StationeryMad

On the plight of the Somalians

2011-09-18T10:14:00.001-07:00

When Satre spoke of his idea of a radical freedom to choose, he clearly did not have this in mind--the kind of absolutely stark choices between two impossibly, inhumane fates: “If they stay in Somalia, they will die of hunger,” he said bluntly. That’s what the choice comes down to for many Somalis: Do they risk starvation at home or torture and rape while fleeing?" (reported by Kristof for NYT).

This decision-tree left me cold.

On mining ores

2011-09-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

"And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 'Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, and my temper?' And, keeping the figure a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools and that fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal."

-- John Ruskin, in John Ruskin on Genius (2011), p.75.

On the idea of living in the solution

2011-09-17T06:55:00.001-07:00

"When one is living in the solution, one does not understand the problem."

--Peter Sloterdijk, Neither Sun nor Death (2011).

On a Drift to Low Performance

2011-07-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

"Thus though man has never before been so complacent about what he has, or as confident of his ability to do whatever he sets his mind upon, it is at the same time true that he never before accepted so low an estimate of what he is. The same scientific method which enabled him to create his wealth and to unleash the power he wields has, he believes, enabled biology and psychology to explain him away--or at least to explain away whatever used to seem unique or even in any way mysterious...Truly he is, for all his wealth and power, poor in spirit."

--Joseph Krutch (1959), cited in D.H. Meadows's, Thinking in Systems: A Primer, pp.185.

On Design Ethics, Design Awareness and Design Education

2011-06-06T01:24:00.000-07:00

This the transcript of my keynote lecture at the Design and Technology Awards 2011.

Good morning. It is a pleasure for me today to share some of my ideas on design education and ethics with all of you. As you may know I am trained as an architect, and not as a product designer. So I hope you will pardon me for my ignorance in your field. That said, I am also a design teacher, and so I hope that my own reflections on design education will still be of some use.

Preparing this lecture brought back memories of my experience as a student in a design and technology classroom. For two years in secondary one and two respectively, I remember learning how to sketch, draw orthographic projections, axonometric drawings and work on various materials from wood to acrylic. I remember that it was a class that allowed me to conceptualize, calculate, measure, make, and also take whatever I have made home. On hindsight, I thought that there was something in the task of making that made it very different from physics, history or literature.

In any case, subsequently in the next four years of my pre-tertiary education however, I drew nothing and made nothing. Even though I learned more about complex equations and formulas, and knew more about the world through the various sciences, in many ways I had come to know less about it.

This brings me to the two questions at the center of this lecture.

First, what does it mean to be ‘educated by design’? To be educated by design must be the aim of design education. However normally we don’t phrase the aim this way. Normally we tend to say that in design education, a student learns to visualize and draw; this student learns the dexterity of handling tools and hones his tactile intelligence with materials. This student also learns how to observe users’ needs and wants, and to synthesize all these ideas together through a design model or prototype with some intent in mind.

But here, I want to raise the question by asking: is that all to what it means to be educated by design?

This leads me to my second question. The second question is, ‘what is design ethics?’.

I do not intend to ask this question out of the blue. On the contrary, I think this second question is intimately connected to the first question. Unless we have something to say about design ethics, it is very hard to arrive at a sufficient answer of what it means to be educated by design.

As a prelude to what I want to share, one can say that design shapes and modulates the interests, the relationships and lives of individuals and communities. Because of this impact, design always has an ethical dimension. Hence the question is not, ‘how do we make design ethical?’—because it already presupposed some kind of ethics—but rather, ‘how do we engage and activate the various ethical values already implicit in the design process for the development of the student?’

So let me begin with the second question on ‘what is design ethics’ first. It is possible to answer this question tentatively first by saying that design ethics is mostly about ‘good design’.

Good design is always somewhat subjective and controversial. But as you will see later, I am concerned here with the other kind of good design.

As a start, to define what is good design, it is always fruitful to show what is not good design. I understand that even bad design may still be a very subjective issue. Even so, I would still like to demonstrate my position on this matter. Hopefully the examples I am going to show will speak for themselves. I apologize that most of them come from architecture.

My first slide here shows a house by the famous architect Peter Eisenman. For a time, Eisenman was designing a series of houses through the exploration of geometrical rules. I should add that these explorations in geometry came at the expense of livability and perhaps even safety concerns. It was said that upon hearing that an occupant in one of his buildings fell from the stairs and broke his ankle, Eisenman remarked that from then on, this person would cease to take a staircase for granted.

Here we see that in order to obey the geometrical rules he set up, Eisenman had to include redundant beams that serve no structural purposes, and he also separated the bedroom of a loving couple with a gap.

My second slide shows the basement levels of Fusionopolis. The pictures speak for themselves. Even where human traffic is low in a temporary set up like this, human factors of safety and ease have not been considered in the implementation of this design.

My third slide shows the carpark at Orchard Central. I don’t know if you have tried driving in this carpark. Thankfully, I have yet to experience the design here. But for those of you who have tried it, I hope your experience has been less harrowing compared to that of these policemen.

My last slide in this series shows a case of risky improvisation. While we may not call improvisation a form of design, it is however a form of designerly problem-solving behavior. The key but debatable difference between improvisation and design is that improvisation aims to solve a problem expediently with readily available materials—such as seen in this case where a sense of responsibility was lacking.

If this is the general idea of what bad design means, now lets look at a definitive example of what is known as good design.

Here are Dieter Rams’s famous 10 principles of good designs. I am sure many, if not all of you, are acquainted with Rams, for he was for the longest time, the most iconic designer working for Braun in Germany.

But what Rams missed is the other category of what it means by ‘good design’. This means good as implied in the ethical good. I am afraid that there is no easy way of expressing this so please bear with me. Good design, in the ethical category, is concerned with the following questions:

(1) Why are we designing this artifact?

(2) What are its anticipated consequences and costs?

(3) Who are we designing it for? Who benefits and who loses?

(4) Who is responsible in this design? What are the responsibilities of this design?

These questions, except for (2) and (3), are rather peculiar by standards in design today. The first question is usually bypassed because the need or want is apparent. As for the last question, lawyers are the ones who usually answer it.

In contrast, questions of ‘how’, for example, how is this or that made? How do we achieve this or that effect?, have become much more prevalent today, perhaps owing both to the wide range of technological tools at our command as well as to the immediacy of communicative networks for sharing what we know and have made. Even so, these questions of ‘how’ usually do not invoke the question of ethical making, for example, such as, ‘to what extent is the method of making sustainable?’ or ‘has the method considered fair wages?’. Instead, questions of ‘how’ tend to refer to questions of method and techniques.

In any case, Australian designer and researcher Tony Fry once remarked that design ethics is a marginalized and underdeveloped area in design. It is not hard to imagine why this is the case. Designers are practitioners of action. This does not mean that they act without thinking. Rather, to use a Donald Schon’s aphorism, designers think in action. Furthermore, designers enjoy looking ahead, not looking around—something that ethics oblige us to do. The attraction of the end product is a very seductive and an all-encompassing goal. And perhaps most of all, ethics has a stodgy aura about it: the ethical thinker is perceived as a superior personality on a high-horse reprimanding anyone deemed to be morally inferior. This common but inaccurate view does not sit in well with the pluralistic ethos practiced in design today.

And so as designers, shouldn’t we just contend with being the most skilful and talented designers we can be?

However the famous designer George Nelson once said that if designers start out by limiting their responsibility, they also limit their potential. This insight can be said to be the mother of all insights in design responsibility. Think about this for a second. What Nelson seems to say is this: design always starts out with a problem or need. And how we define this problem or need in turn depends on the formulations of our responsibilities towards this problem or need. Thus how we formulate our responsibilities then determines the kind of potential and command we enjoy as the designer.

In other words Nelson is asking to us imagine a forward kind of design responsibility—responsibility that is not associated with the backward responsibility of liability but with hopeful anticipation, obligation and virtue. To put this concretely, if designers were to embrace this forward responsibility, they would look forward to a world where their designs are proudly implemented and not just sold; and they would be willing to participate in the continuous development of a product alongside the user and not just as the client. The anecdotal tale of the architect who does not look forward to his creation, much less visiting them and asking how the user is, demonstrate the rarity of this forward kind of design responsibility.

But surely Nelson did not ask us to expand our responsibilities as designers indefinitely. To do so would be profoundly irresponsible. On this, I think Nelson is asking us to draw our boundaries in a responsible manner—both backward and forward responsibilities--and this exercise is itself an enlarging move towards ethical design.

(from The School and Society, p.37-38: ‘Take the example of the little child who wants to make a box. If he stops short with the imagination or wish, he certainly will not get discipline. But when he attempts to realize his impulse, it is a question of making his idea definite, making it into a plan, of taking the right kind of wood, measuring the parts needed, giving them necessary proportions, etc. There is involved the preparation of materials, the sawing, planing, the sandpapering, making all the edges and corners to fit.’)

The disposition in design today to focus much more on the ‘how’ over the ‘why’ can be partially traced back via Donald Schon to the Progressivist’s philosophy of John Dewey. According to Dewey’s philosophy, in order to learn something we must try it. By trying, we see the consequences of our action and by comparing that with our original intent, we learn something new. Dewey’s great faith in the experiential method must rest on his equal faith in the epistemology of the scientific method, which is experimentation.

But today, questions of ‘why’ have become just as important as questions of ‘how’. The state of environmental degradation, the novel but harmful financial derivatives and new products of every kind that ultimately end up in landfills are not categories of design action that can benefit from experimentations. As a matter of fact, countless acts of design today are irreversible actions: design actions that exact a cost in both material and human resources and sometimes have residual effects that last for many generations.

Interestingly, Dewey saw the need to expand education beyond that of learning and skills towards the broad social goal of democratic citizenship. However, in his writings replete with so many references to design education, he did not anticipate the day when design would come to threaten a sustainable way to live, for example as highlighted by problematic issues of mass consumption, mass disposability and planned obsolescence.

In light of these issues, systems thinker C.W. Churchman, who coined the phrase, ‘wicked problems’ once remarked that many ways of doing things were invented in the Twentieth Century, but we have not found any way to justify for many of them. At the same time, phenomenon that was once in the vicinity of fate or destiny have now turned into problems of design under mankind’s discretion. Here are a few at a very high level of design possibilities:

(a) genetic traits of one’s offspring

(b) procreation beyond one’s death

(d) the natural balance of ecosystems

(e) the size of the world’s population

(f) the survival of species, including our own (Protzen & Harris 2010: 222)

Hence the focus on questions of ‘how’ over ‘why’ ultimately spells what design thinker Horst Rittel calls the ‘loss of destiny’—we no longer require a justification to exercise the power of design. In other words, the human species has arrived at a stage where we can no longer quite distinguish between what to design and what not to design. The range of design artifacts out there tell us that many design artifacts exist simply because we have the capacity to make them. And unfortunately, the logic of the market tends to reinforce this state of affairs.

Subsequently, this leads to a state today where we can no longer quite distinguish between what to design and what not to design. The tallest building? What productive role does it serve? The fastest car? Where is it going? Man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree? Is our planet running out of interesting geographical features?

Techniques, methods or even enlightened aspirations and design talents cannot answer these questions on our behalf. Only ethical reasoning, along with their corresponding dialogues and debates between individuals who will be affected by these designs, can begin to point the way.

Now let me conclude this lecture by returning to the first question on what it means to be educated by design.

To be educated by design, I suggest, is to be made more aware and conscious as a human being by design. What do I mean by this?

Let me further explicate this idea a little more through two different ways. The first way has to do with a designer being aware of what he or she is doing. The second way has to do with an individual being made aware of design as a citizen in a democratic society.

First let me start by situating design awareness from the designer’s point of view. Here, I quote Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Project as accounted by Richard Sennett as an extreme example:

“When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about only after you have had your technical success.”

Oppenheimer was however in this case, referring to the atomic bomb.

I certainly hope none of our students end up designing weapons of mass destruction! It is not my intent to demonize Oppenheimer, for he was also deeply tormented by the military use of his design. Yet one thing is clear: the designer who is unaware of the ramifications of his or her private design tampers with risks and dangers that may one day become the public’s problem. To put this in another way, being aware of what we do as designers have something to say about what we should design and what we should not design. From here, we can then begin to consider how we design.

To underscore this idea better, I provide you with Tim Brown’s own account. You may know that Tim Brown is the CEO of IDEO. In Brown’s account, he talks about how IDEO was engaged by Oral-B to reframe and redesign toothbrushes for children. The project was lauded as a success. A few months later, one of the lead designers of this project was walking on a beach in Mexico when he found the very toothbrush that he has designed, except for a few barnacles and still quite new, washed ashore. In his estimation the toothbrush was disposed for quite some time, yet it looked more or less the same as the day someone had decided to dispose of it. The moral of the story is clear: Brown is highlighting the need for designers to be aware of the complex interactions between users, product life-cycles and the environment in things we design. It will not be a straightforward task to analyze these complex relationships, but Brown asked us to try.

I should add here that questions of ‘how’ are important in this context of design awareness. For how we design something shows the values we bring towards design. This lesson of craftsmanship is direct but seldom invoked. Indeed, how we design and what we design teaches the users the values and the responsibilities that designers hold on to.

The skeptic may say that this lesson has become obsolete in the age of industrial production. Yet many designs today show that the ethic of care, and hence also an act of educating by design, is still achievable despite the disappearance of the traditional craftsman.

And as my last example on this point, consider this Tsunami warning marker that became news recently. It was discovered that people who built above this marker, erected long ago by the ancestors of the villagers, got to keep their lives and houses. But everyone who built below this marker had their houses and lives swept away. We can see in this example, a case in point where individuals who lived long ago saw the responsibility to warn future generations about the tsunamis that they had experienced through an act of design. And they elected to design in a very direct way: carving a stone tablet that is anticipated to last a long time on a point on the hillside they deemed safe for their descendents. They were far-sighted in their design responsibility. To reiterate a point I made earlier, this Tsunami marker can be seen as a case of forward responsibility in design.

In any case, I do not want to give you the idea that design awareness is uncontroversial. As a matter of fact by Rams’s definition, good design is design that we are not aware of, that is, unobtrusive!

This brings me to my second way of being aware of design as a citizen in a democratic society.

If we take a look around our environment today, we quickly realize that we are surrounded by objects of all types that are opaque and mysterious. Yes, many of these objects are very attractive and some are even downright seductive. This has become the mandate of design today. However, they say beauty can sometimes be skin-deep, and this is the limit to design that I hope to explicate a little more here.

To use a Heideggerian formulation, such designs only become apparent, that is, they become visible to our consciousness when they malfunction. Heideggerians like to use the example of the malfunctioning hammer: when it works, we don’t think about it. But when the hammering head falls off, we realize it has become a hammer that does not work. To put this in design lingo, a user-friendly design has the unintentional effect of rendering us less aware and more unreflective of its design, a point made by sustainability scholar John Ehrenfeld.

This does not mean that we should design or live with designs that calls on our attention all the time. Rather, the point is that design artifacts today are hardly designed with the intentions for users’ self-maintenance, much less for training his dexterity and hence also, mental and physical awareness of these designs. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the designed artifact challenges us every moment to try and understand the reasoning and logic behind its creation: why did the designer do this? How did the designer accomplish this? How can I as the user find new ways to interpret, use or maintain it? Designs that seek to heighten our design awareness attempt to consider these questions in their conception. Designs that seek to reduce our awareness dismiss these questions as superfluous. The choice between these options is therefore also a choice of design ethics.

Thus, it is possible to say that today, we have an unprecedented range of design artifacts at our disposal, but in contrast, our design awareness has become unprecedentedly low. The bushman has to know each facet of his flint intimately but how many of us truly understand—and can repair—an induction cooker? Truth to be told, today, design can only catch our eyes initially, but cease to catch our minds and our bodies as people who try to live and work with them. And it is by understanding design both cognitively and bodily that we come to be further educated by design.

On this, should the values of user-friendliness and unobtrusiveness be the perennial guiding principle of good design? They should be if we are interested to continue this trend of low design awareness. On the other hand, they should be questioned and challenged if we are interested to find greater design awareness through designs that invite us to work and understand it, and perhaps through this, to become co-designers with the original designer.

Here, I end my lecture with a provocative question: how then do we teach design awareness, if by design awareness we refer to being educated by design, when our environment is filled with designs that are user-friendly (but not maintenance-friendly), unobtrusive, opaque and or mysterious? To put this more concretely, how are we to heighten our quotient of design awareness when design tries to be invisible in everyday life?

I suggest we first start by asking ‘why’. Why is this design made? Why is it important for us to have this design? And what is the intention of the designer? Like the proverbial example of the young child who always asks ‘why’, this is perhaps the only way when design becomes apparent and conscious to us, appearing in our mutual conversations, public dialogues and national discussions. Only by rendering visible what was once unproblematic and unobtrusive can we begin to be truly educated by design.

Thank You.

*post-script:

"Language can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about. Our perspectives on the world depend on the interaction of our nervous system and our language..." --Fred Kofman

On Human Dignity (1)

2011-05-13T23:28:00.000-07:00

"A life is a life; there it is; if anything is sacred, a life is. The question: Of what value is a human life? is indecent. The question: why do you want to stay alive? is a tyrant's question. It should not be asked; any answer will always be off the mark; the words will fill in poorly for the appropriate silence."

