This conversation on Second-order design fiction is part of an ongoing collective research project by Fry and Perera on Technology, Cosmotechnics, Design and Resistance. In their conversation Fry and Perera explore the concept of second-order design fiction (SoDF) as an emergent means of addressing how design is understood and practiced in the context of the contemporary ecological crisis. They propose how SoDF can be considered a potential alternative to the ‘crisis of representation’ that contributes significantly to the complications related to finding ways out of unsustainable practices. SoDF is not a how-to instruction, but neither is it an activity without a function. SoDF sets up a meta-narrative, a prefigurative political message, that can assist in writing the brief for a complex problem that does not bring forth a reductionist solution. As such, it delinks the better-known concept of ‘design fiction’ — a methodological tool often used in the imagination of futures — from its preoccupation with objects, technology, and technocratic global north projected views of the future and innovation, to focus on the intersectionality of the crisis of the present. More broadly, SoDF as a tool is also a means to empower those critical thinkers who, regardless of arriving at design from other disciplines, have the transformative agency required to deal with the complexity of our times, the end times.
Fry’s body of work — known to many via his numerous essays and books — attempts to explore the complex relationship between design, politics, and unsustainability. His definition of what unsustainability means in relation to contemporary crisis discourse (or discourse on end times) and mainstream sustainability discussion appears in his books such as Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics, and New Practice (2009) and Defuturing: A New design Philosophy (2020). The need to pursue the same questions of unsustainability and crisis simultaneously as a crisis of the political imagination is highlighted in books such as Design in the Borderlands (edited with Eleni Kalantidou) (2014), Unstaging War (2019), and A New Political Imagination (co-authored with Madina Tlostanova) (2021). Fry’s readers would find transversal lines of connections between the arguments and suggestions appearing in these books as his critical perspective on the role of design in end times is one that takes design beyond its containment by a specific discourse. It also deals with design as seen from what theorist Donald Schön (1983) identified as the ‘swampy lowlands’ of practice, where theory is not an extraneous matter but a way of making sense of the complexity of practice. Fry’s design engagement with crisis in post-conflict situations in Timor-Leste and Colombia, and role as director of the EcoDesign Foundation from 1992-2002 and most recently engagement in questions of practice as the director of the Studio at the Edge of the World has always influenced his writings.
These practical questions are at the center of his most recent publication Writing Design Fiction: Relocating a City in Crisis (2021). Part story, part methodological discussion, the book addresses the methodological issues designers have in framing complex issues. The book introduces a methodological tool to engage with this complexity identified as a ‘second-order design fiction.’ In this conversation, we hope to discuss this concept of a ‘second-order design fiction’ (SoDF) while at the same time try to understand how this concept fits within Fry’s larger body of work related to questions of unsustainability and the questions concerning the imagination of futures when designing within end times.
DP: Considering that there might be readers who are not entirely familiar with your projects and their evolution, would you like to explain some of the core ideas that drive the methodological discussion in the book?
TF: I speak from the End Times, which means recognizing we all everywhere exist in a condition of uncertainty, without any clear sense of direction. Rather than have a sense of progress we have a sense of unsettlement: for many it is a material reality, for most it is an unacknowledged or repressed psychology.
Design for me is a vastness. It is our species ability to prefigure before we act; design is anthropologically and ontologically elemental to our being. Phenomenally the world we live in is a world of design. Not just in terms of the extent of the fabricated but also in the directive designing power of the cosmology that we are born into – we are not born into a world but the world prefigures our knowing, being and acting meaningfully. We are born into a semiosphere observed epistemologically. That designs how we see everything. As Plato put it, we see with our minds, not our optical instruments, our eyes. Ontologically, our mind and our body are indivisibly shaped by the material and immaterial specificity of our being in the world, which in turn elementally reaches out and shapes this world. Crucially, the hand mediates the recursive relation between mind, body and world.
Mostly the way design is written about and taught, and especially is presented in media, is small and object focused. Which is to say the discourse of design does not acknowledge and embrace the extent of the ontologically designing agency of the designed world. As will be shown, ‘second-order design fiction’ (SoDF) is introduced in part to overcome this structural condition of limitation. As such it is one of the emergent means of expanding the way design is understood and practiced.
DP: Second-order design fiction seems to relate to notions of design fiction, one of the most-used contemporary scenario planning tools by all kinds of futurist practices. For example, two well-known instances where design fiction has been used extensively is in the work of Near Future Laboratory by Julian Bleecker, who associates design fiction with ‘diegetic prototyping,’ and in the work of Dunne and Raby, where design fiction appears as a tool to speculate on utopian and dystopian realities and critically engage with these futures in the present. In what sense is your re-definition of the term different from these existing practices?
