me think, what

is the opposite of a conversation? I like the idea of competitive communication. I think we see that emerge in things like response videos.

T.H Its less about talking to each other, its more about trying to out do each other?

J.T Well, take

it to the next level rather than nodding in agreement. Or contradicting what someone has said to make them rethink their position. Its like a form of writing, where there is a back and forth that takes on a different expression.

T.H Thats a nice idea, if you are saying it is viewed on a conversational basis, you assume each party has equal importance in that conversation, that both ideas are equal.

But if you stage it in a competitive way, where one can override the other, you can push something forward. It becomes a debate or an argument. Either way, it is still the exchange that creates the interest. There

is some kind of relationship, its building in that facilitation of response.

J.T Responsive as opposed to reactionary?

T.H I think responsive as opposed to being fixed or static.

That it is not something you try to assert on somebody.

I keep coming back to this, Esa summerised this concept: that we should no longer design for somebody but design with them. You are not designing something prescriptive but something which will be affected by its user. The main point of this seems to be looking at work which creates experiences, dialogue or feedback. It seems to be more

process based rather than object based.

Would you agree that things seem to be going the way of intangible experiences over designed objects?

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J.T Definitely, I think it becomes interesting when

you start initiating behaviours.

Currently “changing behaviours” seems to be a buzzword, there’s a lot of design debates and dialogue occurring around that subject; when you start to probe, provoke or create a situation where exchange can take place. Today at a crit, a student was proposing a holiday that doesn’t yet exist, which would entail new rituals to go along with it. It made me think of this ritual in Spain: on New Years Eve you eat 12 grapes to mark the 12 chimes of the clock at midnight. I did research into that, I discovered its not this long standing tradition of Spanish culture, but rather it came from the grape growers that wanted to sell more grapes. I think its amazing just by

framing it as a new ritual it became one in a very short history.

T.H Creating behaviours with an effect in mind, its a designed action. Here the effect is wanting to sell more grapes!

[Laughs] J.T There are comparable examples, one that springs to mind is Red Nose Day. Where the symbol they have created of the red nose indicates that you have taken part and participated in an event supporting the charity.

This symbol then takes on so much more meaning than it would do as simple icon or stand alone object, it becomes

an action in itself.

T.H Thats why I have been pursuing these Relational ideas; that you open yourself up to far more possibilities when you are not looking to creating a one-way system.

You are creating something that is capable of taking on a life of its own. You create the initial momentum and hand it over to the public, who can take it to new places. You let projects follow an unpredictable route of development.

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thinking of the participants as not just users but also abusers.

J.T Perhaps

They can probably do better things with technologies and situations if we build in ways for people to abuse or maybe misuse them.

T.H Do you mean using something in a way that the designer hadn’t anticipated?

J.T Yes, or using it for other purposes or functions that may actually be much more meaningful than what you originally imagined. Thinking

of ways to build in affordances that allow for those improvisational uses.

T.H Something that is no longer fixed but open to possibilities.

Another specific question I wanted to ask you, going back to my earlier conversation with Sheena, we talked about the development of online teaching. Putting lectures and seminars into an online space, where you lose that immediate face to face synchronous conversation, by nature of the video format. How would you overcome this problem?

J.T I think it can work better in some instances, as you can revisit the thoughts over and over, you can also have time to think more deeply about something before asking a question, even if you get the response later because of the time delay. The most worrying aspect of this form of teaching for me is, do you need the tutor once they have transcribed their knowledge on to video, once they have recorded that piece can the institution then run it again without them?

T.H Thats true, you don’t want to make yourself redundant! But can it grow afterwards, is the issue. Sheena said that she teaches because she likes to learn, however when

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you just have information relayed by a screen you restrict that ability for it to lead to new ideas.

J.T I think it can still go two-ways but it is delayed rather than in real time. However if the video remains as a one-dimensional delivery, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still useful as a resource. For example software tutorials. Many tutorials coming out now have a comments facility that allow you to ask questions to the person you watched in the tutorial. This model is already a reality, there are a lot of low residency Post-Graduate programmes that rely on electronic feedback, and scheduled Skype meetings.

T.H What kind of programmes?

J.T A lot of them are in the field of creative writing, I think that is because writing is a form that really lends itself to digital transmission and feedback.

T.H It works in an asynchronous situation, as you need that time to read and reflect upon ideas before you can come back with a response.

J.T There are quite a few low residency Masters programs in Art & Design that are embracing the idea of not having to physically be there in the studio more than say once a month. Most of it is about independent learning.

T.H Where do you think CSM should be headed with its new building?

J.T I don’t want to prescribe anything but I would hope we start to take advantage of what this space can offer.

You have already started doing some preliminary studies into how interdisciplinary the building allows us to be. If it was conceived as an interdisciplinary site, I would like to see it become that.

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T.H Using that physical space. It’s why this building is so open plan in its nature—that all the walls are glass and you can see into everybody’s studio, see them working—its a very interesting quality that I don’t think is really being made use of yet but hopefully will start to be as students come up through this school.

J.T Likewise, I think it could become a leader in that area based on the fact that the building can accommodate it.

T.H I was thinking about this in my dissertation— written before the new building had opened its doors, based on the spiel we had heard of this open-plan, cross-disciplinary space—wondering if CSM could become a Relational School. Looking at Relational Aesthetics and Altermodern ideas, as the dissertation was themed, you do have this vast number of people from all over the world coming into this one space. You

have a shared culture that is created by creolisation from everyone who has come here, there is no standardisation, just that the

more people that come the richer the atmosphere becomes.

I think that is a very important quality of CSM. Do you think the school is beginning to value the notion that you can create something by facilitating a space rather actually making something?

J.T I think that they are not going to have much of a choice. I think that culture is asking for it. I think that education would be foolish not to acknowledge this as viable forms of communication. What that means though, is that we are going to have to actively develop a studio culture that allows for such flexibility,

experimentation and diversity.

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Curated and Edited by Timothy Holloway with Monika Parrinder Esa Matinvesi Nathalie Alv책ng Joshua Trees Sheena Calvert