--George Kateb, Human Dignity, 2011: pp. 40.

Between Sociological Imagination and the Geographical Imagination

2011-05-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

A most pertinent quote from Harvey,
"This distinction between the geographical imagination and the sociological imaginations is artificial when we seek to relate to the problems of the city, but it is all too real when we examine the ways we think about the city. There are plenty of those possessed with a powerful sociological imagination (C. Wright Mills among them) who nevertheless seem to live and work in a spaceless world. There are also those, possessed of a powerful geographical imagination or spatial consciousness, who fail to recognize that the way space is fashioned can have a profound effect upon social processes--hence the numerous examples of beautiful but unlivable designs in modern living."

(from David Harvey's Social Justice and the City, revised edition, 2009: pp.24)

What is utopia for?

2011-04-05T00:25:00.000-07:00

"Utopia is on the horizon: when I walk two steps, it takes two steps back...I walk ten steps, and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is for this, for walking." (Galeano & Borges 1997)

cited from Just City on the horizon (2009), by Cuz Potter and Johannes Novy.

A Critique of the Creative Class

2011-03-01T00:06:00.001-08:00

William Lim, architect, theorist and writer, came to class today and said something often missed in our tacit or explicit pursuit of the telos of creativity.

He said, 'creativity is the beginning and not the end.' With this declaration he devastated Florida's thesis; and with these few words, a massive intellectual edifice of platitudes--'teaching to be creative', 'creativity', 'the creative city'; you name it, its all there--was toppled.

If creativity is the beginning and not the end, then what is the end, the telos, or purpose of our practical actions? Implicit in Lim's declaration is the idea that creativity is only a means to some end: what we are actually striving for is not creativity, but creativity is merely a vehicle towards that goal. I have to wonder aloud with so much investment pouring into ventures building our creative capacities, what would we actually do once we find ourselves there?

'Palindrome' from Ed Soja

2011-02-24T22:20:00.000-08:00

Today I heard Ed Soja lectured for the first time. It was truly a splendid experience to have finally heard the writer himself rather than through his books.

He said something that after some thinking, I thought is rather indicative of the state of affairs today.

His quote reads, 'from crisis-generated restructuring to restructuring-generated crises today'. By this, Soja was referring to the changes in the urban form as a result of the tumultuous social and political events of the 1960s and 70s--when multiple crises prompted a change in how we plan and design cities ('cities': Soja thinks the city is passe; I disagree because barring an objective definition, the city is also a psychological category that can never quite disappear at any scale of reference). These urban forms are however again changing rapidly today due to the many unanticipated volatilities in the larger environment resulting in never-seen-before crises in planning and design.

It has taken me a painful one paragraph to recapture and explain that one particular line. While we can all debate on the validity of his proposition, this proposition does encapsulate an economy of thought that warrants a record on this blog and perhaps, further review.

On the criterion of beauty in architecture

2011-01-19T20:50:00.001-08:00

A statement by Alvar Aalto quoted by Kenneth Frampton:
"The structures which were means to create a new architecture have been wrested from us and turned into commercialized decorative ends in themselves with no inner value. There was a time when a miscontrued, lifeless traditionalism was the chief enemy of good architecture. Today its worst enemy is the superficial decorative misuse of the means acquired during the breakthrough...The contrast between deep social responsibility and decorative "surface effects" is perhaps the oldest and certainly the most topical issue in the debate on architecture. Please do not think that I wish to disparage beauty in rejecting decorativeness. Architecture must have charm; it is a factor of beauty in society. But real beauty is not a conception of form which can be taught, it is the result of harmony between several intrinsic factors, not least the social."

Cited from, 'Questions of Value: An Interview with Kenneth Frampton', by W.S. Saunders and N. Levinson (2007).

Luxe, calme, et volupte

2011-01-18T22:31:00.000-08:00

image: Dezeen

This interpretation of the traditional Japanese teahouse says it all: "luxe, calme, et volupte".

Imageability without Legibility

2010-12-26T21:46:00.000-08:00

The way we build cities today with many signature architecture, along with the criticism of such an approach, is truly indebted to Kevin Lynch's general idea of imageability--the need for a coherent visual order in man's urban environment. This idea of imageability has unfortunately led to a commodification of architecture and its images, which in turn reinforced the specious need to create even more signature work for imagined prestige rather than human concerns. Consequentially, what is achieved is in fact imageability without legibility.

Loss, Continuity and Renewal

2010-11-30T16:26:00.001-08:00

Early in the morning today in my bathroom, I heard the birds sing. These were likely the same songs I heard when I was 15; and possibly when I was 25; and always around this time in the morning. Then I suddenly realized that though the song was the same, it could not have been the same bird singing when I was 15, then 25, and now at 35 years old. It would seem that while I was oblivious to the relatively slow passage of my mortality, many generations of birds have passed. The children of the birds I heard when I was 15 were carrying on the same song.

Upon reflection, the sense of continuity for the birds is startling when compared to our much more protracted, profound and complex--though also much threatened--version in human societies.

Spanish Proverb

2010-10-27T05:56:00.000-07:00

Lo que separa la civilizacion de la anarquia son solo siete comidas.

(Civilization and anarchy are only seven meals apart)

-From Julian Cribb's The Coming Famine (2010)

On sports car

2010-10-10T00:02:00.001-07:00

"I couldn't find the sports car of my dreams, so I built it myself."

--Dr. Ferdinand Porsche

On freedom

2010-09-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

"The guarantee of freedom is freedom."

-- Michel Foucault

松尾芭蕉

2010-09-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

秋深き

隣は何を

する人ぞ

A refreshing viewpoint: The Enigma of Capital

2010-09-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

"Of course this [referring to new social relations radically different from relations of neoliberalization] is utopian! But so what! We cannot afford not to be."

--David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital, (2010), pp. 231

In Remembrance of Aino Paasonen

2010-08-06T23:27:00.000-07:00

I received news today that my teacher, Aino Paasonen passed away on July 14, 2010. This is in remembrance of her teaching and contributions to my own learning and life.

* * * *

Sometime during early Fall of 1997 as a second year student at SCI-Arc, I met Aino.

She was amazingly tall, I remember, and spoke with a commanding yet gentle voice. Aino was going to teach all of us in second year writing, and to expose us to thinking in the humanities, she announced.

I did not quite understand then why all of us had to learn writing—all of us could write, of course, or so I thought—or the humanities. After all, isn’t this a school of architecture? I remember resisting Aino’s call with my sketchbook and pen in hand, determined to carry on with my little ‘design’ doodles in her class—in secret and at the back of the large classroom if I had to.

As the warmth of early Fall in Los Angeles trickled away, I soon realized that Aino’s class started at an ungodly cold hour in the morning when no student—habitually after long nights of working—ought to be awake reading long epics of Gilgamesh or Homer. And so I found myself stealing sleep, along with many of my classmates I am sure, in Aino’s class. One of my classmates, whom I shall not name here, labeled Aino’s class, a ‘napping session’—a foolish notion that then, I also concurred foolishly.

Amid her explication of the classics, I was quite certain that Aino was cunningly aware of those of us who were masquerading our design doodling with note-taking, and those of us who were simply snoring away. Despite these clandestine activities going on right under her nose, she had simply refused the easy way out by calling us up. Naively, I had only taken her humanistic sensitivity to our plight as design students for a form of tutorial indifference.

Nonetheless, I remember a few instances when Aino was not too pleased to discover that none of us read what she had assigned. But Aino never left the class in a characteristic angry huff practiced by many teachers; instead, she persevered and improvised her teaching despite our collective betrayal. I do not know if it was my growing guilt or fear or respect—for Aino inspired all—but her class caught on for me amid my secretive doodling and growingly also, unwilling napping.

I remember one episode in Aino’s class vividly: Aino’s recitation of Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian. I can still hear her voice in my head: ‘listen to this in Italian’. I did not understand a single word she said, nor could I have known then that this was the last I listened to Aino’s recitation of the Divine Comedy. Even so, I remember that her voice was uplifting, and her spirit joyous. It was as if Dante’s words were honey and she was relishing every drop of it. Then, I must have encountered something akin to the intellect richly mixed with poetic love.

* * * *

I could not have realized then the privilege of being taught by Aino, a humanist who understood the need to educate humanistic designers, especially so today amid the great distress and suffering primarily caused by man-made problems.

Although Aino has left the nettles of this world, her legacy for humanism remains. On this, something of the late Aino Paasonen—her humanistic conviction, and her intellectual love—will always stay with me: in memory at Beethoven Street, and in practical actions for today and the future.

Thank you Aino, for your teaching in my own learning and life, and for your contributions to SCI-Arc. Drink with the gods and rest well.

A Short Essay on the Idea of Waste

2010-07-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

A Short Essay on The Idea of Waste

by Jeffrey Chan

‘Waste’, ‘trash’ or ‘garbage’—and whatever else you may have that stand for the ‘unwanted’—has always been a part of the human condition. Like us, animals, insects and plants produce waste and avoid their own waste. However unlike us, these living things cannot appreciate the full extent in the idea of waste, nor can they engage with the idea of waste deliberately or productively.

Rightly understood, waste is normally defined as unwanted things; things that are usually also thrown away. To be fair, waste has a stronger valence than either ‘trash’ or ‘garbage’; we tend to conjugate the word ‘waste’ in ways where neither ‘trash’ nor ‘garbage’ is adequate, for example, in ‘industrial waste’, or ‘wasteland’. But at the same time, to use ‘waste’ instead of ‘trash’ or ‘garbage’ also hints of an existential struggle—“I have wasted this!”—as if we try to salvage something before it turns into ‘waste’. In a nutshell, ‘waste’ is a much more ambivalent concept when compared to both ‘trash’ and ‘garbage’.

This is why to simply define ‘waste’ as unwanted things people throw away is also to underestimate the significance and the profound threat lying at the heart of this idea. Interestingly, we are unable to understand ‘waste’ without defining what we actually value. To throw away good drinking water is a waste precisely because we first value water as a perennial good. Similarly, we are also unable to understand ‘waste’ without some kind of a limit: if good drinking water exists in ever infinite supply for everybody, it is hard to imagine how we can be capable of wasting it. And remarkably, we cannot conceive of ‘waste’ without also taking into account the purpose in mind: unless I have an end goal, I am unable to judge that I have wasted my life trying fruitlessly to attain this goal. All these can be recognized as the paradoxes of waste.

While it is unclear if what is valued, limited and purposeful is always never wasted—(one can nonetheless waste one’s limited life doing what seemed to be valued and purposeful)—it seems however clear that waste is paradoxically defined by what we value and treasure most. For this reason, there is always a remote possibility that some of what we actually consider as waste may still be of some value and use.

Beyond the paradoxes of waste, the idea of waste is directly correlated to the idea of production and consumption. In production and consumption, waste at the supply side comes from the fact that natural resources rarely exist in a form suitable for humans’ immediate consumption—there is always a need to transform these raw resources into processed ones and some waste is always inevitable in this process. Furthermore, at the end of the demand chain, such resources often end up as extraneous packaging or empty containers destined for the waste dumps. While there are enthusiastic strategies for ‘closing the loop’ or ‘cradle-to-cradle’ today, these strategies cannot account for the sheer absolute increase in waste that must also correspond to the sheer absolute increase in the number of humans on Earth. In any case, if production and consumption increase, then absolute waste will also increase. Hence it is impossible for global leaders today to seek economic growth by increasing production and consumption while decreasing the volume of waste at the same time. To proclaim the glories of growth without detailing a sustainable strategy to solve its accompanying problem of waste can only be the babbles coming from an inconsistent mind.

This is why waste is without doubt, the singular man-made threat to the human condition in the 21^st century. With some healthy skepticism we may come to discount the severity of global warming; but no amount of skepticism can sway us from the staggering reality of waste. Already, there are flabbergasting estimates: that the largest cities in Asia will produce up to 1.8 million tonnes of waste in the near future on a daily basis.

In this context, managing waste has become a science. Experts in waste management are tormented daily with a range of choices, none too popular or effective, for solving the problem of waste. In certain places people actually pay for what they throw. It has been found that this ‘pay-for-what-you-throw’ has been effective in containing the problem, though it hardly diminishes the problem in structural ways and it is always politically unpopular. On the other hand, the next choice is to expand the infrastructural capacity that has to do with waste disposal. However experts discovered that an increase in the capacity of this infrastructure is nearly always followed by a corresponding increase in the volume of waste. In other words, the convenience of getting rid of waste tends to generate a greater volume of waste. Clearly, while this choice is often politically popular, it however exacerbates the problem. Then there is always the solution of just ignoring the problem of waste. But as a classic example near the Mediterranean Sea showed, it is impossible to ignore waste because it is going to smell (bad).

In light of these realities, some have suggested recycling our waste. However, it is dubious that recycling can ever be an effective solution for the problem of waste. This is because recycling usually means ‘down-cycling’—the recycled resources can only be used for products of a lower specification and virgin resources, which inadvertently also mean producing wastes, are always needed in the production process. Moreover, recycling can lead to the illusion of limitless resources, which inadvertently again, lead to more wastes. Furthermore, recycling is hardly an automated process after our recycling bins have been emptied. If anything else, recycling thereafter takes dedicated administration and line operators to painfully sort through what can be recycled and what cannot by rule of thumb—a process that can hardly be optimized. Thus, recycling can only limit the problem of waste in certain resource categories while opening up new categories of waste (e.g., sludge from inks produced during recycling paper). For all these reasons, recycling cannot be depended as an effective solution for the contemporary problem of waste.

Similarly, many have suggested composting. However again, composting only works for mostly organic matter. In the world of human generated waste, organic waste is perhaps the least of our pressing problem. That said, composting represents a viable way for greatly reducing the amount of waste. The catch however, is that not everyone who is inclined to recycle is also inclined to do composting. This is simply because the composted waste does not disappear along with the garbage truck. Composting is often a slow and smelly business, and not everyone can be persuaded to live with decomposing organic matter. To be sure, at the end one is rewarded with a high quality organic fertilizer. But with nearly half of the world’s population living in urban cities with very little meaningful use for these fertilizers, and with a good proportion of the world’s population living somewhat impatient and busy modern lives, composting cannot possibly be a viable strategy for everyone but only for a group of self-selected greenies.

Given that this is a growing and alarming problem of waste, and given that none of the choices we have so far are even effective for solving this problem, we may think that we are already deeply mired with a very wicked problem. Unfortunately, there is worse news ahead. Not only does the problem of waste lie unsolved; and not only is there no good solution, but also the kind of waste we produced collectively has taken a menacing turn in the recent decades.

In the past people threw out food-scraps, broken pottery and irreparable bits and pieces. But today, people throw out leaking batteries, unfashionable cellphones and wholesale toxic and hazardous biological and industrial wastes. It is sometimes remarked that the archaeologist of the far future will find nothing for our culture today beyond the contaminated fragments that would come to signify our present and wasteful civilization. Tragically, the growing cancer of e-waste, toxic waste and wastes of all type that ought to embarrass a civilized man have spawned a burgeoning underclass of human waste scavengers. These human waste scavengers generally perform the undignified duty of physically disintegrating the things we throw away in order to earn their livelihoods by collecting some precious scraps from this disintegrative process. In this process, they usually absorb some of these toxic wastes into their own bodies before transmitting the externalities of these wastes into their future generations. In other instances, these wastes creep into the water tables for their crops, poisoning them directly before these ‘fresh’ produce are shipped to every other part of the world. In other cases—especially for those who live near incinerators or garbage dumps—the ash and dioxins from burning waste have turned into a living torment for the populace. For these reasons, it is no longer sound to think that we can actually throw anything away in this globalized world; rather, to throw something away today is tantamount to having some of it come boomeranging back at us.

The severity of this problem ought to convince all thinking men and women (and children) to limit the maximal volume of waste to an absolute minimum—the minimum for the dignified survival and flourishing of civilized societies. But what is the minimum for the dignified survival and flourishing of civilized societies? Ineluctably, the logic in this imperative to limit waste also tasks us to consider the reverse of what is being practiced today: that human civilization ought to be steered towards what is minimally required rather than towards what can be maximally acquired. Given that the collective human civilization is being structured towards maximal acquisition and not along the principle of minimal requirement, my question will stand tragically without a responsible answer.

Considering that this imperative is all but nearly impossible today, the next most feasible task is to create a guiding taxonomy for different ideal-types of waste. By this I do not refer to the different kinds of waste, for example, nuclear wastes, industrial wastes, or organic wastes. Rather, I am referring to ideal-types such as the waste-that-is-absolutely-unavoidable (WAU), the waste-that-can-be-reused (WRU) and the waste-that-should-not-be-considered-waste (WNCW) and finally, waste-that-should-never-be-produced (WSNP). The fault for the primitiveness of these concepts is mine alone; but at least I hope that their primitiveness will reveal the clarity necessary for this taxonomy to be useful.