TF: I am not going to direct my comments to specific people or projects. The current condition of limitation of design fictions is not uniformly evident – it arrives with variation and difference.
So said, what SoDF does is to de-centre and delink design fictions from a preoccupation with objects and technology. It exposes the insufficiency of a technocentric, and global north projected view of the future disarticulated from the inter-relational crisis of being now. This view is evident in the reductive afterlife of modernity. The flawed emancipatory claim of modernity was progress equated to the realization of a unified world delivered by ‘development’ underscored by capitalism and a ‘humanitarian’ ethos. Globalization displaced this ambition by reducing it to a universalized supply chain and market. Now in the deep and deepening relational environmental crisis heralded by, but not adequately defined by the Anthropocene, the announcement of the commencement of the sixth extinction event, the fragmentation of the world order, and the absence of any political ideology able to comprehend let alone address the complexity of this situation, progress has become totally conflated with technology. It has been posited as the agent of salvation and the techno-evolutionary destiny of human being: the transhuman. As such, technology portends the eventual abandonment of others (the displaced and the dispossessed), the self (the subject of hominoid being) and in the end the planet (as evoked by ‘project Mars’). All this is a possible, but not an assured future. Technology, as integral to our becoming in difference, is inescapable. But it’s form can be contested – cosmotechnics is an emergent example to become aware of.
To date, design fictions have had an uncritical relation to the projected technological construction of reality, a colonizing power, that exposes their misplaced telos. In significant part this error results from an inadequate understanding of temporal plurality. Our species does not exist existentially in the same space-time, nor can it be so positioned. This intent being part of the flaw of modernity’s knot of development. Geo-differentially, the future travels towards a specific ‘us’ from the consequences of past actions. At a very general level climate change is an example. Current greenhouse gas emissions compound with those of the past (of several hundred years) and produce impacts coming toward us from the future. Another more specific example is that many delta cities around the world were created because the land was fertile, rivers made the transport of extraction of material possible, they provided good harbors for ships – all of which facilitated conditions for trade. But deltas are prone to flooding. In the past this was lived with, the economic advantages being greater than the environmental cost. Now with sea level rises this is no longer the case. Many of these cities are fated. A future is traveling toward them that will destroy them.
Design fictions to date are mostly clean, and aestheticized. They often arrive as exhibited expressions of design avant-gardism. What they diegetically speak and advance does not reveal the extractive genesis of things brought into being, nor their defuturing potentiality. As such they replicate an insufficient consideration of defuturing causality intrinsic to the world of invention, technology, and material and immaterial production. In this instrumentalized world people know what they are doing but do not comprehend the consequences. This is especially so with the arrival of psychotechnologies of mind and memory.
DP: You bring to our attention the ‘defuturing potentiality’ of design and how design de-futures as much as brings forth a certain future. Defuturing as a concept is almost antithetical to the innovation narratives that relate design to progress, which we hear from contemporary think tanks and industry. Your position also alludes to the problems we have in identifying design via the narratives provided by the industry and its economics. Would you like to explain this notion of ‘defuturing potentiality’ a bit more, perhaps with an example from your own experiences?
TF: Defuturing is intrinsic to the past, present, and future of design. It is grounded in the dialectic character of creation and its indivisible relation to destruction amplified by industrial production. What thereafter occurred was that the rate of material extraction and the impacts of the means of its transformation into a commodity form exceeded any ability for natural systems to recover. The structural condition of unsustainability enabled by extractivism, capitalism and consumerism constituted the passage of defuturing into its present critical condition. What defuturing makes clear is that the unthinking of thinking in design, innovation, production, and consumption is the failure to grasp that the dialectical relation of creation and destruction is fundamentally an ethical issue. As a result, the economic embodiment of this failure means the economy of globally hegemonic capitalism is unethical at a most fundamental level. This means that the moral redress to capitalism is not attained by the primary goal of overcoming inequity, but in the first instance by resolution by design of defuturing (see Fry 2020) as a basis for Sustainment as the futural order. Without this order, however it is created, and in all our difference, will not have a future.
