Persistent Fools: Cunning Intelligence and the Politics of Design

By Thomas Wendt

Persistent Fools: Cunning Intelligence and the Politics of Design explores the manipulative qualities of design, the unsustainability of capitalist rationalism, the anti-strategies of cunning intelligence, and new approaches for responsible and ethical design practice. Design is not a purely benevolent activity. Even in an age of human-centered design (or perhaps because of it), the practice is linked to deception. But rather than this being a downfall, Persistent Fools argues that we can use its deceptive qualities to introduce a new way of strategizing: cunning intelligence over rational logic. The very connection between design, deception, and capitalist exploitation might also be the lever for shifting power relations back toward sustainability, if only we can flip the dominant logic. Persistent Fools argues that design is a political act and should be understood as such. It is a call to action for designers to shed the baggage of industrialist thinking and adopt new forms of futuring that are better equipped to deal with social and political complexity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Wendt
• Release date: Jul 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781548377137

Thomas Wendt

Thomas Wendt is an independent design strategist, author, facilitator, activist, educator, and speaker based in New York City. He splits his time between client engagements and independent scholarship. His client work includes building sustainable human-centered design capabilities through workshops, training programs, and coaching, along with projects encompassing early stage design research, co-design, and service design. Thomas has worked with clients ranging from large companies to nonprofits and activist groups. Thomas’s first book, Design for Dasein, deals with the relationship between experience design and practical philosophy. It explores the emerging practice of designing experiences through the lens of phenomenology, a philosophical perspective concerned with how humans experience the world. His second book, Persistent Fools: Cunning Intelligence and the Politics of Design, explores the role of cunning intelligence and deception to make more socially, culturally, and ecologically sustainable design decisions, as well as a means of resisting oppressive design. Thomas speaks at conferences across the world and is published in both academic journals and practitioner publications on topics such as philosophy of design, design theory, sustainability, design research, design thinking, and the politics of design. He also enjoys escaping to a remote cabin in the woods whenever possible, single malt scotch, and practicing yoga.

Book preview

Persistent Fools

Cunning Intelligence and the Politics of Design

Thomas Wendt

Contents

Introduction 4

Part 1 The Rationalist Impulse

Ch. 1 Design and the Rationalist Impulse 14

Ch. 2 The Deception of Nature 51

Part 2 Cunning Intelligence

Ch. 3 Trickery 76

Part 3 Responsible Contrivances

Ch. 4 Cunning in Design Practice 128

Ch. 5 Design Ethics 145

Ch. 6 Cunning and Criticality 174

Conclusion 193

References 198

Notes 220

Introduction

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. William Blake

The briefest rummage through the dictionary reveals implies that designers aren’t to be trusted. Benedict Singleton

Design is both a defining characteristic of humanity and an act of deception. Humans are unique in their ability to plan, think ahead, strategize, and create the futures they want, but nonetheless designing always contains elements of deceiving.

Design creates artificiality, contrivance, and un-natural interventions that aim to promote certain behaviors over others. The goal of this book is to trace the relationship between deception and design through the lens of the trickster, and argue for embracing cunning intelligence as a strategy to make collectively informed, sustainable design decisions.

I first came across the question of design and deception through Vilém Flusser’s work, particularly an essay in The Shape of Things¹ entitled A Word About Design. Flusser connects design as an act of planning with design as an act of cunning. The word design has its etymological roots in planning, drawing, sketching, and other words we equate with design practice. Design is also related to scheming and cunning intelligence. Flusser’s concern in this essay is to examine the ways design, right down to the language we use to describe it, works to subvert natural laws for the betterment of humanity. It is easy to critique this analysis on the grounds of essentialism: certainly, Flusser is predicating his conclusions on the existence of a predetermined natural state or law that generalizes existence. My goal will be to pick up the thread Flusser started, specifically avoiding essentialist traps by introducing new ways to think about nature and further articulating the design/deception intersection.

As a designer who got his beginnings in the heyday of human-centered design, it struck me as both interesting and disturbing that design is so fundamentally related to scheming, which of course calls to mind various conceptions of cunning, deception, trickery, etc. How can something we call human-centered also be so ethically problematic? The optimistic side of me sees design as a benevolent force that contributes to the betterment of humans and the world. The pessimist in me sees the darker side of design, the side that contributes to hatred, violence, natural resource depletion, and oppressive politics. This paradox lies at the center of my analysis. Design is not a clearly defined practice: it is full of antinomies that any responsible practitioner should take time to understand.