First, lets start with WAU. WAU is waste that is absolutely unavoidable. Without demanding much imagination, we can easily come up with a few—that few which do not belong to polite conversations at the dinner table. Beyond that few there are wastes coming from personal hygiene items and sterilization processes in medical care. The interesting thing is that if we try hard enough (without forcing) to include more artifacts from our daily life in this category, we may come close to answering the earlier question on what is absolutely the minimal for dignified survival and flourishing. This is at least one of the promising qualities of this taxonomy. In any case, WAU is an inflexible category insofar as the human population is concerned. If the world’s population rises, WAU will also increase accordingly.

Second is the WRU. WRU stands as an intriguing category today because its potential is somewhat untested. It is said that a distinguishing trait between the contemporary man and the modern man is that the latter has his cobbler mends his shoes, while the former simply buys another pair. For us to repair and reuse what we normally consider waste, a certain creativity is demanded along with a fair bit of virtuous tolerance for the improvised. Certainly no respectable homeowner would like to see his or her home filled with old shoeboxes improvised as bookshelves, or empty bottles as vases; yet the rationale of WRU asks us to ponder a little before we open the lid of our dumpster to proclaim something as ‘waste’. Simply ask yourself if this ‘waste’ can be repaired, improvised, and reused. For this reason, WRU is also the easiest category for one to tackle the wicked problem of waste—though the economy built on the selling of the new and the next ineffable product is less likely to agree with the rationale of WRU.

Third comes the WNCW. WNCW builds on WRU by asking us to reconsider the different roles our alleged ‘waste’ can take on. Perhaps the unwanted fruit peels can be composted. Or perhaps the used honey jar covered with a thin sticky layer of residual honey should not be condemned as waste but to be filled with warm water, and subsequently consumed and cleaned before recycling the jar. And maybe we should not throw our old Hi-Fi sets out, or those cathode-ray TVs that were imperially granted obsolescence a while ago. The principle of WNCW does not oblige us to turn our homes or our workplaces into junkyards. Rather, in view of the things already consigned to the junkyard that we have now in our midst, it asks us to reconsider our next new purchase—very carefully.

Finally is the WSNP, which stands for wastes-that-should-never-be-produced. The low hanging fruits of this category are the toxic industrial wastes and nuclear wastes—the types of wastes that are neither biodegradable nor civilization-friendly in the long term. On the other hand, the more implicit items in this category are the many frivolities one tends to acquire at a 99cents store for no purpose other than for the fact that they are cheap. I am not an opponent of the 99cents store; but I am a staunch opponent of buying something only to throw them away soon after.

* * * * * * * *

This taxonomy is useful to the extent that it allows for the re-interpretation of waste, and hopefully from that, also a re-caliberation of our attitudes and behaviors towards the waste we produce.

* * * * * * * *

Even so, the idea of waste does not tell us anything about whether we can in fact afford the entity to be wasted. To be sure as I have mentioned earlier, waste is only comprehensible if we also take into account on what is being valued, limitedly available and purposeful. But these paradoxes of waste still do not tell us anything about the affordability of waste in any precise way.

I have one last idea in mind. Let us up the stakes here on this issue. What would you consider as a waste that you can never afford? Think hard for a minute. For me, it is human waste. By human waste, I do not mean the kind of waste that is found to be of bad taste for polite conversations at the dinner table. By human waste, I mean a generation or generations of humankind wasted in order to cope with the problems of waste. Since I cannot afford to waste another human being, born or unborn yet, human waste is the answer to my own question.

Today, we are already witnessing the beginning of human waste. The large underclass of human waste scavengers grows by the year while the problem of waste remains largely unsolved. If it takes a great number of human lives today in order to contain the problem of waste, then I wonder what it would take to cope with this problem in the next 50 or a 100 years’ time? Would our civilization evolve an entire class or sub-culture just to deal with waste? And would countless human beings in the near future devote their lives solely to the mastering of different strategies to struggle with the problem of waste? Because no one can truly want to devote his or her entire life and livelihood to deal with waste, and to commit the lives of his children and grandchildren to the same task—I cannot imagine otherwise—all these must therefore tantamount to human waste.

And so if none of us can ever afford human waste but if human waste is inevitable given this growing problem of waste, what ought we do? The answer, while elusive, lies at the heart of what we will do after reading up a little on the idea of waste.

The Wisdom of a Philosopher

2010-07-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

I was wrestling between calling this first blog post for the month of July 'No Determinate Principle for Happiness', or 'The Wisdom of a Philosopher'. After thinking about it, I went for the latter. Here's the passage that I found myself reading and re-reading again:

"Now it is impossible for the most intelligent, and at the same time most powerful, but nevertheless finite, being to form here a determinate concept of what he really wills. Is it riches that he wants? How much anxiety, envy, and pestering might he not bring in this way on his own head! Is it knowledge and insight? This might perhaps merely give him an eye so sharp that it would make evils at present hidden from him yet unavoidable seem all the more frightful, or would add a load of still further needs to the desires which already give him trouble enough. Is it long life? Who will guarantee that it would not be a long misery? Is it at least health? How often has infirmity of body kept a man from excesses into which perfect health would have let him fall!--and so on. In short, he has no principle by which he is able to decide with complete certainty what will make him truly happy, since for this he would require ominiscience."

Immanuel Kant, in 'Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals', 418, 47.

The idea of Interior Elevations

2010-06-30T04:59:00.001-07:00

image: St. Vitus cathedral, Prague, Czech Republic

While traveling earlier this month, I revisited the St. Vitus cathedral in Prague. The last I visited St. Vitus was nearly 14 years ago, in 1996, before I started on my architectural education. The building must have looked the same; yet I suppose it was I, who was seeing it again with somewhat different eyes.

* * * * *

I started my journey in architecture gawking at modern buildings. This journey took me through several stages of 'phenomenological spaces' and OMA-que and supermodernism, tossing and turning, before now coming to the Gothic 'style'.

But to define the gothic as a 'style' is grossly misrepresenting. After all, no one really knows who invented this 'style' (i.e., there is no known architect for the Gothic cathedral). It was likely built by trial and error--especially for St.Vitus which is still one of the larger cathedrals around--and it was most likely built by a community of master-builders comprising of masons and craftsmen of different specialties, and designed and built at the same time across generations. In contrast to our swiftly photoshoped, seasonal and ephemeral--faddish--definition of style for real estate today, the Gothic is Architecture.

I must admit this: it is hard to love Gothic architecture. But I attribute this challenge to our present lack of understanding on the construction of these spaces, and perhaps, also to our current estrangement to the divine awe and realities that the Gothic cathedrals embody and represent. Nonetheless, it is still possible to love without knowledge, even if it amounts to a lesser love.

I was just walking along the aisle of this cathedral with my family before I noticed this particular view, at my full standing height, just before the transept of the cathedral. Observe how each line within this composition seems to flow past each other fluidly, hinting of more richness beyond what was actually glimpsed. And each line capable of tying to different points, unifying the entire composition by adjusting one's position slightly...

The bizarre thing about this view is that there was likely no designer who decided that the interior space should look like this at this particular position. In other words, the dynamic composition here was completely un-orchestrated. This realization adds to the awe of gothic spaces: does any designer dare to capture this as an interior elevation in modern, insipid architectural drawings? And if we take this further into speculative territory: is what can be drawn and thus cognitively planned and orchestrated lesser than what cannot be? If the Gothic cathedral can no longer teach us, it continues to question us.

Walking out of a Gothic architecture is like going back into a brighter but a flatter world. In this brighter and flatter world, spaces are bordered by bland planes and wide roads, littered with neon symbols of another god, saying nothing and glittering to nothingness. Awe once again, quickly dissipates.

A quote from Emmanuel Levinas

2010-06-01T20:36:00.000-07:00

"It is extremely important to know if society in the current sense of the term is the result of limitation of the principle that men are predators of one another, or if to the contrary it results from the limitation of the principle that men are for each other. Does the social, with its institutions, universal forms and laws, result from limiting the consequences of the war between men, or from limiting the infinity which opens in the ethical relationship of man to man?"

from Ethics and Infinity

即無殃保何來環保 ?

2010-05-27T05:45:00.000-07:00

即無殃保何來環保 ?

(translated as: 'if plundering and ruin to the Earth is not the status quo, why is there a need for environmentally conscious actions?')

Taichi hand movement in water

2010-04-12T21:42:00.000-07:00

The hand movements of Taichi, when executed just below the surface of water, demonstrates that this physical exercise is at one with its central philosophy, and perhaps even a way of practice in life.

Try it. If execute a 'pushing' stance, that is, with your palm flat and pushing the water just below the surface, you can see how great the resistance is. Conversely, if you execute a 'pulling' stance, that is, with your palm relaxed and 'pulling' back the water (with your fingers relaxed and following the flow of the water), you would feel a great natural fluidity. Normally Taichi is not practiced in water. But as far as resistance is concerned, water and air are both fluids that can be used to demonstrate these principles here.

A 'pushing' hand stance is also a striking stance. One strikes an opponent with the palm more or less flat. The force that is exerted is countered with an equal reaction force. But a 'pulling' stance is an accepting stance; one accepts the incoming force and works with that. 'Striking' is far removed from the consciousness in the 'pulling' stance.

I am tempted to imagine from this example that even the physics of this world is hinting to show us a way of life: that if one operates daily with the 'pushing' stance, there is going to be great resistance. It may even be 'unnatural'. But the 'pulling' stance involves acceptance and operating fluidly.

The idea of the Guarantor

2010-04-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

The idea of the Guarantor

by Jeffrey Chan

For an idea as important as it is prevalent as the guarantor, it has received surprisingly little attention. By guarantor, I do not refer to the individual who serves to guarantee one’s responsible behavior (e.g., for rent payments). By guarantor, I am referring to the idea for a set of conditions that must exist to ensure the results of one’s actions under uncertainty.

Let me provide an example that will render this idea of the guarantor concrete. For those of us who have followed news on the CERN Collider--buried deep somewhere under the French-Swiss Alps--recent news of its first successful ignition ought to come as excitement mixed with sweet relief. After all, we are set to learn more about the basic fabric of our universe in a laboratory. In the meantime, the world has yet to be consumed by a gnawing black-hole predicted by educated opponents of this Collider technology.

So how does the guarantor fits in here? In this case, the guarantor that guarantees the world as we know it--or in fact even the Universe--from vanishing into either a black hole, or a vacuum decay, is merely the statistical improbability of such an event. As for the opponents and the skeptics, the guarantor that guarantees the world and the Universe safety (at least from human action this way) is to turn that darn Collider off.

Given the clarity conferred by the idea of the guarantor on these two radically opposed realities, I leave you to decide where you stand on the CERN debate. Certainly, the argument is much more complicated than an absolute either/or scenario between existential annihilation or business as usual. Yet one thing is clear: there are few concepts today to guide and evaluate uncertain human actions in large scale system designs. The idea of the guarantor, even though it is blunt, is possibly one of the rare, extant few.

* * * * * * * *

The idea of the guarantor is not new, though it may be unfashionable to check its roots today. As far as I can discern, its prominent roots go back to Kant (1). For Immanuel Kant, one of the central questions that he wrestled with was ‘what ought one do?’. Simply, Kant wanted to know what compelled practical action. For example, upon seeing a lost child seeking his mother, what compels me to help the child? Does helping makes me happy, which is why I inadvertently find myself helping the child? Or is it because helping is a moral act, in which I find myself obeying this moral rule--‘help one who is unable to help himself’?

For Kant, neither simple happiness nor obeying the moral rule is sufficient to serve as the reason behind the practical decision to help. Instead, Kant proposed the idea of summum bonum, or the highest good, as the motivating reason for this practical action. In this summum bonum, it is no longer possible to distinguish between simple happiness and obeying the moral rule; rather, acting morally, or virtuously, is also happiness-seeking at the same time.

But Kant realized that for this highest reconciliatory position as the summum bonum to be possible, he also required a guarantor, which he found in God. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he wrote, ‘Thus without a God and a future world invisible to us now but hoped for, the glorious Ideas of morality are indeed objects of approval and admiration but not springs of purpose and of action’ (2). In other words, unless there is a God that guarantees rewards for goodness (i.e., performing moral actions), there is no motivation, according to Kant, for being good.

And so for the next 150 years or so the idea of the guarantor laid dormant until a young philosopher with very Catholic roots combined with a Pragmatic disposition rediscovered this concept. He is C.W. Churchman (1913-2004), who eventually found himself teaching Operations Research and Kantian philosophy in the business school, as well as a host of other unclassifiable and un-pigeon-holeable subjects in his ‘West’s seminars’ at the University of California, Berkeley. Unlike philosophers who were dug deep in trenches between that of analytic philosophy and that of continental philosophy in his time, Churchman found the no-man’s land of applying his philosophical learning to practical human problems to be most rewarding and fascinating. Naturally, Churchman found himself at the forefront of an un-pigeon-holeable domain comprising of applied ethics, systems design and management thinking. There is still no title for this ‘discipline’ today, though there is every need for it.

Of note, Churchman saw that the practical actions of his day--policy-making, city planning, systems design and development, architecture and urban design: actions that bring novelty into existence--were in fact indifferent from the kind of practical actions Kant talked about: what ought I do?. In retrospect, Churchman’s contributions to the study of complex planning and practical decision-making can be said to be his unique inclusion of theology and teleology while other thinkers of his time were busy subtracting both theology and teleology from their ideas. By theology I do not mean theology with a capital ‘T’--the Theology having to do with postulates about God and divinity--though Churchman came close (along with a few other thinkers) to posit a theology of ultimate system (3) that all decision-makers of complex decisions must take into account. To formulate this in another way, Churchman, like Kant, saw the need to include a purpose (i.e., teleology) within a larger worldview of interacting systems (i.e., theology) for practical action without which actions would be deemed arbitrary, or worse, unethical.

For Churchman, the guarantor is the missing bridge between the purpose of the individual (or the organization) to survive, and the actual realities that can delimit, or even nullify this purpose. Consider a hypothetical example. Assuming that there is a global interest to preserve the Bluefin tuna (not just that our great-grandchildren can have tuna sashimi but that they also will see Bluefin tuna swimming in the oceans (4)), a new global regulatory body is created to regulate the fishing and the consumption of Bluefin tuna. For this new regulatory body to exist, it is therefore necessary to consider aspects of realities that can guarantee its continual existence. One of these realities must be an unconditional global agreement to drastically reduce tuna fishing. However, this unconditional global agreement cannot be guaranteed unless there is also public awareness locally, especially in locations where Bluefin tuna is both a desirable luxury and a traditional staple. But public awareness cannot be guaranteed unless there is also the guarantor of an effective institution of public discourse and education. In Churchman’s words, before long, the guarantor of one system would have unfolded into guarantors of other systems--until they form into something akin to the ultimate system, or what Churchman called, ‘G.O.D’--‘guarantor of destiny’ (5). Only with this guarantor of destiny in mind can this new regulatory body possess a grip on its own destiny, that is, its organizational purpose amid the greater environment.

We will never know where Churchman would deem as the appropriate and practical stopping line for this ever expanding schema of vital guarantors. But I suppose one suggestion is clear: given any design intervention (or a practical action that introduces something new into the world), the better one can see this unfolding picture of different guarantors, the better one can anticipate the design’s environmental problems and issues beforehand.

However, this is not the way conventional design envisioning occurs today. In system designs today, a design vision is usually independently proposed without truly defining and interrogating the conditions that must exist to guarantee the survival of this new design proposal. For example, bold visions for the electric car do not truly question how this new design system can be maintained--even when the world’s sources for lithium, the primary driver of this system platform, are unevenly distributed geographically. And on the corollary, what ought we do with all the newly minted, efficient combustion engine cars now displaced by this new system? And how about all those now redundant petrol stations carrying newly designed, high-octane-number petrols? Wouldn’t there be a coalition of resistance towards electric cars from the stakeholders of these combustion engine cars and petrol stations? Hence, Churchman’s guarantor is useful to the extent that it can compel system designers to question what is necessary and what must be put in place in order for their designs to succeed. Whether designers actually find it useful--or impeding--is of course quite another matter.

Churchman’s guarantor is important in another way: it can help designers evaluate the performances of their design. Consider an example from service design. A five star hotel guarantees a certain standard of service. How do we know if the hotel has delivered on its guarantee? A direct way to answer this question is to see what kind of guarantors the hotel management has put in place, and whether the service performance has met the standards imposed by these guarantors. To check the guarantee of complete satisfaction by its guests, start by checking how unreasonable demands by guests are being handled.

* * * * * * * *

On this, it is possible to say that a sizable portion of our everyday lives is devoted to the maintenance of the institution of guarantors, even though we do not explicitly use the word ‘guarantor’. Take the example of making a promise: my promise to you that I shall do such and such is a verbal guarantee that I would do so. Or consider the example of following a cookbook: if I add such and such an ingredient in this amount and order I am more or less guaranteed a dish resembling the one printed on the cookbook. Or take the example from public service: the government guarantees the effectiveness of this service for her citizens. And on this, we tend to devote the first two decades of a new human life to education, so that this process at least guarantees a level of civility and literacy to maintain and to participate in a democracy. We also try to engage as many stakeholders as possible in complex social designs, so that this encompassing strategy at least guarantees some stability for any newly proposed social institution.

