the playful designer (Part I) — An Overview of the Associative Principles
Why radical skepticism, poetry, and play afford an approach to (re)design(ing) [in|with|of] social constructs.
This is the first article in a multi-part series, which addresses the ethical awareness regarding how designers approach situations, and invites more rigorous engagement for challenging implicit bias, especially around the politics and positionality of “helping”, authority, expert, or complicit collusion in oppressive systems. The other parts are forthcoming.
This is Playful Design. It is meaning meant to be played with rather than known. Certainly.
Confusion is afforded.
Discomfort is afforded.
Acknowledgement of interpretation and play is afforded.
Freedom is, ideally, afforded.
Play with these words. Think with them. Do not seek a mode of being with this thinking certainly. Absolutely. For the following is expressions of a potential Design(er)(ing) devoid of such comforts. Such sensibilities of certainty, and related concerns, like control, containment, and compartmentalization, are elements of Seriousness. A Seriousness, which, arguably, is the central force behind our most wicked of problems. Relinquish such expectations and engage with this work. Rise to the challenge — the indisputably consequential challenge — of being playful.
What follows is poetry. What follows is philosophy. What follows is Design and design and an evaluation of them both in the ways they entangle and inform one another. Though one might read this in any such order they so desire, it was written with a particular flow from which the original thinking came.
The work begins by exploring Design and Being; With a distinction between Design and design and the roles Design plays, ontologically in affording design. As Fry says, Design Designs. So, it seems we ought to recognize just how that Designing happens and to what effect.
This leads directly to the Serious Designer. This is Design when Design(ers) deny their freedom to Design freely. When Design(ers) submerge their freedom in the content which they accept and obey from society: social constructs constructed so strongly they see them as certitudes.
An exploration of such will reveal a troubling outcome: the Banality of Design. This theory, in its infancy, is that Serious Design — absent critical, constructive thinking — perpetuates, and intensifies the perpetuation of, oppressions inherent in social constructs abided by unquestioningly.
But, such a discipline of Design, which chooses to leave in the shadow troubling aspects of a too complex situation of uncertainty, only accentuates the disorder from which we are situated.
Playful Design, alternatively, does|would not. It is ways-of-being. A Hinge Mind, Shape Shifter, Thought-Full, Response-Able, and Genuinely Free. It reckons with notions of realities which seem more like made up rules than facts inherent of being. For it is in a state of playful Design that constructs can be challenged and alternatives imagined, collectively.
For a Hinge-Mind can recognize the cats cradle of constructs we are entwined within. A shape-shifter can adapt, morph, distort, and reconfigure known shapes to enable non-knowing. The Thought-Full afford differentiation between just and unjust constructs of authority, hierarchy, and domination. The Response-Able, find the ability to respond; to challenge, resist, disobey, subvert, deny, or reDesign unjust constructs. And the Genuinely Free, pursuant of a freedom which wills itself only by willing itself as an indefinite movement through the freedom of others, are engaged in a freedom of solidarity.
From these characteristics and examples, a set of playful Design principles is born. These can be imagined as Design guidelines for a practice of Playful Design. Suggestions, inclinations, ideas rather than rules.
- Designers ought to acknowledge their Radical Freedom to engage social constructs.
- Designers ought to acknowledge the ways Design, Designs, and Designing contribute to social constructs and Design design, i.e. ways-of being.
- Designers ought to be prepared for the thinking necessary to discern justifiable and unjustifiable social constructs.
- Designers ought to acknowledge their Radical Freedom to challenge unjustifiable social constructs.
- Designers ought to respond to such acknowledgements and preparation with a pursuit of Genuine Freedom.
And so, let us begin with this Playful Designing. For beginning is important. It is in this beginning — consciously, confused, and playful — that we might stay with and play with the most tricky and challenging of our troubles.