DP: This point when you refer to ‘sustainment’ and ‘futural order’ is ideal to discuss the relationship that has been alluded to within your book, between the term SoDF and the second-order cybernetic notion of ‘recursion,’ particularly as it relates to the ways in which designers go about knowing and being in the world. In second-order cybernetics, recursivity has a lot to do with the entangled observer-observed position. It is important to note that although recursivity is often used as a general term for looping, which often gets confused with repetition, this loop in the case of second-order cybernetics is more like a spiral. So, the connection between the doer and what is done is not a mere feedback loop but a recursive loop. Heinz von Foerster, the father of second-order cybernetics, defined the distinction between first-order cybernetics and second-order cybernetics by suggesting that the former is the cybernetics of the observed systems while the latter is the cybernetics of the observing system. He pointed out that the observer who enters the system not only stipulates the system’s purpose but also can stipulate his purpose within this system. Awareness of this recursive entanglement is also, according to von Foerster, a call to take responsibility for our actions. How have you accommodated this idea within your notion of ‘second-order design fiction’?
TF: Second-order design fictions directly articulate with ontological design, which is the fundamental essence of design as event – namely, seeing ourselves as a designing/designed species historico-futurally. The recognition that that which we design, designs us as we design. This process for us begins with our being born into a designed world and our becoming ‘human’ by exposure to the designing agency of the ‘things’ of this world, which, in turn, our collective actions change by design for better or worse. Thus, we do not die in the same world into which we were born. This endless spiral mirrors second-order cybernetics at a higher order and concrete level.
Fundamentally, SoDF means repositioning the designer’s placement before the act of design. The point is not to end up with a fiction, but a place, in the context of the ‘complexity of complexity’ (as it names a complexity that is acknowledged but is beyond our understanding of complexity) from which to define what to design.
There are three stages:
1. The first stage is the adoption (the taking of the selected problem into ownership) of a complex design problem. In my book Writing Design Fiction I wrote and included a novella on the story of relocating a city – this in every respect of what a city is materially, socio-culturally, economically and more. This is a very complex design ‘problem’ situated in the complexity of a changing climate that has no reducible design solution, form or image. The narrative arrives out of experience, knowledge of urban design, culture and so on of an observed past.
2. The second stage is to make observations on the inadequacy of what was observed, not least the unseen, the absences. This means recognizing the conditions of onto-epistemological limitation of observation that arrived with observing the observed. This is to say, what we see is delimited by what we know. Thus, when a story that recounts observations is reviewed, and limitations of knowledge are identified, so also are limitations of seeing. For example, if a collection of machine components are viewed on a table and are recognized as parts of a particular machine they are seen as part of a whole. Without this knowledge they are just seen as a collection of related or not related components.
3. What the reviewing process of 1 and 2 enables is the writing of the brief for addressing the complex design problem. The brief is the ‘meta-design,’ or designing of what is to be designed. Without command of the brief the designer is a subordinate design agent, and so is a service provider designing what at the most fundamental level has already been designed as a future.
SoDF is therefore a means by which designers acquire autonomy. What this implies is that the designers become independent designing agents. They identify and select the projects they work on. In so doing they define the design problem or issues to engage, in contrast to them being defined by a client. They equally have to find a way to gain an income from this activity. The simplest perspective here is that if a problem is selected for which a solution is wanted, then there is a good chance it will be paid for. Becoming entrepreneurial then becomes an activity that requires to be developed.
DP: You have mentioned elsewhere that there is no outside to capitalism, yet that it is possible to work against it from within as ‘inside-outsiders.’ You call this a form of a ‘redirective practice.’ How would this process of writing SoDFs feed into a redirective practice? Would you argue that developing such SoDFs should become part of formal design school curriculums?
TF: Capitalism requires crisis to drive the new to propel economic growth. Redirective practice asserts the imperative of transforming what already exists. It is counter to extractive economic development – it is postdevelopment. It is about repair, retrofitting and metrofitting. It is about recovery. It is about eco-nomy, eco-logos. The law of planetary home-making and home- keeping. It implies not adding to the curricula of the design school, and all other schools, but transforming them. There is no position from which to overcome capitalism, but there are emergent conditions of massive environmental impact costs that will radically transform the material conditions of exchange, inequity, and capital accumulation.
Currently, design education is dominantly an education in error directed at sustaining the unsustainable and subordinating design to survival. Why? Because it fails to grasp and address the ‘dialectic of sustainment,’ which means failing to comprehend and take responsibility for the fact that whenever we create, we also destroy. Behind every computer, house, car, washing machine, TV set and every other manufactured thing is the violence of extractive industries and the mountain of waste of the discarded. The fundamental ethical question does not arrive. Does what I have designed justify what it will destroy? This is not an argument against the necessity of creation, but against its uncritical insufficiency. The dialectic of sustainment exposes the need to transform design education at the most fundamental level, which emplaces the enormous importance of redirective practice. The challenge that comes with these observations is the need to establish and educate the autonomous, as already indicated, independent designer not overdetermined by the designing of the client’s brief. This means two orders of design education. The first is to have learnt to understand the criticality and strategic significance of design in the world. Out of this acquired knowledge opportunities can be identified. Second is to have design capability to design in a way informed by this knowledge.