As Tim Ingold so aptly puts it: We cannot make the future, however, without also thinking it. What then is the relation between thinking and making? To this, the theorist and the craftsman would give different answers. It is not that the former only thinks and the latter only makes, but that the one makes through thinking and the other thinks through making.² While there is a strong emphasis on adaptability over rigid planning throughout this book, the point is not to eliminate strategic planning. Rather, I want to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of both planning and improvisation, with an equal weight on each. My interest is to further develop how the theorist and craftsperson come together, and that any separation imposed by external forces serves productive means over real human-centered means. The conceptual and practical distance between thinking and making is a relic of past rational approaches to design. Design must move past it.

One of the main goals of this book is to take a deep look at this apparent relationship between design and deception, and pay specific attention to how this relationship can contribute to design ethics.

This is an uncomfortable conversation.

The emergence of human-centered design and an overall warm-fuzziness promoted by commercial design suggests that design as a deceptive practice and cunning intelligence may be a bit taboo. Nonetheless, I want to argue that while deception can have malevolent qualities, deception can occur on a more mundane, even beneficial level. There is, of course, a boundary line between too much and too little deception. I will use design practices and products as examples to articulate where that line is. Similarly, I will explore the spectrum of rationality in design, from the hard positivism of commercial design to the unwieldy playfulness of the trickster designer to show where the two might meet.

The objects that make up our environment, context, habitus, etc., influence the way we think, feel, and act. One role of being is to learn how to dwell with what we create. Martin Heidegger³ sets up a reciprocal relationship between building and dwelling, in which Dasein—the being who exists as self-consciously thrown into a particular context—cannot build without dwelling and cannot dwell without building. If individuals are literally thrown into a pre-existing, designed context, design becomes a way of actively caring for the things given to us and creating new things for us to encounter, cope with, and use to augment the given environment.

One difficulty with studying design is mediating the oscillation between planning and action. That is, design always focuses on the future, but the critique of design looks backward. Can the trickster help with this challenge? The trickster archetype has been with us since the beginning of artistic expression. From ancient mythology to modern popular culture, tricksters shape our realities and the role of deception in everyday life. The main practice of the trickster is deception, bending the truth and manipulating situations to suit his needs (the trickster is almost always male). The trickster becomes skilled at deception, hones his skills as if his life depends on it, as it often does. The work of the trickster is to recognize his situation and the elements in his environment, realize what his end goal might be—to eat, copulate, acquire wealth, or escape a dangerous situation—devise a plan to manipulate his environment to deceive an opponent, and finally, carry out that plan with grace so as not to alert his opponent of the deception.

The trickster has much in common with the designer: from reading their current environment, to planning future scenarios, and even to using deception to carry out these plans. There is an inherent link between design and deception. Instead of reading deception as a malevolent force, I want to show how deception and trickery can help achieve an ethics of design.

I will also show how cunning intelligence can benefit both designer and user. The designer can circumvent rationalist impulses and drive toward deeper, more sustainable design, and users can emancipate themselves from the restrictive scripts placed upon them by designers.

In the last few decades, design has taken a strong humanist path in how it frames its contributions to the world. This results in, for better or worse, a generally positive outlook towards design. We think of design as a source of good, an honest profession that meets the needs of the humans it serves. The common idea that design thinking mediates human, technological, and business needs captures this sentiment perfectly. If only we can perfectly balance human needs, what we can feasibly build, and still make a profit, then design is a great, egalitarian, and benevolent force. But of course, this balance is utopian in the worst sense of the word.

Capitalism mandates that business needs will always take precedence, despite their often-unsustainable results. Nonetheless, simply including human needs in the design process, for some, revolutionizes the approach to design, to creating new futures. With the adoption of human-centered design across organizations from nonprofits to Fortune 500 companies, one result—admittedly, among many positives, is overly optimistic and even delusional in thinking that design is an automatic source of human happiness and prosperity. While this view is not necessarily wrong, it forgets that design is inherently deceptive and that the other flavors of deception can lead us toward better design and more preferable futures, both for humans and for their environment.