Despite the prevalence and the vital importance of guarantors, we have a diametrically different situation in the world today. Many, if not countless, are likely to agree that there is no such thing as a guarantor in the world today. Given the need to constantly adjust one’s skill sets today, it is no longer possible to guarantee that one’s education is ever completed even after twenty years. And given the hastiness in industrial production today, it is no longer possible to guarantee safety and high quality for every unit produced. And especially after the Financial Tsunamis of 2008 and the subsequent collapse of multiple markets and institutions globally, traditional guarantors, such as stable careers, liquid credit markets and stable governmental services have vanished.

Paradoxically, in this world with radically fewer guarantors than before, there is however a rising number of radically new (system) proposals: novel sources of energy and technologies, and new modes of living, working and communicating. But if we consider that all new system proposals demand the simultaneous consideration of their own guarantors (i.e., subsequently unfolding towards Churchman’s ultimate G.O.D.), then how is it possible that a world with increasingly more new proposals can coexist with one where there is also increasingly fewer guarantors? In other words, by Churchman’s guarantor, isn’t there a practical contradiction today where one is acting more and in ever newer ways without a commensurate level of guarantee that this action will turn out to be more likely good and right, rather than bad and evil (6)?

* * * * * * * *

In this paradox, there is only one possible source of solace. In the movie adaptation of the novel, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, there is a scene in the mines of Moria where Gandalf the wizard and Frodo were talking when Gollum appeared to spy on their conversation. Upon detecting Gollum, Frodo drew his blade and wanted to slay Gollum. But Gandalf intervened by cautioning Frodo not to be so swift in dealing death, for by his intuitions, Gollum still had an unknowable role to play in determining the fate of Middle-earth. To this intuitive insight Gandalf also added that there are forces in existence beyond Good and Evil, such that even the very wise cannot see all ends.

And so in a world where there are increasingly fewer guarantors but more (novel) human actions, the only solace that is left, in the here and now at least, lies in presuming the existence of these ‘forces’ beyond Good and Evil. By these forces, there exists no necessary guarantor that good design intentions will produce good consequences. In fact, most of the time individuals and groups are frustrated even when they try to do ‘good’. Similarly, there exists no necessary guarantor that willful and mischievous design intentions will beget their intended willful and mischievous consequences--frustrations beset the good and evil alike. Unanticipated and undesirable consequences, but also serendipity and pleasant surprises all emerge from efforts to do ‘good’ as well as from attempts to do the ‘mischievous’.

In such a world--if it is in fact that we live in such a world--we can take refuge in the knowledge that the collapse of guarantorship does not imminently signal a collapse of civilization.

Notes:
(1) It is however Descartes who has an earlier account of God as guarantor, where he had to reassure himself that God does not deceive, and hence, his inquiry for truth was guaranteed.

(2) Critique of Pure Reason, B840-841.

(3) In the movie Avatar by James Cameron, Cameron came close to depicting the theology of ultimate system in the flesh. “Ultimate system” is of my own coinage, and this concept describes an all encompassing system made up of different living systems united in one consciousness, and where in Unity it is greater than the sum of its component parts. Cognitively, it is not possible to comprehend the ultimate system, though it is possible to rationally take into account that it exists. For this reason, early thinkers of this theology tend to share similar awe and respect for this picture, which has to be first introduced via rational thoughts but later maintained on faith. Among early thinkers of this theology in the 1960s is Gregory Bateson.

(4) I thank Gerard Yee for his encouragement and his anti-cynical stance on this matter. I suggested that in the failure of CITES, everyone should have their Bluefin tuna fill, to the tragic and absurd consequence made apparent in a world where there will be no more Bluefin tuna for contention. But Gerard suggested otherwise.

(5) Churchman, C.W. (1979). The Systems Approach and its Enemies.

(6) ‘Good’, ‘Right’, ‘Bad’, ‘Evil’, are simply defined as objective deviations (i.e., positive or negative) from the intentions of the designers, whom I presume to have legitimate intentions. Hence ‘good’ means the outcome of the design is aligned with the legitimate intentions of the designer, while ‘bad’ means the outcome is misaligned. ‘Evil’ implies a greater deviation or misalignment.

The Design Thinking Movement and the designing of Lifeworlds

2010-03-04T06:34:00.000-08:00

The Design Thinking Movement and the designing of Lifeworlds

By Jeffrey Chan

The Design Tsunami

If you have been reading (and seeing) more of the word ‘design’ in recent years, you are not alone. Corporations, companies and even governments around the world are adopting ‘design’ more than ever, finding new homes for this word in old places. Once found only in the technical language of industrial, engineering, graphic, environmental and fashion design, today design has been normalized. Now, careful real estate agents would go to great lengths to tell you who had designed your bathroom seat. Now, school children are able to distinguish between ‘better’ and ‘worse’ cellphone designs. Now, even your experience before a bank-teller or at a Cineplex was likely designed. Confronting the mass normalization of design, one wonders what has not been designed.

The funny thing is that nobody quite knows exactly when the recent buzz surrounding ‘design’ came about. If one is to survey catalogues and media closely associated to what is labeled ‘design’ over a thirty years period following the intense commoditization of design—in fashion, product, graphic, and architecture—the ebb and flow of design has followed economic boom and bust cycle rather closely. For example, there was a proliferation of design before the OPEC oil crisis in the early 70s, and then during the yuppies excess of the 80s before the ‘87 crash. Following this line of thought, the resurgence of design in recent years might have something to do with our own recent Gilded Age.

However, one would imagine that the recent market crash that has brought an end to our own Gilded Age, leading to what is now commonly dubbed as the ‘Great Recession’, had decimated design. Surely enough, sectors traditionally associated with design were gravely affected. But design as a cultural force continues to prevail. Why is this so?

On this question several factors come to mind. First, globalization has radically transformed design and the design practice (1). While a few important markets have been critically affected by the unprecedented economic downturn, many emerging markets continue to do well. Second, design has been diversifying from its traditional artifactual forms into semantics, interactions, systems and networks (2). Increasingly, design operates in the semantic space of artifacts and interactions that are to some extent, free from the constraints of the physical economy. And third, design is increasingly practiced and operationalized by individuals and groups that are traditionally not directly connected to design. In other words, the universe of design is expanding (3).

Indeed, what is most intriguing about the recent design tsunami is how ‘design’ has been expansively conjugated and signified in different ways—for example, such as ‘service design’, ‘experiential design’, ‘organizational design’, ‘design for innovation’, and ‘design thinking’ by individuals who are rarely card-carrying professional designers but public administrators, business gurus, anthropologists, sociologists, managers, educators and medical practitioners.

* * * * * * * * *

The Design Thinking Movement

Tim Brown of IDEO is right to say that there is design thinking (i.e., the way a designer thinks) and then there is design thinking (4). The former is the way card-carrying design professionals think. It is also an academic phrase referring to the study of a designer’s reasoning process (5). But the latter is what I would further call the design thinking movement. Powering the expansive presence of design in language, artifacts, services and systems today, the design thinking movement is orchestrating the designing of our lifeworlds.

The design thinking movement differs from design thinking proper in three broad ways. First as mentioned, the design thinking movement comprises of many different individuals and groups whom we are unlikely to label as card-carrying designers. Second, the design thinking movement is very likely to concede to a design process that is much more participatory, team-oriented and empirically driven rather than an individuated, cognitive and intuitive process that (traditional) design thinking is more likely to admit. And third, general media often credits the design thinking movement as the vital link between successful companies and their product offerings, for example, in Apple or OXO. In contradistinction, design thinking remains as a small but interdisciplinary academic field studying how designers think (i.e., how the designer reasons).

Differences aside, the intriguing question has always been whether the design thinking movement could exist independently without the academic field of design thinking altogether. As far as cross-acknowledgment goes, except for a few references to design thinking—and recurring favorites have always been Horst Rittel’s “wicked problems” and Herbert Simon’s concept of design—key publications rarely acknowledge the presence of this field. It is as though there were two wedding parties going on in parallel with little interaction between them. This may be because the design thinking movement has been preponderantly carried out in the management field. This is however ironic because the idea of ‘wicked problems’, a familiar concept recurring in the design thinking movement (6), was first invoked by C.W. Churchman in the school of business administration at Berkeley in 1967 (7).

Nonetheless, it is still never easy to find out exactly when the design thinking movement started, though it is easier to conjecture on where and why it began. If we trace the dates of major publications and observe the career trajectory of key exponents in the design thinking movement, the contemporary design thinking movement started in earnest not long after the dot-com bust.

For many, the dot-com era conjured up images of 30 year olds playing ping-pong at 10am, and a flexible work ethic replacing the rigid time-card. In this work culture, creativity was key, and so was one’s independence and drive to excel. Because many of the dot-coms were also start-up companies, work culture was fluid and improvisational; then, the self-design of one’s work-tasks and the motivation to pursue productive new leads was more important than adhering to executive orders.

While many of these new work cultures vanished along with the dot-com bust, what remained as a legacy, and continues to charm and seduce, is the idea of a creative work culture capable of transforming (good) ideas into lots of cash and jobs.

* * * * * * * * *

Explaining the Genesis of the Design Thinking Movement

Even so, the legacy of a creative work culture does not adequately explain the rise of the design thinking movement today. To furnish an adequate explanation, we need to further consider the convergence of three ideas: (a) the conjoint doctrines of the post-industrial society and of the (new) creative economy; (b) the historic relationship between industries and (industrial) designers and advertisers in the United States; and (c) the resurgence of the innovation paradigm.

* * * * * * * * *

The doctrine of the post-industrial society and the doctrine of the creative economy are two distinct though closely related doctrines. While the former doctrine is a cultural doctrine suggesting the transformation of society from one producing goods to one providing and inventing (new) services, the latter doctrine is an economic roadmap suggesting that it is possible to foster an economy centered around transforming innovative ideas into cash and jobs. While each of these doctrines diverges in their thesis, both converge on the radical idea that it is possible to drive economic development and prosperity through ideas rather than goods.

This radical idea would not have come to pass if not for the fact that sometime during the last thirty years, it has become the norm to move production, especially production of goods in the lower-value strata, from major centers of capital concentration in the world to peripheral zones where labor was both abundant and cheap. This phenomenon of outsourcing, doubtlessly exacerbated by an intense deregulatory wave initiated in the 1980s, increasingly hollowed out such centers. Consequentially, such centers were burdened to emphasize management, innovation, service and design over manufacturing and the production of goods. In turn, this transformation set the stage for the creative economy—an economy centered on creating (profitable) ideas and services rather than actual goods for trade; an economy weaned on the creative cerebral rather than the production muscle power. In the midst of all these, the seeds of the future design thinking movement were extant but remained dormant within the ranks of advertising and industrial design industries.

Even so, the essence of the design thinking movement has existed for a long time between American industries and the American advertisers and (industrial) designers. One classic example refers to the fierce competition between Alfred Sloan of GM and Henry Ford of Ford Motor Company in the early but saturated automobile market (8). To expand his market share, Sloan created seductive styling and colors with the help of designers and marketed them with the help of creative advertisers. While Ford provided quality engineering and low prices for his stodgy but well-built Model T, Ford’s cars were no match for GM’s cars not only on the basis of styling and colors, but also because GM cars also happened to be appealing for the lady-driver (i.e., no hand-cranking required). The rest as we know is history (or at least up till before the recent debacle).

And long before the creative economy, industrial designers discovered research methods that could effectively allowed them to innovate (9, 10). In essence, these methods served a twofold function. One, these methods were capable of providing new user data for the designer such that his design increasingly approximated optimality for the user. And two, the constant flow of such data provided ample opportunities for successive iterations of the designer’s design prototype towards that optimal solution. The ideas of getting to know your users and prototyping are therefore hardly new. In the quest for an optimal solution, the industrial designer has to oversee and balance all of the following criteria, namely performance, merchandising, function, ergonomics, innovation and aesthetics appeal just to name a few. This provided the industrial designer with a perspective to complexity that is rather dissimilar to other fields of design. For these reasons, the design thinking movement today shares a lineage more in line with the culture of industrial design in America rather than say, with fashion or architectural design where in comparison, the designer’s artistic vision is of greater paramount.

On this, it is possible to further argue that the design thinking movement today is quintessentially an American innovation. Historically, design thinking took a different form in Europe with the probable exception of Peter Behrens who worked for AEG in Germany. In Europe, design thinking took on a much more polemical role in critiquing material production as well as trying to reconcile the role of the artists with the new techniques of modern industrialization (11). And while national institution that promoted design did exist as early as 1944 in the UK, as I shall discussed later, such an institution was in essence closer to a trade board rather than a school of thought for design. The historic differences underlying the design thinking movement between the two continents persist to the present day, where for example in Italy, (industrial) design is very often performed by architects and the entrepreneurs themselves, and where there is no tradition of performing market-research or user-needs studies before making a design offering in the market (12).

Over this long corporate partnership between industries and designers, corporate executives gradually became aware that there was in fact a close compatibility between the innovative methods practiced by the designers and the innovation that is obligated by the ever shortening of product life-cycle in modern production. This requirement (and desire) for innovation in the American society was noted long before outsourcing or psychological obsolescence became the norm (13, 14).

Truly, the recent drive for innovation was rooted in the need to expand the supply and variety of goods made possible by new technologies and labor relationships on one hand, and on the other hand, obligated by the strategic shift to compete on the distinguishing mark of design. In other words, in a world saturated with a greater variety of goods all imbued with a drastic reduction in shelf life, corporate executives realized that it is much more strategic to differentiate and to compete through incessant design. But because consumers today are also much more discerning than before, the design of products and services must therefore be equally discerning and accurately targeted to the pluralistic needs and wants of consumers. For this reason, the design thinking movement has also evolved to encompass a pluralistic class of ‘designer-thinkers’ from a variety of disciplines offering a multitude of insights for design—anthropology, sociology, psychology, management, engineering and design—all capable of observing and collecting insights through their own unique vantage point. Christened as the new advisers in the courts of corporate suites and media halls, ‘design thinkers’ quickly turned into the vanguard of strategy and innovation for many design-centered corporations.

* * * * * * * * *

The Institutional Demand for Design Thinking

The success of the design thinking movement would have gone unnoticed except for the continuous coverage by notable media such as the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Wallpaper and Monocle over the last decade. In many cases, new branches, sub-sections and dedicated spokespersons emerged to closely monitor trends in the design culture and to interpret these trends for the layperson interested in design. By accentuating the multiple roles of design in successful product offerings, such media reports inadvertently also reaffirmed the vital importance of the design thinking movement to the public. There is after all, a direct correlation between the public’s interest on design and the stock prices of companies creating successful products. And just going by the financial reports of luxury consortium such as LVMH whose marketing thrust remains predominantly in design, consumers in the last decade, likely boosted by high earnings in the stock market, were generally more willing to spend on a greater variety of designed goods compared to any other periods in modern history. For many, the design thinking movement has become a positive, self-reinforcing cycle of converting design innovation into increased corporate earnings.

This design thinking movement is however not a phenomenon only confined to the private sector. In recent years, three institutional entities are playing greater roles in the propagation of the design thinking movement globally. These institutional entities are governments, NGOs and the universities.

However, the marriage between institutions and design is hardly new. Insofar as the government is concerned, the earliest example must be the Council of Industrial Design, or what is known as the Design Council (UK) today. Started in 1944 by the government to harness the potential of design for wartime Britain, it was perhaps the earliest case where institutional powers directly and explicitly connected design to some notion of the public interest. And in 1953, the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, was set up as part of the American program for the postwar reconstruction of Germany (15). Initially conceived as a school of social research and political science, it subsequently turned into a school of design. Even so, the subsequent curriculum offered in HfG Ulm, though in design, was heavily laced with the component of social research and science. HfG Ulm was noted for its work with industrial bodies such as Braun and Lufthansa, training a few generations of designers capable and comfortable in navigating the interdisciplinary fields of social research, management and design.

Hence, the recent drive towards national institutions whose sole organizational mission is to promote and coordinate design activity—such as the Design Council (UK), the DINZ (Design Institute, New Zealand) and DesignSingapore (Singapore)—is steeped in the long history between governments and design. While each of these institutional units has different contextual duties and mission, all of them converge on the task of promoting design activity, which inevitably also amplifies the design thinking movement today in no small ways. Whether it is actively promoting a culture for design, or an awareness to design or championing design learning, such institutional units for design are also intellectual base-camp for the global circuit of key thinkers, educators and consultants in the design thinking movement. Importantly, these institutional units also advise their respective governments in charting out a roadmap for a creative economy through design.

Another institutional group that has gradually seen the workings of the design thinking movement is the NGOs. It is suggested that the delivery of aid and support by NGOs from a top-down position has not been effective (16). This is because without understanding the actual needs and grounds for aid delivery, effectiveness for many NGOs has been compromised. In recent years, key consultants from the design thinking movement have been commissioned to rethink and reinvent the organizational structure and output of these NGOs (17). Departing from the analytical, top-down approach favored by a past generation of NGOs, the newly designed NGOs tend to favor a bottom-up approach featuring self-empowerment and self-help made possible by the signature methods of ethnographic observation and creative reimagination practiced within the ranks of the design thinking movement.