DP: From very early on in your work, you describe the problems we have in dealing with the contemporary ecological crisis (environmental, social, psychological) as a crisis of representation. The idea that designers/design practices struggle to deal with the ‘complexity of complexity’ and the fact that this leads to a ‘crisis of crisis’ has been discussed by you quite often. To put this in other words, you argue for frameworks that do not produce immediate solutions but instead make the complexity of the design problem more present. In what ways does SoDF support this process?
TF: There is a general point to make that frames how we all think about representation. The complexity of complexity creates a crisis of crisis that is a crisis of representation wherein the relational complexity of the compound crisis is not represented. Media modes of representation present critical conditions disaggregated from the relational complexity of crisis. Fragments thus get read as totalities. Likewise, theorists and activists situated in their specific discourse present, for example, the Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, geopolitical insecurity, unrestrictive warfare, the sixth extinction event, etc. as representations of the crisis of our times. But in foregrounding their specific concern they mislead. The crisis as suggested is a compound complexity that is relationally dynamic. The inadequate representation of ‘crisis’ means we unevenly and globally occupy an ecology of the image of restrictive vision. The crisis does not arrive because of a fear crisis. It is deferred, avoided. This in turn constitutes a crisis of politics and leadership and a massive disjuncture between how the present is governed, how the future is seen, and the actual future that is unfolding.
We in our difference do not see our worlds as they need to be seen to prompt action. To reiterate, the dialectical relation between creation and destruction goes unseen. The preoccupation with creativity and creation, and the neglect of the presence of destruction (often concealed by ‘beauty’) misdirects. The represented image of the world directly connects to how we act in the world. What I am identifying here is not a superficial condition easily corrected but an ontological condition whose changing requires learning another way of seeing and recognizing what Plato made clear two and a half thousand years ago: we see with our mind, not our eyes. This is not to abstract seeing as cognition but to recognize sight as ontological, as are all senses. They are intrinsic to our being in a sense-able world. Here is the fundamental difference between seeing a picture and being in the picture. The world I see framed by my ‘picture’ window does not equate with the world I sense when I step out into it. The problem we have with so many problems of the world is that they arrive as representations. We experience the weather, we learn about climate change and maybe interpret experiences of the weather via the mediation of images and knowledge gained, but we don’t see climate change.
SoDF as indicated makes a distinction between the design problem being designated and the process of making it present. The ability of design thinking to identify and understand causality at a fundamental level is weak. This means the preoccupation with solutions is facile. Like it or not design is situated in the defuturing conditions of challenges in which our species is immersed. In the pursuit of solutions there are some problems that can be solved (although many often not self-evidently, which means they may or may not be), and there are also problems that cannot be solved but that invite adaptation – action that responds to circumstantial change. Then there are those that cannot be solved or adapted to. In this context, making present is the bringing of the representation of the problem into question.
DP: One issue that designers often deal with is the commonsense notion of progress that is often associated with the concept of a particular future. One can argue that neoliberalism (or capitalism in general) operates via fictions of linear progress and unlimited growth. These fictions, in turn, influence ‘facts’ or which set of factual information is considered more important than the others. It seems that second-order fiction as an approach, with its emphasis on recursivity, seems to complicate this relationship between fact and fiction further and provide an alternative framework where the facts and fiction could form another relationship. Is that so? Could you elaborate on this a bit further?
TF: Fact and fiction are not a binary. Transition from one to the other is contingent on an available means (extant or futural). In design they are mediated by imagination – fact is generative of fiction, and fiction of fact. The linking agent of imagination in the process is ‘concept’, and it is the situated viability of it, or not, that when it exists enables the passage from the one to the other to occur. In design in general, and specifically SoDF, fiction travels ahead of fact and brings it into being. What at one moment in time is a fiction of impossible realization at another is realized. Flying, organ transplants, splitting the atom, seeing, and having a conversation with someone on the other side of the world are but a few obvious examples.
Fictions also can, and do, function to bring fact into question and in doing so challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. As such they reveal the problematic character of truth carried by ‘common sense’ as the harbinger of a truth claim. Here one needs to draw the distinction Antonio Gramsci made between common sense (the unquestioned) and good sense (critical judgement). At what point does the fiction of a design idea become a fact? Is design the fiction and the designed the fact?