Pharmakon

Before getting in to the pesky question of what is being deceived, it will be helpful to first explore some of the linguistic peculiarities associated with design and related activities. It is possible to remain critical of design without falling in to paranoid Cartesian traps concerning deceptive automatons and the apparent veil cast over reality. There are linguistic clues that help elucidate the connection between design and deception. Jacques Derrida famously articulated the ambiguity of language with his theory of deconstruction—in particular, for our purposes, his treatment of pharmakon. Derrida points out that the ancient Greek word pharmakon can mean both medicine or cure but also poison. He uses this strange linguistic anomaly to show how language can play tricks on us, contradicting itself, and signifying its exact opposite. In a similar way, many of the words we use to describe aspects of design tend to reveal themselves to be associated with deception and manipulation. Much like pharmakon, we associate design with compassionate action—and often, this association proves itself to be warranted—but when the association breaks, it tends to break in understated ways. That is, the times when design turns deceptive are most detrimental when no one notices.

Deception always involves a state of being misled. An entity can purposefully mislead us such as when a cellular phone company attempts to hide extra costs behind a promotional price. We can also be misled through accident or coincidence such as through optical illusions where we might say my eyes deceive me. When purposeful and malicious, we refer to deception as deceit. Both purposeful and accidental deceptions are found in the Latin decipere, often translated as to ensnare. To deceive is to trap someone in a particular way of thinking and/or behaving. In the same way, we might think of design as an attempt to trap people into thinking or behaving a certain way. Sometimes this ensnaring is purposeful, as in subway turnstiles that prevent passage without payment. Sometimes it is coincidental, such as how using a larger coffee mug than usual might result in the jitters.

As much as designers are hands-on in their work, much design happens in the mind. Designers devise plans to create devices. Device has its roots in the Old French devis, which has a number of meanings from division and separation to wish, desire, and even coat of arms and last will. There is an interesting link between the things we refer to as devices—often, high technological gadgets that have incorporated themselves into everyday life, such as smartphones—and feelings of desire. The design of the device wishes for a particular outcome. In this case, we can identify that desire as capital-driven. The design of the iPhone, for example, has resulted in an outcome that has shifted how consumers relate to both technology and one another, evolved markets to suit Apple’s growth, and locked customers into Apple’s platform via proprietary applications and hardware. They also can serve as badges of honor and identity (coat of arms) that communicate something about their owner’s status and values.

Modern dictionaries go so far as to define device as a plan, scheme, crafty trick. Devise also has roots in Old French. The word deviser can mean to plan, contrive, give form, arrange, linking the act of planning to contrivance. Design-related planning always involves a certain amount of contriving, insofar as the world is almost never conducive to the needs of designers—if it were, design would not need to exist.

Planning or contriving imagines clever ways to manipulate the environment to achieve a purpose. Contrive has a few origins. From Old French, controver can mean to find out or imagine, resulting in a strange contradiction in the word itself. To find out implies the revelation of some hidden truth, whereas imagine suggests the creation of something new. Also related to contrive is the Late Latin contropare, to compare, and Latin com-, with, tropus, song, and tropos, figure of speech. To contrive is to plan with artistry (song) and metaphor (figure of speech).

Contrivances are not necessarily strategic, meticulously planned according to rational inputs and facts. Rather, to contrive uses one’s ingenuity to both imagine new futures and to use the current environment to create new ways of being in the present. Eventually, contrive became associated with falsity. Something is overly designed when it seems terribly over the top, such as a place like Disneyland might. Modern contrivances, despite being the design that has become too-designed, still maintain their sense of creativity and artistry. A designed object or experience is contrived when it has crossed a boundary and become overly designed, more designed than needed or desired.

In the act of making, designers fabricate objects and/or situations. Fabrication can mean to construct, build, and make, as in the original sense of the Latin fabricare, but they can also be used to lie, as in the modern sense of the word. Fabrications can be outright lies, often employed in legal situations, when the difference between truth and untruth can have punitive results. Fabrication techniques can require artifice, the work of art or craft that involves specialized skill. The Latin artificium can refer to the process of creating artifice and to the professional employment of a craftsperson. Modern meanings of artifice, like those of fabrication, often point to artificiality, and even to cunning skill. Middle French artifice means a specific type of skill employed in situations where cunning intelligence is necessary. An artifice is a skillful manipulation used to trick or deceive. The result of artifice might be an artifact, or the product of skillful, artful creation that is inherently artificial.