Finally, the last institutional group that has embraced and played a role in the propagation of the design thinking movement is the university. Consistent to Herbert Simon’s critique made years ago, many universities have found the idea of design uneasy (18). First, design lacked the intellectual rigor required by the natural and social sciences. Second, design is neither a true academic subject defined by core textbooks nor one where intellectual demarcations could be used to differentiate it from other subjects. Worse, design is neither fully comfortable in the humanities nor within the social science. In short, there is no place for design in the university.

It is therefore not surprising to see design appearing as independent units within established universities, for example the Stanford d-school or the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University. And to be precise, these are not design schools, as reputable design schools such as Pratt, Parsons, Otis or RISD are. Instead, these are schools of design thinking. Students of these new schools of design thinking do not graduate with a professional degree in design. Rather, they graduate with traditional disciplinary degrees with (accredited) emphasis in design. Similarly, these are also not schools of design management, where increasingly, it has become the norm to teach design and management hand-in-hand in design specific programs (i.e., ‘the MFA is the new MBA’, or so the mantra goes).

How can we further characterize such schools of design thinking? These can be said to be schools championing the confluence of many disciplines working together on challenging problems to realize concrete and human-centered solutions. Realizing that real-world problems are complex and ‘wicked’ (19, 20) and therefore less amenable to be solved through the sequestered silos of the traditional university knowledge structure, schools of design thinking exhorts their students to practice system rather than disciplinary thinking by marrying rigorous empiricism, innovative imagination and aesthetic appeal in the search for design solutions.

For this reason, such schools draw much more from the interdisciplinary principles underpinning the design thinking movement rather than from the craft-oriented leanings of traditional schools of design. Given that these schools of design thinking appeared only recently, it is still too early to draw any further conclusion. However one thing is almost certain: that the design thinking movement will continue to evolve because of these schools.

* * * * * * * * *

Where is the Design Thinking Movement Heading?

But where is the design thinking movement heading? If it is in fact a movement as I argue, how will it further evolve? And will it expire eventually—like all movements do?

There is anecdotal evidence indicating that the design thinking movement—at least as it is being practiced today in the corporate context—is evolving. There are sound reasons to support this view. Firstly, corporate cutbacks have greatly pruned the scale and reach of the design thinking movement. Although still necessary, there is an enormous—if unprecedented—pressure to consolidate operations in the corporate sector today. Inadvertently, this has led to a vast contraction in the market for design thinking services. Secondly, the growing momentum of the sustainability movement is directing the design thinking movement towards more sustainable goals, behaviors and systems (21).

Here, it may be useful to propose a further question: to what extent has the design thinking movement—like all productive social movements—contributed to the public interest? All those new product editorials and pictures of lavish architecture, and the explosive growth of media coverage on design related issues have indeed contributed to the growth of public consciousness and awareness on design. But I argue that the design thinking movement has so far missed its central mission: to promote the active deliberation of design in everyday life.

To explain this, I will have to make two distinctions. First, thinking is different from thought, which is the product of thinking. Second, thinking is different from ideas, which is a fixation of thought. Truly, thinking is the ongoing, active flow of furthering thoughts and questioning extant ideas. And so while the design thinking movement has richly contributed to the proliferation of design thoughts and ideas with ever newer products and better services, it has not visibly improved the active deliberation of design in everyday life.

But what do I mean by the ‘active deliberation of design in everyday life’? By this I mean the following: for everyone who is capable and willing to be informed in design matters to question design motives, artifacts, policies, systems and their corresponding consequences. In other words, the active deliberation of design in everyday life ought to include the following few basic, design-oriented questions: (i) Who designed this artifact, service, policy, or system? (ii) What is his or her or their intentions in this design? (iii) To what extent are these intentions justified? (iv) What are the consequences of this design and are there any (suspected) unanticipated consequences? (v) What are the methods used in attaining the design goal? (vi) Are these methods justified, ethical and sustainable? (vii) Can we live with the consequences of this design and would these consequences affect future generations adversely? (viii) Are there alternatives to what is being proposed? And finally, (ix) Given the answers to the above questions, what empowers my consent or dissent to this design?

We catch a glimpse of this practice in a few debates on nuclear energy, where clearly, every informed citizen should be aware of the material and policy designs—and indeed the future repercussions—behind nuclear energy before they support or reject it. Similarly, a snippet of this practice could be caught in the different discourses that emerged on the design of bailout packages and the various economic stimulus policies. In the same way, every product, service, system or network being designed today should be subjected to these design-oriented questions for the sole reason of safeguarding the public interest tomorrow.

This then, ought to be the central mission of the design thinking movement—the public thinking on matters of design.

Otl Aicher, the co-founder of HfG Ulm and an early dissident during the Nazi regime, knew this mission of design thinking well. In one of his most memorable essays, ‘the world as design’, he wrote,

‘the world in which we live is the world we made…

making is an activity for which someone is responsible, in which someone is involved with concept, design, execution and checking…

in design, man takes his own development in hand. for human beings, development is no longer nature, but self-development…in design man becomes what he is. animals have language and perception as well. but they do not design.’ (22)

‘the world in which we live is the world we made’: it is too important to leave the active deliberation of design in everyday life beyond the capable and able reach of the design thinking movement.

References and Notes:

1. Bruce Mau. (2004). Massive Change.

2. Klaus Krippendorff. (2005). The Semantic Turn.

3. The ‘universe of design’ was a phrase used by Horst Rittel. It is also the title of a new book by Jean-Pierre Protzen and Dave Harris (2010).

4. Tim Brown. (2009). Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

5. Peter Rowe. (1991). Design Thinking.

6. Roger Martin. (2009). The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. See also, John Kao. (2007). Innovation Nation.

7. C.W. Churchman. (1967). Guest Editorial, Management Science.

8. Giles Slade. (2007). Made to Break.

9. Henry Dreyfuss. (2003). Designing for People.

10. C.W. Mills. (1963). Man in the Middle: The Designer.

11. Ulrich Conrads. (1997). Programs and manifestoes on 20^th-century architecture.

12. Roberto Verganti. (2009). Design-driven Innovation.

13. Donald Schön. (1971). Beyond the Stable State.

14. John Gardner. (1981). Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society. Beyond these mid-20^th century references, it should be noted that Alexis de Tocqueville was probably the first who observed this characteristic.

15. Kenneth Frampton. (1974). Apropos Ulm: Curriculum and Critical Theory.

16. Willam Easterly. (2007). The White Man’s Burden.

17. Tim Brown, (2009).

18. Herbert Simon. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial.

19. Donald Schön. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner.

20. Horst Rittel & Melvin Webber. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.

21. Tim Brown, (2009). Brown’s account of the Oral-B toothbrush washing up the shore unchanged ought to be retold in every design classroom.

22. Otl Aicher. (1994). the world as design.

Notes on Vertical Urban Farming

2010-01-20T18:54:00.000-08:00

I was at the City Hall area yesterday when the haughty edifice by architect Moshe Safdie caught my eye. This edifice comprises of three imposing towers standing adjacent to the other towering maybe 60 stories into the air. On their common top straddles a vast, cantilevering plateau of steel and concrete. The next thing that I noticed was its still unadorned, unpainted and likely unfinished skin. Then an idea struck me: what if some of the skin of this vast building complex is used for vertical, urban farming?

* * * * * * * *

Imagine that we have 3,000 buildings in Singapore. Further imagine that each of these buildings is 10 stories high and the height between each storey is 2m. Lets also assume that each building has a linear footprint of 100m. And for simplicity’s sake lets also assume that this footprint is rectangular in shape and with the longer sides measuring 40m each. Hence without including the shorter sides, each building has 40m x 20m x 2 vertical surfaces, which is 1,600 square meters. If we add this number up for all 3,000 buildings in Singapore, then the aggregate number is 1,600 x 3,000, which is 4.8 million square meters.

4.8 million square meters is also 4.8 square kilometers of surface. This is still a tiny number in tiny Singapore with about 710 square kilometers of total land area.

But my calculations are erring on the conservative side. It is likely that we have much more vertical surface aggregating beyond 3,000 buildings of 10 storey each. I take into consideration all the public housing estates, the private estates and most of the commercial, public and private, non-classified buildings in this city-state.

It is in fact worthwhile to discover the exact number. But for argument’s sake lets imagine that my margin of error is 100% lower than the actual number.

If so, then in land-scarce Singapore, we have nearly 10 untapped square kilometers of surface now. This number is sure to increase with a continuous increase in population density. And you know what, as far as air space is concerned, there is no upper limit on this number…

* * * * * * * *

Sometimes ideas are weak and discounted as fictional or unrealistic because they stand in isolation to other ideas. But when these ideas are put together like hands and feet, things can work.

* * * * * * * *

Assuming that we dedicate these 10 square kilometers to intensive, high-yield urban, vertical farming. Lets further assume that about 51% of the citizens buy into this idea and would willingly—and profitably—contribute some of their time in the week (instead of shopping) to organize and work in this effort. Even so, we are talking of 1.6 million people working on this farming venture at any one time—would this not be the largest industry, spurring domestic demand then in Singapore? With a rising grey population and a longer but uncertain retirement livelihood in the world today, urban farming can become a sustainable source of income and psychological fulfillment for the golden years.

* * * * * * * *

I am not an agricultural expert. But I am an architectural designer who realizes that there is a problem of cladding buildings in plastic, granite and glass when the world is increasingly growing hungrier and (will become) bloodier from food conflicts. While my Hobbesian inclinations are clear, it is also clear to me that only architects and urban designers are trained—with support from public administrators and urban agricultural experts—to provide the aesthetical and technical spatial answers for this growing social and global problem.

* * * * * * * *

I have grown some tomatoes, potatoes and lady’s fingers successfully (in my garden). From this experience in primary school, I realized that Singapore has a full year of growing season.

Critics of urban farming may suggest that the use of water will surely increase exponentially for water-scarce Singapore. They are right. But equally true is that all vertical urban farms can capture rainwater that is lost right now through run-offs from these vertical surfaces. Imagine that half a centimeter of rain falls daily in Singapore for the whole year. That’s an incredible amount of water that can then be channeled for sustaining these farms.

Besides, depending on how these vertical farms are designed together with the façade, they are likely to reduce heat gain and at the same time, also reduce ambient temperatures. Indeed, these vertical farms present before us is a choice between the positive reinforcing cycle of air-conditioning use, or a negative feedback cycle of reducing air-conditioning use.

* * * * * * * *

I mentioned earlier that ideas ought to work together. Here we can begin to count the perks of this proposal:

(1) Reduced emissions from food transportation. With a reduced demand for imported food—especially tonnage heavy agricultural products—we also reduce emissions attributed to trucks and planes carrying these products.

(2) Eating healthier. This is subjective. But with an available local supply of agricultural products we may come to depend less on processed foods and more on natural foods, thereby also cutting down on paper, plastic and synthetic material wastes. This also means major cuts in emissions.

(3) Hunger is on the rise in the world today. In a soon to be food-scarce world, increasing a domestic supply of food means food security if and when the barn-houses of the world reduce their exports for a near 100% imported-food dependent Singapore.

(4) It may even be possible to have surpluses from this effort and to export some of these surpluses. With the market for organic agricultural products expanding in the world, vertical farming, because of its proximity to human activity, must be as organic as it can be. Is this not another place to explore the combination of these two ideas: between organic farming and vertical farming?

(5) Communities in the city-state can be organized into self-sufficient communities specializing in different produce and strengthening local identities and trusts between people. All said, I do not hold onto a romantic ideal of socially edifying agricultural work. What I am suggesting is a much more modest and pragmatic vision where this can become another avenue for community involvement with tangible perks.

(6) The probability of a universal carbon credit system is high in the near future. When this finally becomes reality, contributors to this system can exchange rebate-credits based on their individual production yields. This serves as an incentive for working in this socially ameliorative ‘industry’.

* * * * * * * *

What are some of the problems with this vision? Here, I count a few of them:

(1) Not all buildings can be used for vertical farming. For example, buildings with a security nature; or buildings used for communication purposes and so on.

(2) Architectural conformity. This is not so much a problem as it is still an open question. Architects have always been able to provide answers that have yet to be imagined. Imagine entire housing estates covered with trellis of tomatoes, lady’s fingers and other vegetables…It may strike some as delicious while some may find it a perverted version of the witch’s house in a new Hansen and Gretel story. But because no effort has been expended in envisioning a cityscape like this, there is still ample room for improvement and compromise.

(3) Free-riding. Like all public goods, there will be some who would literally want to do nothing yet receive the same pay-offs as those who work on these vertical farms.

(4) Initial high costs from public investment and private cooperation. But if we build it well and if it can last a long time, how is this different from building a subway or an effective airport?

* * * * * * * *

Many years ago, an American psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow came up with a hierarchy of needs. For Maslow, food, water and sleep are foundational needs. Luxury, circus and entertainment(-gambling) for him are surely aspiration wants.

All around the world today we see more trade-offs along this trend: competitive advantages in agriculture traded for tourist-inducing golf-courses and thus, foreign exchange; resources that can be invested in sustainable production being consumed rapidly for higher immediate dividends but poorer longer term returns; and finally, a vast material investment in our visual and spatial productions that have nearly no relevance or gravity to the human condition today.

If there is preponderant attention paid on aspiration wants today, surely some attention—and vision—ought to be allocated to foundational needs as well?

Notes on My Educational Philosophy

2010-01-19T16:16:00.001-08:00

Recently I was asked to render my educational philosophy.

To write this 'educational philosophy', I reflected on my own teaching experience; and through this reflection, tried to sieve out a few enduring principles and convictions that I believe are at the core of what I practice in teaching and learning. However upon doing so, I realized that these principles, though workable in the classroom, have yet to address many of the concrete perplexities in the world today that education can no longer dismiss.

For this reason, I started all over again. And here's the version I would like to share with everyone who reads this blog:

“We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.” -- Mary Catherine Bateson

Philosophy for me is still the love of wisdom. To this I shall just add that we tend to pursue what we love. Thus, my statement of educational philosophy is about the pursuit of wisdom through learning. I do not make this statement solely as a deductive exercise; instead, I shall explain why wisdom ought to be the paramount goal of education today.

* * * * * * * * * *

For the longest time, the Classics was the linchpin of higher learning in both the Occidental and the Oriental scholastic traditions. This changed however with the rise of the sciences and the technical vocations. Today, I believe another change--no less tumultuous and perhaps more urgent--is underway.

Today, it has dawned upon us that more technology and improved ways of problem-solving are not always ameliorative for the human condition. But to this realization, we have no substantive answer yet. In the absence of a substantive answer, societies have elected to plow ahead faster with more development and better technology--as if by going faster, we can make up a worthy teleology through greater speed.

This specious teleology centered on unbridled possibility over worthiness, accelerated progress rather than human purpose and technique at the expense of wisdom is the root cause of many pressing problems and risks facing the world today. These pressing problems do not ask for more technique or technical solutions--there are plenty available in every shade and size today. Instead, what these pressing problems behoove is wisdom to question the present course of actions and upon this reflection, to begin making worthy choices based on what we already have.

* * * * * * * * * *

No matter where we stand on the political spectrum today, and no matter what our position on climate change is, it is unequivocally clear that the general human condition will deteriorate in the next 50 years, if not earlier. Even if we discount the predicted ramifications of climate change, an absolute rise in global population over the next two decades will simply imply a greater contestation of common resources (e.g., clean air, water and food). And with contestation frequently comes conflicts. From another perspective, many cities around the world today are wrestling with the repercussions of unplanned diversity and pluralism from globalization. Unplanned diversity and pluralism may inject new energy into the cultural lives of cities. But at the same time they can bring about socially counterproductive conflicts.

In such a world, there will be competing goods. Even with governance specifically designed to oversee the distribution of resources, hard choices will have to be made. Should resources be consumed preponderantly by the native or the newcomer when both are equal but incommensurable good? And in the event of a climatic catastrophe, to what extent and for whom do we open the borders of our havens to? Is not every human life an equal, intrinsic good?

Where there are such competing goods, there is likely also tragedy. As a scientific civilization, we have forgotten the vital moderating role of the tragic for the human condition. The tragic, I argue, will become more prevalent in the world of tomorrow. To navigate the tragic does not call for more refined techniques of Operations Research or rational decision-making. To navigate great complexity and resource constraints all amid the tragic inevitability that some goods would have to be sacrificed, wisdom is again required.

* * * * * * * * * *

On the other hand, modern education has a tendency to categorize knowledge without truly appraising it. Today we produce new knowledge of every category and discipline, but we have no good way of justifying for any of them. It is also said that the world today moves too fast; we have to learn how to learn because no formal education is ever sufficient for the complexity of practice and life. Learning to learn is still necessary but no longer sufficient for the future. To be sufficient, we need to periodically appraise our acquired knowledge. We also need to know what to do with the knowledge we have acquired and to steer this knowledge towards a sustainable human good, all which are wisdom in action.

