Design and Grace:

Writing in the midst of World War II, French philosopher, activist and mystic Simone Weil notes that the one who thinks they are the possessor of force seems to walk through a “non-resistant element”.^[1] In the Iliad, considered by Weil as the purest poem of force, unstoppable Greek soldiers push forward, slashing through Trojan flesh and bronze, only to be driven back to their ships the next day by the enemy army, as the favours of the gods, the tides of force, have shifted. Wielding force, we “do not impose on [our] movements that halt, that interval of hesitation”, wherein lies all our consideration for other lives.^[2] Intoxicated by force, we move as if destiny has provided us with complete licence and unimpeded access to the other—on the battlefield, at the restaurant or in the design studio.

Force is omnipresent but, writes Weil, moments of grace are possible. Weil’s unfinished play, Venice Saved, pivots on such a moment of unrealised force.^[3] In the play, a band of Spanish mercenaries scheme to seize the city for the Spanish crown. The Venetian authorities suspect nothing, and the plan is destined for success. On the eve of the coup, Jaffier, the leader of the insurgents, watches the sun set over Venice. He holds the city in the palm of his hand, as exposed to his power and will as it is to the rays of the setting sun. 

The last act opens to a new morning. During the night, Jaffier has confessed the plot to the Council of Venice, demanding only immunity for his friends. They are tortured and executed nonetheless, and Jaffier throws himself into sure death.

The sun rises on a city spared from destruction.

Why did Jaffier change his mind? This is not revealed in the play. The city was there for the taking, yet Jaffier stayed his hand. This active inaction upsets the notion of exerting power as the inevitable outcome of force. It suspends Thucydides’ dictum that “each one commands everywhere he has power to do so”.^[4] At the height of possibility, the beautiful city exposed and up for grabs, Jaffier stays his hand.

In my PhD dissertation, Design and Grace, I activate and investigate such moments of unrealised force.^[5]

We tend to think of design as making new things, of designers acting through addition and intervention. But, in a world where human activities often violently constrict the lives of others, how can designers also cultivate creative acts of withdrawal, foreclosure and leaving be?

I engage with this question through the notion of grace. Drawing on Simone Weil, Michel Serres and Patricia MacCormack I define grace as “actively not doing what you are able to do”.^[6]

Grace is more than just a no. It is an active or affirmative negation, related to what linguists call “scale-external negations”.^[7] Such negations are not purely destructive or oppositional. As expressed by the prefix a-, scale-external negations activate a previously unavailable spectrum of meaning and possibility. Something that is amelodic is neither melodic nor unmelodic, rather it is outside the realm of melody.

I will first discuss adesign, or grace applied to design acts. I will then use the figure of the ahuman to introduce four design experiments with undoing anthropocentric privilege in human-animal relations.

Adesign

In 1996, architects Lacaton & Vassal were commissioned to redesign Place Léon Aucoc, a small square in Bordeaux, France. The architects spent lots of time on-site. They talked to the local pétanque players and they noted the movements of the flâneurs. Then they presented their proposal: do nothing. The square is already beautiful, they claimed, already full of quality, charm and life. Nothing but a few minor changes, such as cleaning the square more often and replacing the gravel, was needed.

This led to a conflict with their client, the City of Bordeaux. Lacaton recounts: “At first they said, ‘ok, we’ll find someone else if you don’t want to do it.’ Our response was, ‘We do want to do the project, and our project is to do nothing.’ After three months of discussion, they were convinced that we had done a good project. They said ‘okay, you’re right’.”^[8]

Twenty years later, fashion design student Laura Krarup Frandsen refused to produce a collection of garments for her Master’s project at the Royal College of Art in London. At the degree show she instead staged a “die-in” performance, during which climate activists lay on the floor like corpses. Spurred into climate activism by a recent UN report that described the huge emissions from the garment industry, Frandsen had come to the conclusion that producing any garments at all, even through sustainable methods, would be inappropriate.

When the project was presented on a popular design blog, Frandsen was called out as a “lazy student” who “didn’t do her homework” and “avoided her finals” using “little effort”. Others focused on the work having “no substance”, claiming “she hasn’t actually done anything yet”.^[9] The critique levelled at Frandsen did not take aim at the quality of her work. It questioned whether her work qualified as design at all.

I claim that these are not aborted or incomplete design processes. On the Lacaton & Vassal website, the Place Léon Aucoc project is assigned the status of “built/realisé”. The creative outcome is not void. It is an instance of do nothing, an (a)design act of leaving be, of leaving room for the life that already existed at the site. Their decision is not inaction motivated by refusal, inability, complacency or apathy. It is a carefully considered and articulated design proposal.