Craft takes on different meanings in different contexts. Old English, Middle English, Kentish, and Proto-Germanic words with similar roots point to craft as a source of strength and power. In our modern sense of craft as careful skill, the craftsperson is a powerful figure, especially considering their unique cunning ability. In other words, craftspeople tend to be crafty, yet another word for the skillful use of cunning intelligence. Even if the ultimate goal is to create preferable futures, reaching that goal requires trickery. Even dwelling, the ultimate ontological endgame for design, was originally associated with the Old English dwellan, to mislead or deceive, before eventually taking on its homely connotations.

We can see that many of these design-related words have double meanings. Design both creates and destroys, makes realities and forecloses on others, maintains a certain amount of artificiality and often goes too far into artifice. The following pages will trace the design/deception relationship first by establishing the function of design under the current rationalist framework, then looking at the trickster and cunning intelligence as a function of anti-strategy, and finally argue for a model of sustainable design based on cunning intelligence of the trickster combined with ethical sensibilities.

Part 1:

The Rationalist Impulse

Ch. 1: Design and the Rationalist Impulse

[T]he structure of the world turns out to be a function of liberated hands. Vilem Flusser

Liberated Hands

Design is… This phrase seems like an appropriate way to begin any discussion on an esoteric topic like design. One can always refer to a static definition as a gauge for the validity of current opinions. Control the vocabulary as much as possible. When I say design, you should know what I mean. When I say design, I should know what I mean.

In many ways, this book is about the complexity of the word, design: its components, intricacies, paradoxes, connotations, difficulties, failures, and follies. Instead of defining design, we will focus on the anomalies and games language plays when we understand and articulate design.

We commonly think about design as a strategic and aesthetic act. A strong movement in contemporary design discourse highlights the strategic and dampens the aesthetic by stressing design’s role in planning and purposeful action. To design is to act intentionally, to plan what to do before actually doing it, and to articulate strategic goals and the steps needed to achieve them. Distancing design from its aesthetic connotations serves emotional and economic purposes: designers that lack a background in aesthetics and visual design are able to participate in the strategic aspects of design without necessarily contributing to the materiality of the end object. Designers can join organizational strategy discussions, leveraging this inclusion to demand higher fees. On a more primary level, there is no need to categorize design as either strategic or aesthetic, as it combines both at times and is neither at others. Many contemporary designers also seem to have greater pride in their work when participating in the more strategic aspects of design, as opposed to simply applying a coat of paint.

If we follow elements of design back to ancient Greek and Latin roots, we discover definitions of design as change, evolution, revelation, and emergence. The ancient Greek physis commonly translates as nature, but can easily be expanded to mean anything that contains its own potential for change. What we commonly think of as natural phenomena—like a caterpillar morphing in to a butterfly or a tree losing its leaves in autumn—contain elements of physis, as its potential for change is encompassed in its own being. They don’t require intervention from any outside force. Other forms of evolution or emergence do require outside intervention, such as building a bridge over a body of water. The bridge is an unnatural intervention with an objective, an intentionality that does not exist in the river but only emerges with outside influence. This intervention on nature is often thought of as design. So preliminarily, design is not a natural process. In many cases, it stands in opposition to nature.

We can conceive of intervention on nature through the lens of techne, the imposition of something outside that allows nature to change. Techne requires planning and foresight, a vision of more preferable futures to make that vision a reality. In this way, techne often translates to art, technique, or skill, as it is inherently productive, moving toward a pre-defined goal. It requires a certain level of expertise to implement, as the necessary actions are often at least somewhat standardized.

Modern offshoots of techne include technical skill and technology, often interpreted as efficiency of production. One attends a technical school to learn trades that require specialized skill. One might win a competition or court case on a technicality, or the failure of standardized practices to account for contextual variables. We might preface a statement by saying, Technically… But as Carl Mitcham points out, "Techne in the classical understanding—and this cannot be emphasized enough when comparing ancient and modern making activities—is thus fundamentally oriented toward particulars instead of toward the efficient production of many things of the same kind in order to make money."⁴ In its original sense, techne was associated with how practices of making come about, or as Martin Heidegger highlights, a revealing.⁵ Techne sparks a metamorphosis in natural materials. It reveals the potentiality of material through the skillful intervention of cunning intelligence.

Finally, techne incorporates both reason and rhetoric.⁶ Reason is needed to formulate plans and to know which scenarios are more preferable than others. Rhetoric is needed to gather support