* * * * * * * * * *

I do not pretend that wisdom is the magic pill. All I have tried to suggest here is that sustained human flourishing increasingly requires the exercise of wise decision-making--wisdom in action that modern education has scarcely made room to provide or teach. This is why I suggest that there is a tumultuous change in the air. The Financial Tsunami of 2008 has demonstrated the foolery of knowledgeable, intelligent men and women without wisdom. But in its wake it has left the palpable burden on educators to nurture wisdom: how can educators nurture or teach wisdom?

* * * * * * * * * *

No statement is complete without a few concretely stated propositions. In concluding my statement, I make the following propositions concerning the nurturing and the teaching of wisdom:

(1) It is unwise to repeat great mistakes or to reinvent the wheel

On this I refer to the classics in every tradition, where thoughtful choices and conversations on nearly every category of human perplexities have already been explored in one way or another by great minds. It is wise to learn from these conversations; it is even wiser to master the foundational ideas underlying them. In the same way, it is wise not to repeat their mistakes. Only one thing the classics cannot provide: that is, how to navigate the novel and treacherous problems technology has burdened upon the human condition today.

(2) It is unwise to learn alone or to hold a monologue with oneself

On this I deviate from the image of a wise old hermit in his cave. Sustained, independent inquiry is an admirable trait of any learned man or woman; but more impressive and certainly wiser is the willingness to test the outcomes of this inquiry in a community of other learners and thinkers. For this reason, it is wise to learn in a communicative and argumentative environment filled with dissonant ideas.

(3) It is unwise to remain as an armchair theorist trying to learn wisdom

On this I depend on the phrase, ‘to rise to the challenges’. What are the pressing problems today? What can I do about them? What is the value of my actions and how does this value resonate with a sound vision for the future? What are the anticipated consequences of my actions? What are their ethical repercussions? Are there limitations to what I can do independently and how do I address these limitations? And how and to whom should I pass my mantle in the natural course of things? To test one’s judgments on concrete issues and to act upon them; to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions and to reflect on their ethical repercussions; and finally to prepare in advance for one’s mortality--these have always been the hallmarks of wisdom.

(4) It is unwise to be cynical

The line between wisdom and cynicism--the attitude of having seen it all and that nothing good can come out of anything--can be very thin. This is especially true today. Therefore, it is possible to say that the road to wisdom today is filled with many pitfalls of cynicism. How to rescue oneself from cynicism is critical for nurturing wisdom. On this I see the teacher playing an important role. This role consists of encouraging the student; of making constructive remarks and rebukes; and of building and envisioning rather than tearing and constricting. Most important of all, the teacher is to demonstrate how and why wisdom leads to life whereas cynicism leads to stagnation and decay.

* * * * * * * * * *

This then is the concise statement of my educational philosophy.

Protecting our Ecology and the Awareness for Life* (translated)

2010-01-10T20:58:00.001-08:00

Protecting our Ecology and the Awareness for Life*

English Translation of 生态的保护与生命的觉醒 by Jeffrey Chan

(original Chinese article by 霍韬晦 appeared on Jan 11, 2010, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore)

Humanity’s ecological problems are only getting worse. Everyone only sees his or her immediate benefit in a great narrowing of horizons. Except for the brink of disaster, no one is fully aware of today’s predicament. But when disaster strikes, it will be all too late!

Humanity has entered a new era through the power of technology. But also because of the use of technology, new complex problems have emerged. The most obvious of these problems are: climate change, pollution, melting ice, dwindling resources, sinking land, vast reductions in forest lands, massive desertfication ...All these have caused countless worries: can there still be a tomorrow for the world? One wonders. Can man exist without his environment?

It is precisely because of these worries that we have the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. The goal of the summit is to reduce global carbon emissions, and to ensure that warming in the century will not rise above the safe limit for survival. 190 countries were presented at the summit; and almost 120 leaders attended in an unprecedented summit that lasted nearly two weeks. But the entourage and convoys surrounding these leaders--bodyguards, bureaucrats, journalists and activists--had already ‘polluted’ Copenhagen. Pollution of planes and cars had antagonized thousands of environmental activists into a destructive display of social conflict with security at the summit.

The Copenhagen Summit as Political Performance

Even after deploying so many leaders, minds and resources, the regrettable thing is that there is so little to show for it all. Each party in attendance seemed happy to merely say his or her piece without trying to close the mutual distance between parties. Whether it is the developed countries or the developing countries, nobody seemed willing to commit to new mutually binding agreements, nor to accept mutually binding regulations. This has made the plan emerging from the summit hollow and fictitious.

The failure of Copenhagen has reflected the value of self-preservation and self-protectionism of these individual nation-states. Most of these political leaders are merely ‘performing’ in order to secure the confidence and votes of their respective constituency. For example the United States is the country with the largest emissions; but during the summit, the US has suggested an absolute standard of reduction for individual countries, rather than a relative one according to the needs of (developing) countries. This absolute standard is clearly unfair to China with 1.3 billion people or India with 1 billion in population. Because no one is willing to commit to greater emission cuts, the graver consequences following from this unwillingness will be a rise above the 2 degree Celsius average global temperature mark in this century--the very mark that demarcates a safer world from a more hazardous world. Despite the fact that everyone is claiming to accept responsibilities, reality is nearer to the adage of ‘each for himself and responsibility for the other’. Therefore after the summit, developed countries pointed the spearhead at China and by this act, complicated the Sino-American relationship.

The truth is that even with a mutually binding accord, this accord will be inconsequential. Observing history, global summits tend to be merely filled with empty talks; it has never been easy to implement a mutually binding accord. Furthermore, implementation demands regulation: but who will perform this regulatory role? Even though the United Nations has the executive power to deploy troops, this executive act still demands the unanimous support of all constituent members at the UN. Moreover, what we are discussing here is the environment, which calls not for military action but political solidarity. And because our pressing problems call for political solidarity, they are therefore political problems that can only be solved by a political act.

What does this tell us? It tells us that humanity’s ecological problems are only getting worse. Everyone only sees their immediate benefit. Except for the brink of disaster, nobody is aware of the danger. But when disaster strikes, awareness would be too late!

This situation is likened to the Financial Tsunami. Before it occurred, many had already perceived the dangers. They have even tried sounding the alarm but no one believed them during those prosperous days. It was not until the Tsunami struck that people tried to think of an escape. But then, it had became all too late.

The Consequences of Greed and Inertia is Foolishness

How is it that humanity is so foolish? This is because of greed and inertia. And this is because everyday reality is always nearer than faraway dangers. And although the individual may be alarmed to these dangerous prospects, this individual nonetheless believes that he or she will be spared. This pathology is the seed of self-conceit and is the root cause of self-destruction.

The self-destructive tendency of humanity is evident in history. Self-destruction comes not because humanity is unintelligent, nor because humanity is incapable. Instead, it is the over-ambitiousness of mankind that is at the root of self-destruction. The father of Emperor Ching was a very successful entrepreneur and investor. But he gambled by investing in his unborn son. He was of course successful in this gambit because his son turned out to be the emperor that united China. Yet he was forced to death by this same son. Or take the example of the politician Sang in the Ching dynasty, who in order to change the political laws of his country coerced civilians into tools of war and in the same act, legislated draconian laws. However when he lost his political support, he fled to the borders. At the border, he tried to check in to an inn but fearful of what he had done, he did not dare to reveal his identity. Responding to his inability to provide identity the innkeeper said: without your identity you cannot check in, for this is the law mandated by the political Sang (himself)’. It was then that Sang realized that he had just caused his own demise. Or take another example during the Three Kingdoms. Yang Siu, a high official of Lord Cao, liked to flaunt his intelligence and wit. His habit of flaunting caused him to make many reckless remarks. In the end, one of these remarks exposed the hidden schemes of Lord Cao and Lord Cao put him to death. The stories of such self-destruction are too many. As the proverb goes, ‘making the law that causes one’s demise’ (作法自毙), many tyrants, usurpers, manipulators and flatterers all walked this path of self-destruction.

This is one of the greatest mystery of life. In Buddhism, it is said that along with greed, passion and infatuation, humanity has 84,000 other anxieties and worries--all but one can cause one’s destruction. In Christianity, it is said that the original sin caused mankind to be expelled from the paradise of Eden to wander the ends of the earth. In Confucianism, it is said that to the one who causes his self-demise, he must accept the fruits of his own destruction. Even so, it is plain to see that for some reason, mankind has been unable to transcend the boundary of his limitation. Are not all the inventors of complex financial instruments very intelligent individuals? But the cause of the Financial Tsunami is also because of these intelligent individuals. In the same way, the ecological crisis and climate change are also the fruits of intelligent men and women. For unlimited profiteering and creature comforts in life, individuals of the past do not mind polluting the Earth or exploiting its resources. Today, it will become necessary to sacrifice many times more than these paltry profits and comforts in order to redeem the Earth.

The Chinese has a saying: if one is to know beforehand his predicament today, why would he (want) take the same action yesterday? But mankind never has a ‘beforehand’. All criminals are those that try the law. Beside, innovation (in technology) is always well-justified: after all, civilization must progress, life demands improvements and prosperity must increase...These are all great justifications. But in the end, all these are merely seductive packaging--packaging that causes one’s own seduction and inevitable demise.

Mankind is weak. To satiate this weakness is natural; but unlimited satisfaction leads to decadence and destruction.

I am not suggesting for the regression of civilization. The philosopher Lao Zhi once said that man must return to his original state of nature, or to the idea of the noble savage where he would be just as innocent and pure as a baby. Clearly this is merely an empty thought experiment because who would want to go against his nature of growth? But this is not unthinkable if mankind attains change through education and enlightenment (教化).

Where would we find this education and enlightenment? We would find them in religious thinking and philosophy, and in Confucianism. But in the modern society where extrinsic success is so valued, the voices of religious thinking, philosophy and Confucianism are remotely small: who can hear them? Confronting now the dual challenges of mankind--both the threat to ecology (environment) and life--are you willing to become ‘aware’?

How do we find optimism in pessimism? And how do we stand firm before temptations and seductions? These are the perennial questions that have yet to be satisfactorily answered. In the same way, these questions also stand as veritable tests for mankind’s culture and civilization. But if culture and civilization cannot aid mankind in these tests, do we still have a use for them?

2010 has already arrived. To the one who has rightful ambition this is food for thought.

霍韬晦 (Huo TaoHui) is the Research Director of Singapore East Asia Research Institute (新加坡东亚人文研究所)

Translated by Jeffrey Chan

*Translator notes:

(1) I translated this chinese article for non-commercial reason and because this article parallels my own interest. It is also because I cannot afford the english translation by some online software from the newspaper company.

(2) I have taken a direct translation rhetoric, and hence a few lines here and there may seem rather awkward in english.

(3) I have translated 生态 as ‘ecology’ in some places and in other places, interpreted as ‘the environment’.

(4) For bi-lingual readers, please comment and correct my translation where possible and needed.

Life as Decision(-making)

2009-12-01T06:18:00.000-08:00

Decision-making has been studied at least in psychology, organizational science, behavioral economics, design theory and of course, in ethics. All these different disciplines try to formulate general decision-making mechanism into something explicit and tangible. Yet certain decision-making remains as elusive as ever, especially for decisions that cannot be symbolically represented or circumscribed by clear decision parameters.

Consider this classic case. Describing his encounter with a young man who was split asunder between staying with his remaining family or departing for a noble (albeit risky) mission during WWII, Sartre had only this to say to the young man: "You are free, so choose; in other words, invent. No general code of ethics can tell you what you ought to do; there are no signs in this world." (existentialism is a humanism, pp. 33)

Or consider another case. This one is by Joseph Fletcher whose example is really quite beautiful not to quote in full. Here goes:

"It is night, black dark. A man (you or I) is in a small boat, drifting down toward a roaring waterfall. He can hear, but he cannot see or be seen. He is wide-awake. Any choice he makes may be meaningless. If he rows, madly and no matter how hard, he may be swept over the edge. If he does nothing at all, he may be wedged safely against a rock until daylight and rescue come. He cannot know what to do. The current carries him along whatever he decides. It is impossible to ask for time out until he can pretest alternatives. And after all, not to choose either way is to choose one way. Not to make a decision is itself a decision. He cannot escape his freedom. He is bound to be free." (situational ethics, pp. 154)

Neither case is a comfortable one for the conscientious decision-maker. Sartre asks us to invent. But this suggestion merely further begs the question: 'on what premise ought my invention be based upon?'. Is there an invention without reference or premise? Can there be one without reference or premise? Can we just simply invent out of the blue? To invent with neither reference nor premise is not inventing; it is like...burping (defined: as an uncontrollable and non-cognitive bodily phenomenon). Hence does the Sartrean freedom ultimately commit us to decision-making as burping? I don't think so. While Sartre's point is well-taken, he has merely demurred on the real decision to be made.

In contrast, Fletcher's case is only descriptive. I suppose most human beings caught in Fletcher's case err not so much in 'he cannot know what to do' rather than 'he does not know what to do'. Furthermore, no human being has the freedom not to choose, so to speak. Because of this, I conclude to the opposite of Fletcher: the human being is not free, because he cannot not choose. In other words, he or she can never do nothing (because even doing nothing is doing something).

Although it is tempting, I do not intend to explain the bad things happening in the world today by scaling up from these two cases demonstrating the perplexities of decision-making (even if we tried). Neither am I trying to insinuate that freedom is a metaphysical form of non-action. All said, these two cases do show that for the most perplexing decisions we can ever make, they are often only good guesses even when made under the most calculative conscientiousness.

Hence should we stop making decisions? I believe I have showed that it is impossible not to make one. How can we make good decisions? I believe I have showed that nobody--at least not yet--has a good answer for this question.

Finally, what is the take-away point on this issue? On this question I think I have a pragmatic answer: be gracious--to all if possible--for no one yet knows how to make a good decision.

Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice?

2009-10-17T01:46:00.000-07:00

Recently, my teacher pointed me to a book titled, Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice? The Evaluation of Technical Progress: A Systematic Overview of Theories and Opinions by Dr. Johan Hendrik Jacob van der Pot (1994). This is truly as magnum opus as it comes: two volumes of nearly 1,500 pages and 247 chapters in all. For those who may question why would anyone be interested (or touched) to write such a work, consider this fact: JHJ van der Pot himself was inmate at 6 concentration camps during World War II and survived. For what he has seen or heard in these 6 camps, the very idea of questioning technological progress should now be doubtlessly clear.

Here, I attach an excerpt from Chapter 193, a rather timely piece from the 1970 on today's health care debate.

"Where once the refinement of tools was intimately related to our housing, agriculture, hunting, and sheer survival, today our tools have become separated from basic human needs. As middle-class tool makers and users have risen to affluence, burgeoning technical means have displaced human ends to become ends in themselves, symbols of 'development', 'progress', and 'science'. Even those techniques ostensibly dedicated to the preservation of human life and healing are clearly considered of more intrinsic interest and merit than the human beings they are supposed to save... The conclusion is unavoidable. There is more joy (and money) in elaborating a technique than in giving thousands of desperate people more life, health, and strength through the application of that technique. Technological 'progress' has been running further and further ahead of the people it is supposed to serve, who have died of neglect and malnutrition while a heedless profession ogled at the latest gadget. Medical costs climb out of sight in geometric progression partly because hospitals must be tooled up with the latest devices and people must be trained to use them. 'The best way' must be employed even if the patients who receive the benefits are relatively few, and relatively rich or lucky. One gets the unpleasant feeling that the real function of the patient is to test the technique and be occasionally televised as a symbolic tribute to medical research. It is no coincidence, then, that modern America produces techniques of staggering sophistication, side by side with unmet needs of equally staggering yet tragic proportions, for which there are no available techniques or resources. This inexorable divergence between what is feasible technically and what is needed humanly is the result of groveling before the God of Technique, of resolving what to do next by following meekly the direction in which the tool itself pointed, even though it pointed away from human needs towards the 'opportunity' of a circus in space and other distractions."

- Charles Hampden-Turner cited in Chapter 193: The Mismatch Between Modern Technology and Real Human Needs in Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice? The Evaluation of Technical Progress: A Systematic Overview of Theories and Opinions (1994) by J.H.J. van der Pot

The Purpose of Mathematics Education?

2009-10-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

I am not a teacher of mathematics. I am also neither a philosopher of mathematics nor a designer of math questions. I am not even good at math.

But after reading this: http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/1010464/1/.html , it made me--out of the spirit of (mathematical) objectivity motivated even by a greater curiosity--to imagine what is mathematics education.

After reading this story in an objective spirit, I state what mathematics education is NOT:

(1) Mathematics education is not coming home from an exam, albeit an important one, and gesturing to your mom that your throat has recently been slit.

(2) Mathematics education is not coming home from an exam, albeit an important one, and getting very emotional before crying your heart out while trying to tell your mom amid tears and mucus that your hopes of an A* (i.e., read A-Star: the equivalent of a North American A+. For the simple at heart, it means either a perfect grade or somewhere a iota south of that--one can go no further academically or intellectually, which are of course, untrue) are dashed.

(3) Mathematics education is not about using a calculator, so that 'computational errors can be reduced'. If that were the case, the rocket that NASA just crashed on the Moon would have created a bigger plume of ash. As a matter of fact, use of calculators under examination pressures tends to entail 'errors of dexterity'. This means for a simple calculator, instead of keying in '8', you either key in '7', '5' or '9'--or all four at once.

