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Systems

These independent studio projects share a conversation begun in a research seminar last fall.  That seminar began from one distinct philosophical theme, and then moved toward a unique thesis agenda from each participant. That starting theme was “System”, and our interpretation of it went in in stages. First, in a centuries-long perspective, system was an epistemology, a way of knowing and working on the world. Second, in a decades-long perspective, designers have found themselves at work in a world of systems. To understand the contexts from which design opportunities arise, one should not simply lament or hope to reform “the system”; instead it is better explore the emergence, crossovers, and interfaces of multiple systems, ever recombining and loosely joined. Then third, for the speculation on contemporary issues that thesis projects set out to do, each participant has found a topic by which to consider local differences on the ground. How do small moves in design awaken larger shifts of sensibility about local adaptation? How do the social, political, and ecological complexities of participation in physical places transform amid ever-increasing informational mediation?  For that, in counterpoint to today’s vast flux of networks, the seminar and studio work at the scale, and under the title, of Data:District.



This set of independent studio projects shares a conversation, a thematic starting point, and a series of process stages. The conversation has most generally interpreted local difference. How does the participatory knowledge that resides in a place arise from, attach itself to, manifest in the forms of, and help to take care of that place? For a single word to express those many aspects of engagement, the studio often returns to the notion of “commoning.” Expressed as a habitual practice rather than a specific site, this word emphasizes all the habits and sensibilities of upkeep that enact the latent, usually nonfiscal, value of a site, a neighborhood, a community, or a district. Of those, we keep coming back to district. As an emergent, spatially coherent and culturally identifiable element of the city, a district, or especially a set of districts, stands in counterpoint to the placeless network of logistics and communications that so dominates contemporary life. Because districts often arise from particular crossovers of systems and infrastructures, our studio began from a seminar that began from a look at the origins of system. As ever, the point is to speculate in a world of systems, not to lament predations by a singular “the system.” With an ever-recombinant world of systems, it helps to ask how systems embody particular approaches to resource flows, cultural values, and process knowledge, and that helps for understanding contexts from which new design opportunities may arise.



This pandemic year has brought (temporary) defeat to the practices of resisting the virtual life. If the future is virtual, it might be quite grim. If online is almost okay, then who needs architecture?  But this studio believes the opposite:  all over the world people have been getting very painful lessons, via deprivation, on the enduring importance of embodiment in well-made, purposeful, physically appealing places. Since  information technologies rule our lives, the challenge is to situate those in the longer time frames, better grounded truths, and more trustworthy sociopolitical dynamics of actual places. Many of the projects here examine the objects, props, and situations of participation at street level--just what almost everyone has been missing. Not all of this runs on smartphones--there are situated technologies too. Not all mediation means remoteness--data can be local and interfaces can be tangibly embedded in objects, surfaces, and buildings. And not everything can and should be mediated. Augment reality, perhaps, but do not cover it in instructions, information shadows, and immediate entertainments. Sometimes it helps to do nothing, to step away from the computer, and to be here now.



When seeking small provocative design opportunities in a fast changing world of systems, it helps to anticipate smaller, do-it-yourself elements that can be adaptively combined. The alternative is too singular, too top-down, too often over-engineered for outside aims yet under-calibrated to local circumstance, too robust for what it wants and too fragile for what happens instead. A better systems ecology allows local differences, runs on edge effects, lets a resilience emerge, and bounces forward from perturbatons. Those very abstract dynamics come alive in the very real particulars of urban resource networks, and especially in their participatory engagement through new hybrids of media, objects, and places. To make the city more usable, and to make its networks more knowable and adaptable, demands all manner of self-organizing alternatives to the usual formulas of market, state, or big tech platform. Those invite new relations of sites, situations, objects, agreements, and practices. This is one more reason to be reexamining  and diversifying the cultural frames of system. A better world of systems invites new component architectures for new social organizations.