Etymologically fiction comes from the Latin fictionem, a ‘fashioning’ from the meaning of fingere: to shape, form, devise; and also from fictilis: made of clay, a fictor (maker) or moulder (evident in the seventeenth-century English usage of fictor as sculptor). By the thirteenth century there emerges the word ficcion (French) meaning invention, fabrication; then two centuries later, ficcioun is an invention of the mind. By the sixteenth century this meaning extended to prose works created by the imagination and then in the seventeenth (English) fictum means deception, fiction.
Against the backdrop SoDF is a means that aspires to bring the fiction of a designing event into being. In this respect it has a larger ambition than design fiction bringing a diegetic prototype, product, specific technology or service into being.
DP: How you address the ontology of things has always been an important aspect of your work. In other words, you frame contemporary designers’ inadequate understanding of complex relationality as an inability to deal with the ‘reality’ of these relations. It is a critique on how designers frame current complexity issues as epistemological questions when they are ontological questions (metaphysical). In this sense your argument has a lot of resonance with the ontological turn propagated by other design thinkers such as Arturo Escobar and Ezio Manzini, to name a few. However, I am aware that you frame this ontology via thinking through Heidegger. In what ways do you think these notions of creating second-order fictions help us deal with the ontology of design (the real)?
TF: Design, ontology and Heidegger provide a set of relations that are generative, as said in much of my work, most significantly in SoDF as it presents design and the designed as ‘event’ with nascent designing potential.
First of all, Heidegger’s notion of the ‘thinging of things’ (1975: 163-186) provides a basis of understanding what is brought into being by design goes on designing as a result of its performative qualities. His famous example being the hammer, its ‘thinging’ and essence being hammering. The designing of a hammer in one direction has a consequence for what it is applied to, but equally also upon the hammerer. Specifically, it has an ontological designing consequence. Hammering is a skill. Doing it often results in changes in hand and eye coordination, and in the muscles of the hammerer’s arm. So, living in a world of things, as we use them they use us to realize what they are designed to be, and in doing so have a profound design consequence. We can call some of these consequences ‘the design event.’ What making this move does is shift design into a larger register wherein it is situated in an elaborated relational field of problems to which design can affirmatively engage in its plurality.
The critical factor in Heidegger’s understanding of technology is that he did not reduce and define it as substance – a something. Rather he viewed it as embracing the instrument, the technological object, as being indivisible from instrumentalism become metaphysics. It is from this understanding that he viewed cybernetics as the end of philosophy. By implication it follows that technology cannot have an embodied essence because it is not a singular thing. Rather, he understood essence and the performative character of the technological object. Here then is a link from Heidegger to Simondon’s notion of a technology/nature nexus – now evident in the naturalized artificiality of much of the extant world of our existence most directly evidenced by biotechnologies. Bringing this thinking to design, specifically ontological design, design can be seen as performative beyond an assigned function, hence it being viewed as an event (appropriation – Heidegger), or occurrence (Deleuze, Badiou). I have addressed this especially in thinking the city. The city appropriates things to it, it draws them in; it is an occurrence, it is a locus of dynamic change, it has a metabolism. Consequently ‘we’ design cities elementally, but they equally design us.
What SoDF does is describe the reversal of this process by starting with the fictive designing of a design event as a way to approach the design it is actually designing. Put another way, rather than designing things the event defines what things relationally need to be designed. The underlying story of a SoDF is a metanarrative – it always is annunciating something beyond its immediate narrative content. So, while the story of relocating a city is illustrative of thinking toward this action it is also a prefigurative political message.
What the narrative and its supporting information does is weave the relational elements together in a way that makes what has to be designed/is being designed clear. It is not ‘how to’ instruction. This does not mean this activity is without a function. Rather it is an invitation to think what is to be designed (that is why the end point is the writing of a design brief).
DP: What do you see as the broader potential of SoDF? Moreover, do you see yourself continuing to work on this topic?
TF: Besides viewing it as a means that can assist in the writing of a brief for a complex problem that does have a reducible solution, I see it as an extension of designing by the slowly growing number of thinkers (anthropologists, philosophers, literary theorists etc.) who have become interested in design. This is the obverse of the popularization of d.i.y design software products, and the trivialization of design by so many designers. The scale and complexity of the design challenges now demanding to be confronted needs far better educated designers who understand something of the complexity of the world in which they will work. Likewise, there are critical thinkers who can acquire greater transformative agency by engaging with design, and SoDF gives them a means to do this.
Finally, it should be recognized that all I have tried to do is to liberate SoDF. I will continue to work with it. In fact, I am just finishing a full-length novel. However, its fate rests with who appropriates the idea and what they do with it.
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