(4) Mathematics education is not about big numbers so that inadvertently, you need the assistance of a calculator; which truly for the initiated, an abacus would have been much more efficient for elementary mathematics.

(5) Thus clearly, mathematics education at least for this level is not about calculations requiring calculators at all, unless of course, calculators are nice bling for examinations but we know that bling has nothing to do with math. QED on calculators.

(6) Mathematics education is not about 'breaking down in tears right after the exam'. As far as I know there are two kinds of tears associated with math. One, when you discover something like the incomplete theorem before you lose your mind; and two, when you win the Fields Medal for it. Or by an act of mathematical randomness, you win a Nobel Peace Prize for applying the incomplete theorem, which has happened by induction at least once in human history.

(7) And mathematics education is not about this kind of question:
"Jim bought some chocolates and gave half of it to Ken. Ken bought some sweets and gave half of it to Jim. Jim ate 12 sweets and Ken ate 18 chocolates. The ratio of Jim's sweets to chocolates became 1:7 and the ratio of Ken's sweets to chocolates became 1:4. How many sweets did Ken buy?"

Why? (we should truly ask more 'why' questions for mathematics education).

It took my unpracticed hand and mind nervously scrawling on two pieces of paper before I finally worked out the answer. Honestly, I would have done no better than the average kid on this type of questions. In fact, I would have flung if you locked me in the room with them and gave me the same time as everyone else.

But in solving this problem, I revisited how to do mathematical sums long-hand (without a calculator); remembered how to call concrete things X and Y again; relearned how to perform elementary functions with ratios and fractions; once again toyed with simultaneous equations; discovering where I made errors (yes, I was working backwards from the answer after a few 'computational' errors: the advantage of adulthood) and in it all, remembered that mathematics should be less frustrating and more fun, which concisely just summed up about all Polya said on this subject.

But this question--if this was in fact a representative of all questions for Paper 2 in the PSLE this year--sums up just about everything that is frustrating and obnoxious in mathematics education.

First, a mathematics word-question and its heuristics should aid in clarification and not in exacerbating confusion. About two minutes into re-reading and expressing the algebraic relationships to this question, I forgot who was Jim and what Ken bought. Perhaps a 12 year old brain has greater clarity. Nonetheless, in about another two minutes down this same track, I had forgotten who bought chocolates and who bought sweets. The 50-50 heuristic created by the question designer--doubtlessly trying to make things easy for that poor student--ended up mirroring and hence, worsening the identity problem in this math problem.

Second, a mathematical problem should never constrain possible solutions through the phrasing (or design) of the word problem itself. The problem asked, "How many sweets did Ken buy?". Why, I am also interested in finding out how many pieces of chocolates Jim bought! Because if I do so (which I did but more later), I can by that route find out how many sweets Ken bought using the same mathematical concepts and methods. As a matter of mathematical principle, there is no priority attached to either Ken's or Jim's purchase. So why prejudiced the math question from the angle of Ken? Clearly, the question-designer has not consulted some of the important literatures pertaining to psychological bias in the way we asked questions.

Third, if I did go by Jim's route, guess how many pieces of chocolates Jim bought? 308!!! (*correct me if I am wrong; the urge to write might have compromised my ability to do simultaneous equation).

Now, this is troubling. Because if I were 12 once more (I rather not be 17 again), and looking around even in prosperous Singapore, to have a kid, or a chocolate loving adult like myself, buying 308 pieces of chocolates at one go would have seriously revoked common sense. I might then look around the examination hall, and asked myself if anyone in the world would go out to a gourmet chocolate stand (that's where they sell pieces of chocolates and not 'some chocolates') and buy 308 pieces of chocolates. Because if I, the 12 year old boy with a precocious appetite for upmarket chocolates, can count, 308 pieces of chocolates would have cost me $924 at $3 a piece without 7% Goods and Service Tax. That's serious cash. If I am just as precocious in rudimentary economics, I would think $924 is cash one commits to a mortgage or rent, not to chocolates. In fact, it is downright irrational (i.e., unbelievable). That said, personally I find it comforting that the question designer has glimpsed a world where a boy might part with 154 pieces of chocolates for his friend, or $494.34 for the candy utility of his friend.

And because of this, I, as the 12 year old again (this is getting fun), would be inclined to tell myself that this is an utterly unbelievable answer. Although I am standing on firm ground, my psychology would be telling me otherwise. Should I believe in my psychological intuitions (believe me this counts)? Or should I believe unwaveringly in my mathematical capabilities (believe me this counts relatively little in the crisis scenario of an examination)? Assuming that a 12 year old may not know how to differentiate between his psychological intuitions and his mathematical certainties, then we have a recipe for disaster. Guess we know now why even A-Star students could not complete this examination--if this was in fact the careless way questions were designed and phrased.

Lastly, I am no fan of large numbers whether as a 34 year old adult-still-in-school, or a 12 year old schoolkid. In solving this problem, I had to work out calculations that went beyond my ability to calculate mentally. Maybe I am a notch below average on mental computation--I have been told that quite a few times. Nonetheless, does this impress fans of big numbers? Maybe. But mathematically, big numbers do nothing as far as mastery of the relevant mathematical concepts is concerned. By the highest common denominator of '4', Jim might have bought 77 pieces of chocolates and Ken 17 sweets and this problem could have been still the same. But wait, this would mean half a piece of chocolate and half a piece of sweet by the 50-50 heuristics right? Indeed. So in fact on our hands we have a compound problem--the 50-50 heuristics has complicated even the good intention to reduce these numbers. Thus if designers want to keep the heuristics, change the numbers; but if designers want to keep to a small number in the same ratio, change the heuristics. Mathematical thinking tells me this much, no? To force a choice on these preferences shows some guts in concept prioritization in mathematics; to waver shows incomplete understanding or worse, the absence of responsibility.

* * * * * * * * *

In sum, no child should be put through this sort of un-mathematical mental anguish, because this is not a test of proficiency for mathematics but something like a test of luck.

I behoove designers of such questions to take more responsibility so that students do not feel that their throats have been slit, or doomsday has arrived, or suffering from any of these un-mathematical fates. Most important of all, think like a child and feel the common sense of that child once more. After all, is this not the essence of all great mathematics?

Ought one buy a book for its cover too?

2009-10-05T17:58:00.000-07:00

Some books are good but their covers plain. Some others are bad but their covers beautiful. Some books have good content and beautiful covers but you cannot take it on the bus with you--they are too big or too heavy; and some have beautiful covers but no content, so you can't really take another journey with it on the bus.

But the Penguin Great Ideas series seems to have it all: classic content in a nifty format always packaged in beautifully illustrated covers. Now even the few I have find their home inside my favorite chocolate box, which is a bonus for any organized bookshelf.

I chanced upon this little one at the bookstore yesterday--yes, indeed it was the cover--and quickly devour it, though in contrary to the behavior and mindset advocated in this book: Writings from the Zen Masters.

Here's an excerpt:
The Most Valuable Thing in the World

"Sozan, a Chinese Zen master, was asked by a student: 'What is the most valuable thing in the world?'
The master replied: 'The head of a dead cat.'
'Why is the head of the dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?' inquired the student.
Sozan replied: 'Because no one can name its price.'"
(p.95)

On collecting, the collectible and being collected

2009-09-06T02:53:00.000-07:00

On collecting, the collectible and being collected

a short essay by Jeffrey Chan

Are you a ‘collector’? I would be surprised if you are not one. It is human to collect. We collect what is owed to us--we try--but we also collect what fancy us. Therefore all of us perform the act of collecting to some degree. Yet only a handful can justly call ourselves as collectors.

Collectors are not necessarily connoisseurs. As a matter of contrary opinion, I think that collectorship is quite opposed to connoisseurship. You can collect shells for yourself on a lonely island (perhaps to amuse yourself amid this unbearably imaginary loneliness), but there, it is meaningless to call yourself a connoisseur of shells. After all, connoisseurs necessarily demand others who can recognize their connoisseurship, but collectors merely depend on themselves. Besides, one can collect just about anything that can be collected--even for things that do not fit into any collection; but the connoisseur is inclined to stick only to the good taste. Because of this, a connoisseur is likely to have been brainwashed. But as a collector, you just have to be yourself.

However it is said that the collector collects only what is collectible, generally deemed as what is rare. But rarity does nothing to make something collectible, unless rarity also makes the collectible valuable. By value I do not mean monetary value. After all if one collects because high rarity sometimes confers high monetary value, then one is hardly a collector than a merchant, quite ready to liquidate his collection when the price is right. In contrast, a collector is never quite capable of liquidating his collection; he can only dismantle it. No, by value, I am strictly implying the intrinsically valuable. One can only collect what is intrinsically valuable, because the extrinsically valuable is what one sells. Even so, I am not selling the beauty of pebbles or soda caps to you--I cannot--rather, I am suggesting that it is very hard to talk about the intrinsically valuable today even when this is the sole motivation for us to become collectors.

Does this mean that all that is intrinsically valuable is also automatically collectible? I reckon this is a foolish question; but collecting is a fool’s grasp: what is more foolish than collecting that which we can never truly own? I shall nonetheless answer this foolish question as a foolish collector: “no, even though we try”. A genuine smile, a worthy handshake, a good friend or an apt idea are all intrinsically valuable but none of them is collectible. Yet we try to collect them through photos and memories, via websites and books such that we heroically attempt to transcend what is uncollectible by collecting.

By suggesting that we collect all these things, I might have given you the impression that collecting equates accumulating. Nothing is further between these two actions. To collect is intentional; but to accumulate is unintentional. To collect requires an organizing theme or a plan beforehand; but to accumulate one only needs a working credit card and perhaps an all consuming life. A garage sale is the consequence from an accumulation of things--I know, because I had organized one before: I did not quite know I have so much things that had turned into stuff--but a collection is an organized thematization of things. Psychologists tell us that we collect because the collectibles grant us our identities. Yet I tend to think that we have to invent new identities for things before we can begin collecting them.

However vast this range of organizing themes (does one collect based on a certain color, a historical period or a certain appeal?) or plans (how does one begin to collect?) are, all organizing themes or plans for the collectible must include the criterion of either a set or a range. Indeed, a collection is either based on the completion of a finite set or the following of an infinitely expanding range. A collector who aims for the completion of a finite set is historic--he is always on the lookout for that one keystone to complete his collectible set. But a collector who aims for an expanding range is a futurist--he is set on following an infinite set that never ends. Collecting based on a finite set terminates when a set has been completed. However collecting based on an infinite range only terminates when a collector meets his Collector. The ethics of enoughness is therefore quite distinct--while the former rests on completion the latter relies on persistence.

This question of what qualifies as enough or self-limiting unfortunately puts collecting squarely in the vicinity of the moral. After all, E.F. Schumacher has remarked that any activity which fails to recognize a self-limiting principle is of the devil. Since I have not seen the devil working (so far) as a collector of things, going by Schumacher’s remark I must therefore assume that some self-limiting principles are working in the collecting of things. I have observed that many collectors rest on their well-deserved laurels after completing some self-congratulatory sets. Others who are more likely to persist in expanding their infinite collections take the occasional and apologetic hiatus (i.e., ‘my wife has capped my credit limit because she has uncapped hers’). But since I am neither near to the completion of a set, nor am I wedded to a credit-capping wife, I have therefore yet to formulate my own self-limiting principle.

As a matter of fact, collecting is one of the few remaining activities today where one can still find conviction despite the absence of a unifying creed or an organized religion. Go to one of these collectors’ shows--be it stamps, coins, antiques or fountain pens (yes I collect fountain pens)--and I would be surprised if you did not depart without that same glow of having seen God. To collect demands a remarkable level of faith--who knows where or when one would find that particular pen Luftwaffe officers used or that special Etruscan coin? Yet the true collector finds the signs leading to his potential collectible everywhere. Just like the first (and real) Templar who looked up to the sky: in hoc signo vinces (in this sign you will conquer), the collector marches with a truly unstoppable faith in order to find his collectible.

Because faith is inseparable from purpose, it is therefore prudent to ask just what purpose is served by the activity of collecting itself. Beyond the egocentric purpose of congratulating oneself (one has to do this from time to time just to remain sane in this world, I think), one possible and productive purpose is that collecting is also preserving. For this we have the many unstoppable saints of the collectibles to thank; for without their unstoppable efforts, large tracts of human histories would have either remained buried or more likely, bulldozed and razed, and bulldozed again by the quickening bulldozers of commercialism. Of note, I reserve my special thanks to the collectors of old and rare books, those decrepit volumes detailing unfashionable knowledge or oddities despised by both the philistine pedestrian and the peddlers of fashionable science. Largely because of the saintly efforts of such book collectors, some modicum of humanity--our historic ignorance--has been preserved than destroyed by the latest NYT-BS (I mean the New York Times Best Seller list).

Like all worthy questions that ultimately turn upon themselves, if we collect things then what (or whom) collect us? Unlike the foolish question I raised earlier, I like to think that this is a rather relevant question in an age of facebooks and linkedins. In my short life I have witnessed teachers collecting students (yes, but I also read Harry Potter), universities collecting professors and states collecting talents. I don’t really know if teachers actually form sets of their collectible students or if states pander after an infinite range of talents. However what I know is that to collect undeniably also means to exclude.

Frankly, I have no idea if I am being collected by something or someone. I don’t even have a clear opinion if being collected counts as being privileged or unfree. Oddly despite the fact that I have thought a little about collecting things, I am at a total loss on living human beings being collected. Assuming if I am being collected, what or who is collecting me? What is the theme of this collection? Is this collection organized by color, history or some appeal? And assuming if I am not being collected, why am I not being collected? Is it because I do not fit into pre-existing collections based on color, history or some appeal? Or am I actually a collector who cannot be collected?

I don’t presume to have answers to these questions: they are for you to work it out. All I have to chip in here is that to collect is human; and if you have yet to start, it is nice to begin a little collection of something.

Insights and Instigations of Hope

2009-07-19T19:39:00.000-07:00

What is hope? From my own reading, I found three passages that I enjoy very much; and on which I peruse repeatedly.

"...an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die, but in order to begin."

--Hannah Arendt, from 'The Human Condition'

"Thus even one of the Seven Sages says: 'Most people are bad', which is not far from Hobbes' opinion, which until recently

was almost overwhelmingly correct, that man is a wolf to man. But it is all a question of not agreeing with such opinions;

of recognizing the causes from which they will not spring nor need to spring for ever; knowing how bad so many things still

are, but knowing more deeply how good they could be."

--Ernst Bloch, from 'The Principle of Hope, Volume 2'

"I do not know of a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love

for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education

has not utterly ruined them."

--Karl Popper, from 'The Open Society, Volume 1'

Facility X: A Short Story

2009-07-15T19:55:00.000-07:00

Facility X
a short story by Jeffrey Chan

Plausibly, nothing is worst than waiting on death row. Especially at Facility X.

Now, Facility X is not your usual run-of-the mill maximum security prison for psychopathic murderers or criminals against humanity. Quite the opposite, Facility X accommodates just about everyone. Why, I saw a man quite like myself the other day; and I am just an ordinary man.

Indeed, Facility X differs from those run-of-the mill maximum security prison in a few ways. First, everyone waits on death row here; there is no one stuck with a life sentence, nor is anyone privileged with an opportunity for either appeals or paroles. Second, it is said under more ordinary circumstances, one is trialed before imprisonment. But at Facility X, one is hauled here without any reason or knowledge of guilt; and quite instantly, before one could even utter a grunt of a protest, one has been sentenced to the death row.

Now, before you think that Facility X is this bleak and barbaric place just a few extreme rungs below your usual run-of-the mill maximum security prison, I ought to say the following: it is not. Instead of smelly cells, bad food, common bathrooms and cruel wardens--typical features we tend to associate with typical prisons--Facility X provides her inmates with unusually nice private rooms often overlooking an equally nice garden (and yes, personal decoration is encouraged in one’s room but never the garden, which is managed by professional gardeners); savory food and entertainment that have been certified by the Facility’s dietician and the Council for Entertainment (after all, neither the food nor the entertainment is supposed to kill you before your sentence is carried out); private bathroom where modesty is the best policy and perhaps the most unusual of all, polite but firm wardens who are always neatly dressed in grey suits and shiny black shoes. And I have never seen them carrying a baton in all my time at Facility X. Why, just the other day, one of them was politely inviting me to a discussion session.

Even so, getting to know your fellow inmates at Facility X is intensely discouraged. All doors in Facility X--except those leading to the discussion and energy chambers (I shall tell you what those are in a minute)--are never locked but they are almost always closed. If no wardens are wandering about, it is actually quite safe to knock on another inmate’s door. But it is likely, well I shall say very likely, that no one would answer the door. In retrospect, I have only met a handful of inmates in all my time here; and I never had the opportunity to know them better between a taut smile and that subtle nod. Since meals could be served in one’s room at Facility X, inmates always end up eating in their own rooms, which further reinforced that tacit discouragement for general socializing here at Facility X.