Adesign moves can cause trouble. Those who practise it risk becoming what I call, after Sara Ahmed, designer killjoys, by not adhering to conventional virtues of design, where designing is coupled with adding, proposing with imposing and action with force.^[10]

Through the concept of adesign I attempt to decouple action from force, and grace from resignation. 

Ahuman Design

Let us now deploy grace in the context of more-than-human design.

How should we relate to other animals? How have designers responded to the so called “question of the animal”?^[11] 

A common response is to move towards the animal—to acknowledge more-than-human entanglements through touch, hybridity and ethics of care.^[12] However, bringing the animal into human physical or discursive systems is often a kiss of death for the animal.^[13] MacCormack suggests we should rather ask “the human question”. Asking the human question means turning the gaze back to our own species’ destructive practices and desires. She writes: “‘We need to think differently about animals.’ No. We need to think about the undoing of us, whatever that means.”^[14]

The Ahuman is MacCormack’s figure for encountering the outside of the human.^[15] The Ahuman makes no claim to the animal, but experiments with gracious undoings of the human. Ahuman grace is the affirmation of a no or a not that opens up for the expressivity of others.

Ahuman Design Experiments

I have conducted four design experiments that reconfigure everyday situations in which people in urban Scandinavia may encounter other animals, such as angling, eating, shopping. Conceived as placebos, pauses, poisons and pacts, the experiments populate a palette of nos and nots in more-than-human design. Four relational operators—the conceptual characters Bully, Addict, Allergic and Odysseus—pilot and communicate the experiments.

Placebos

Fishwatching is a reconfigured angling set-up with which you trick and capture fish on camera instead of on a hook. Angling is essentially about “outwitting nature”. Fishwatching is designed to retain many of the traditional qualities of conventional angling: being outdoors, chatting with friends, tinkering with the fishing gear, attaining the knowledge and skill required to outwit the fish and its habitat, the suspense in waiting for a catch, and the triumph of outwitting nature as manifested in a trophy. Fishwatching probes the limits of crafting surrogates for replacing the animal in violent human-animal relations. 

The grace of Bully is an interdependent disentanglement. Bully makes do with a supple connection to the animal, a slack line, a tiny step to the side in a parasitic relation.^[16] Bully’s move is a minimal deviation from the force with which anglers interact with fish. Bully does not give but asks less of the fish.

Pauses

We seem to be addicted to unsustainable lifestyles. “Just one more flight. I couldn’t live without cheese.”^[17] Extrapolating from these rhetorics of addiction in the climate crisis I sent out an invitation: 

Do you want to stop eating animals but find it hard to quit? Eating the flesh of others can be addictive. I’m offering free hypnosis sessions that will guide you towards less harmful eating habits.

Weil wrote that the man of force moves through a non-resistant element. Meat Addiction Hypnotherapy experiments with inviting moments of grace, of hesitation, in an otherwise full and immediate human access to the animal. The grace of Addict is a creative pause, an interval of hesitation in the intoxication of anthropocentric force.

Poisons

If you are bitten by a tick, you may develop a hypersensitivity to the alpha-gal carbohydrate, found in all mammals except primates. This condition is also known as red meat allergy. Allergic by Design is a series of conversations, speculations and prototypes on welcoming, or even desiring, an allergy to animal products. What is in the move from the “I prefer not to” of the vegan to the “I prefer not to be able to” of Allergic?

For the philosopher Spinoza, allergies and autoimmune diseases are poisons that limit our expressive capacities. Building on interviews with meat allergics, I rearticulate Spinoza’s ethics of poison using contemporary disability theory. Communication materials for “A Red Meat Retreat”, a fictional social get-together during which participants expose themselves to potentially allergy-inducing tick-bites, hint at a world in which public allergy conversions are taking place. The grace of Allergic is a relational incompatibility. Through becoming allergic to ingesting, even touching, mammalian products, Allergic alters their capacities, gaining a power to receive a grace that opens up for the expressivity of others.

Pacts

In Sweden it is possible to sign up at Spelpaus.se to exclude oneself from gambling for a set amount of time. Such self-bindings are known as Odysseus pacts. What if it were possible to exclude oneself from other transactions as well? The design experiment Odysseus in the Supermarket prototypes different interfaces to a self-exclusion service, Köppaus.se (http://www.koppaus.se/), through which you can ban yourself from petrol, air travel or animal products.

Whereas ethics of care emphasises becoming engrossed in the situation of the other, Odysseus operates an ethics on the level of the situation, of avoiding impossible situations. The grace of Odysseus is one of careful and cunning self-bindings.

Design and Grace

Design and Grace seeks to articulate a register of grace in design. My ambition is to provide designers with cautious confidence and generative exemplars for crafting vital, effective and beautiful nos and nots. 

In the end, the designer emerges not as colonising conqueror, sad militant or connective empath, but as a dirty dancer, who—curiously, cautiously, carefully—practises the dispossession of the world.