No one seems to know where the wardens stay in Facility X. I have never quite figured this out myself. They are always around in full force, night and day, and even on weekends and on public holidays. And when they appear, they are always smiling in their neatly pressed grey suits, even though their smiles are always too taut to be real. They speak politely; though occasionally through my closed door I would overhear harsh words spoken to some poor inmate. Even so, words that follow from that reproach are usually glossed over with more oily politeness. I try hard to limit my conversations with these wardens; and when conversations are unavoidable, I try hard to appease them. So far, I have been successful. We greet each other cordially and I always follow what they tell me to do with the greatest effort on my part trying to seem all too willing.

Even so, these wardens never seemed to remember you personally. In my early days at Facility X, there was this warden with the blackest hair--it could not have been blacker if he dyed it with indian ink--who stopped by one day to invite me to my alloted discussion sessions. Of course I complied. A few days later he stopped by again and invited me to check out a new energy machine that Facility X had just imported from an unknown location. Yet he found me as if he had never met me in his life before. As he talked, his eyes were empty and parched, staring more or less straight through me onto the plastered wall of my room. It was as if I did not need to be there at all. Yet before he bade me goodbye in very much the same way, he gently reminded if I would remember to show up outside discussion chamber 703 at 8:59am the next morning.

Now, you must be wondering what kind of schedule inmates keep at Facility X. There is actually no schedule, except for the usual obligation of participating in one’s alloted discussion session, and reporting at one’s assigned energy chamber. Beyond these obligations and the usual habits one keeps to stay alive--solid eight hours of sleep and three warm meals plus three intervals for tea, mid-morning, afternoon and supper respectively, inmates are rather free to pursue their own forms of entertainment around here. There are few rules, and even fewer incidents of animosity; but there are a great number of books and movies and classes for sewing and cooking. Why, perhaps because of these reasons, most inmates do not seem concerned that they are in fact serving on death row at Facility X. This forgetfulness is further reinforced by the lengthy time towards one’s inevitable end, which can be quite a luxurious drag. But occasionally--and I repeat occasionally--when I catch a glimpse of an empty room all cleared out for a future inmate through a door ajar; or when an incidental ray of sunlight finds ‘Facility X’ printed in tiny, gold-speckled letters at the top of every wardens’ documents, do I realize that I am an inmate waiting on death row in Facility X.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I must be boring you with the trite details of my daily life at Facility X. Perhaps you may find the business of energy chambers and discussion sessions in Facility X more interesting. Perhaps. During my orientation at Facility X quite a while ago, a warden remarked in one surprising moment of unabashed pride that energy chambers are the definitive hallmark of Facility X. I reckon that there are approximately about a thousand chambers located across Facility X (and I am only guessing since I have only been to chamber 989 and chamber 008, and walking past nearly every number in between). In the energy chamber I have visited, there are two columns of twenty four machines; each column neatly aligned and positioned in parallel to the other. Now, no one seems to know the scientific name of these machines, so at Facility X I have plainly and by convention, adopted the name, ‘energy machines’, since after all, they harvest energy from the inmates.

These energy machines, or at least the ones I have seen and used, resemble a mongrel breed between a treadmill and a cockpit. An energy machine is roughly nine feet in length and about three feet wide, hollowed out in the middle where a black rubber film runs the entire length of the machine. The machines I have seen are all made of a dull metal, unnumbered and unpainted, and the only thing that is ever colorful in them is the human body itself.

In an energy machine, an inmate has the choice of either walking briskly in it, like a treadmill within the hollowed section, or lying down completely on the black rubber film, strapped to the machine like a corpse in a coffin. In either position, an inmate is connected to multiple grey cables with a face mask strapped across his face. I was told that these multiple grey cables, which all end in tiny sticky discs that are stuck to different parts of the body--quite a few in sensitive places--draw energy from the body, while the face mask provides air and absorbs nutrient rich carbon dioxide from the inmate during a typical energy withdrawal session. When an inmate is fully attached to these cables in his chosen position--either walking briskly on the treadmill or passively lying down in the machine--two large but thin monitors are lowered, one before the inmate so that he could observe his own vital signals and energy contributions, while the other displaying the same information faced a common corridor between the two columns of machines for that supervising warden in charged of the chamber.

According to my orientation warden, there are multiple versions of energy machines. But they all do the same thing although the newer ones perform much more efficiently--all these machines harvest energy from the inmates at Facility X. A typical session lasts about six hours, with two staggered tea breaks for rest. There is even a proper meal time of an hour alloted between the third and the fourth hour. But at the same time, these staggered breaks ensure that inmates do not get to talk to each other. It is quite possible for any inmate to stop at any one time, although the warden may demand a valid reason for doing so.

Initially, there was some physical discomfort, even pain, when those tiny discs at the end of the grey cables stuck too close to the skin for comfort’s sake. But surely as that warden said, all discomforts gradually ebbed, soon to be displaced by a general sense of monotony and that uneasy burden of meaninglessness. And sometimes, a pervading sense of gloom. Usually however, the pace of this energy harvesting is leisurely and as far as I could observe so far, inmates do not seem to mind at all. And usually for me, I ended up becoming more exhausted from the monotony of the hours spent in that confined space trying to keep myself sentient (yes, I very much prefer not to walk briskly in that thing) than for any real energy harvested from my body. After all, staring at that monitor with jumping numbers is the least interesting thing to do in the world, and falling asleep is strictly forbidden in an energy machine. This is perhaps why some inmates greatly prefer the option of walking briskly in the machine. And as far as I know, spending time in an energy machine occupies most of what every inmate does at Facility X.

Anyhow one day, the curious question of where all my ‘energy contributions’ were going to struck me. I remember that I was filled with a great reservation on whether I ought to ask this question, which occurred to me even then that it bordered on the unbecoming. But by the time I had detached the final sticky disc from my body, any remaining reservation had been utterly vanquished by my curiosity.

Cautiously, I approached the portly supervising warden of chamber 008 that day. Perpetually plastered with a tiny gray smile, she did not seem surprised as I approached her. I recall she tried to smile all the more, although the vast expanse of her grayish face did much to conceal any real extension of that smile. But just as I opened my mouth, her smile vanished instantly. I stuttered; but nonetheless, succeeded in masquerading my question as a general concern on where my energy contributions went. To this day, I could still remember her smattering of an answer. It was as if she was caught off guard; or perhaps the real answer never existed. “Oh well...the Great Society...the Government, and for the...many homes of the Earth and their appliances, which in any case must be for the society...” and so went on for a minute or two like a snake trying to catch its tail before suddenly, she became aware that she had in fact ran out of all sensible answers. There and then, she fixed a stare on me that I shall never forget as long as I lived in Facility X. It was a cold and empty stare, devoid of humanity and pronouncingly demonic.

I have never dared to raise a follow-up question on that matter again; nor have I witnessed another inmate approaching that level of foolhardiness as I had unwittingly suffered that day. But like every encounter with a warden in Facility X, she did not seem to remember our unfortunate encounter when I reported to chamber 008 again a few days later, greeting me with her usual tiny smile while I stepped into the chamber in great trepidation. Up till today, I still do not know if this warden was intentionally forgetful or in fact, she was acting rather mercifully whenever I see her in chamber 008.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Now, the business of discussion sessions in Facility X is something else. For the uninitiated, it may even sound a tad too morbid. Incontrovertibly, Facility X differs again from the usual run-of-the mill prisons by never fully specifying the method for one’s death sentence ahead of time. Instead, different possibilities for one’s death sentence are debated and discussed endlessly in one of these discussion sessions (if one is lucky--I shall explain why). Sometimes, this sessions take a good four to five hours of one’s precious time. Although I have yet to decide if these sessions are a waste of time, they are however, rarely edifying.

Most intriguingly, an inmate is always given some discretion on deciding the method of his or her own death sentence, although the exact degree of this discretion has never been completely divulged. Why, this discretion is mysteriously confined to the willing press of a yellow button.

Just the other day, after the discussion machine had simmered down, I was warmly invited to approach the long mahogany desk where twelve vials of what seemed to be barbiturate sat awaiting my inspection. I was told that a few vials were rather sweet and sticky, like autumn Muscato, and one particular vial with a clear liquid nearly tasteless. Before I could quite decide by taste which vial would be more ideal, one senior warden--who looked more like a doctor than a warden--gently chimed in that I could also elect to consume from another vial (which he also hinted should taste rather salty) by having small doses from that vial added to my food over a period of time. Before this senior warden could actually finish this suggestion, three other senior wardens sitting next to him started a rousing debate on whether his recommendation would work. Apparently, I was still quite a young and healthy lad, perhaps not susceptible to the cumulative effects of slow poisoning yet.

Debates like these are common sights in all discussion sessions. Each discussion session--or at least all the ones I have attended--are chaired by seven senior wardens before a large but slender glassy inverted cone structure filled with countless tiny colored balls (mostly white) within a hollow ovoid discussion chamber. This large inverted cone structure is the ‘discussion machine’, which dispenses color-coded balls prescribing the method for one’s death sentence.

A discussion machine comprises of a great many interlocking spirals--like a nautilus shell but only more convoluted--within its glassy structure. Rising about thirty-five feet in height and spanning nearly twenty-five feet in diameter at the top of the machine before tipping to a mere six inches at the bottom, one marvels at how this inverted conical machine can even stand up on its own. Nine glassy pipes feed different colored balls into the machine from the ceiling of the chamber. In this machine, these tiny, countless colored balls circulate ceaselessly like blood in living but spirally interlocking capillaries. Within each interlocking spiral, colored balls clash and collide; bouncing and jumping onto another trajectory while others rush on in their place. Ultimately, ten colored balls are ejected from the tip of the inverted cone onto a stainless steel trough the size of a long ashtray in front of everyone in the chamber. These ten colored balls then prescribe the fate of the inmate.

Now, if this is all there is to the discussion machine it would seem unwholesomely deterministic. Before each of these senior wardens there is also a green button, which can be pushed multiple times in any discussion session depending on their mood for that occasion. Each push of the green button introduces eighty or so green balls into the machine from one of the nine glassy pipes suspended over the machine. Similarly, there is a yellow button before the inmate. Pushing this yellow button introduces about seven hundred yellow balls into the machine from the same pipes above. The yellow button perhaps represents the ultimate discretion on the part of the inmate to affect the outcome of his verdict; or perhaps, just to introduce an element of uncertainty into this whole business of death specification. Nevertheless, the inmate is only permitted to push this yellow button once.

Civilly, everyone takes their turn in pushing the buttons, with the inmate last in doing so. The discussion machine then speeds up into a transparent twirl of countless twirling colored balls--white, green, yellow, and occasionally, uncommon streaks of reds and some blurred blues--spiraling along the entire section of the machine at dizzying speeds. Despite the machine’s ungainly invertedness, it seems to brace up all the more elegantly like a spinning top awakened by its own momentum. Indeed, it is quite a sight to behold this machine as its internal twirling speeds up; it hums with a certain focused energy that always end with some prescriptions for death.

The discussion machine is permitted to twirl and churn its countless colored balls like that for a while. I have never tried counting the time, because like everyone in the chamber--the seven senior wardens, plus the warden accompanying me, all nine of us--we are usually transfixed on that beautiful machine of unspeakable raw power. But when the machine finally stops, ten tiny colored balls are dispensed onto a stainless steel trough before us all. It is possible for these ten balls to be composed of an assortment of different colors, or for all ten to be all of the same color: either white, green, yellow, or even red or blue. I was told that no one really knows the number of colored balls in the machine at any one time (at least because each of these senior warden could effectively introduce more green balls by pressing their button more than once, which sometimes cannot be differentiated from tapping one’s fingers in great impatience from the vantage point of the inmate). But it is reasonable to say that there are always more white balls than any colored balls; and far fewer reds and blues than greens or yellows as far as I could observe. While there are many tiny colored balls at any one time, their numbers are by no means infinite.

There is an entire science for decoding the possible permutations of these ten colored balls. I shall not bother explaining to you what each possible permutation means, either by sequence or by an aggregation of colors, because it is like reading tea leaves. Yet, I was told that all ten balls of either red or blue have never turned up before in the entire history of Facility X. Similarly, all greens and all yellows are unheard of as well. Perhaps there are always fewer than ten of reds and blues in the machine--I am simply guessing here. Really, I did not want to know what a straight ace of reds, blues, greens or yellows entail for the inmate, especially at Facility X. On the other hand, a straight ace of ten white balls has happened quite a few times before. In this unfortunate event when an inmate receives ten white balls as the outcome of the machine, the death sentence is promptly served at an undisclosed location in Facility X--according to the prescription for death etched on the first or last white ball.

Most of the time however, inmates tend to receive a mixture of colored balls. Often in my experience, it is mostly white inter-dispersed with one or two greens or yellows; and perhaps in exceeding rare occasions, maybe a red or a blue. As far as my discussion sessions went, the implications of receiving these rare colored balls were never clear. So far, I noticed that a red ball in the pack of ten would earn me a few frowns, while a blue ball always made quite a few senior wardens smile openly. By the way, I have never received more than either one red or one blue in all my allotments of ten colored balls.

However clearly, on all the white balls are etched some prescription for the method of one’s death sentence. In all my experience at these sessions, I have only observed very humane methods such as dignified poison ingestion, or carbon monoxide poisoning, or some other measures akin to these two; but certainly nothing violent like bludgeoning, hanging, or the firing squad, although I have overheard a senior warden once said that a small number of white balls etched with these options are always among the countless humane ones twirling in the machine at any one time.

As I said before, in most instances (fortunately, I might add), inmates would receive ten colored balls comprising of some whites, greens and yellows. One single green ball represents a defensive position to be taken up by one senior warden who would then argue on the behalf of the inmate--mostly on why he thinks the methods prescribed by the white balls are unsuitable for the inmate. A single yellow ball permits the inmate to argue on his or her own behalf, although an intelligent inmate always relinquishes this right to the senior warden, who in any case, always make a more compelling case on the inmate’s behalf. And so two green balls make for two defensive positions, and two yellow balls for two defensive rights on the part of the inmate, and so on. The amusing thing is of course when the inmate receives only a mixture of green and yellow balls. In that event or so I heard, the discussion session is promptly canceled with great consternation on the spot, and another session scheduled in the near future. Till this day, I am still unable to make up my mind if the inmate who received a mixture of only green and yellow balls has lucked out, or if he has merely procrastinated the inevitability of his death sentence.

In any case, I should return to that incident on examining the twelve vials of barbiturate the other day. During that discussion session, I received the verdict of six white balls, three green balls and one yellow ball; and of that yellow ball I cleverly ceded my rights back to the senior wardens involved in my session. Incidentally, all the six white balls I received simultaneously prescribed dignified lethal poisoning, which according to a soft murmur echoing in that chamber, had not happened for quite a while. And there and then, just as a vivid demonstration that all prescriptions for death on those white balls have their corresponding material artifacts, twelve vials of what seemed to be different concoctions of barbiturate were immediately presented before me. I was then warmly invited to come forward to inspect these vials of liquid death.

Honestly, I did not know what to think of my good fortune of getting six instead of ten white balls, even though I was quite aware of that absurd tussle between the uncertainty of the method but the certain inevitability of death for myself. As I began my lackluster inspection of these vials, four of the senior wardens began arguing among themselves on why ingesting poison was unsuited for me. That was when the doctor-like senior warden suggested that the poisonous liquid in one particular vial could be added in small doses in my food over time, which was tantamount to a different take on poison ingestion but at the same time, likely to amount to the same outcome of death. Without remorse, his dignified suggestion was quite consistent to the judicial values that had invented the discussion machine.

Like most discussions, that one ended without clear insights or further specification for the method of my death sentence. Truly, these discussion sessions so far only burdened me with ever greater uncertainties on the manner of my death, even though as far as the death sentence is concerned, it is all quite certain. For a period of time after that particular session, I looked at the food I eat differently. But now I have stopped doing so. For after a while, surely and nonetheless, I will be a dead man at Facility X.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

StationeryMad

On the plight of the Somalians

On mining ores

On the idea of living in the solution

On a Drift to Low Performance

On Design Ethics, Design Awareness and Design Education

On Human Dignity (1)

Between Sociological Imagination and the Geographical Imagination

What is utopia for?

A Critique of the Creative Class

'Palindrome' from Ed Soja

On the criterion of beauty in architecture

Luxe, calme, et volupte

Imageability without Legibility

Loss, Continuity and Renewal

Spanish Proverb

On sports car

On freedom

松尾芭蕉

A refreshing viewpoint: The Enigma of Capital

In Remembrance of Aino Paasonen

A Short Essay on the Idea of Waste

The Wisdom of a Philosopher

The idea of Interior Elevations

A quote from Emmanuel Levinas

即無殃保 何來環保 ?

Taichi hand movement in water

The idea of the Guarantor

The Design Thinking Movement and the designing of Lifeworlds

Notes on Vertical Urban Farming

Notes on My Educational Philosophy

Protecting our Ecology and the Awareness for Life* (translated)

Life as Decision(-making)

Steward or Sorcerer's Apprentice?

The Purpose of Mathematics Education?

Ought one buy a book for its cover too?

On collecting, the collectible and being collected

Insights and Instigations of Hope

Facility X: A Short Story

即無殃保何來環保 ?