The undesignthinking manifesto

We are enduring a crisis of the new.

Where this critique has been launched before, it has been by elitists looking upon aesthetics and daily habits and trying desperately to renegotiate their power. Ours is different, a slow recognition realized in our unaffordable apartments and at the coffeehouse or corporate jobs we can’t leave; ours is a new kind of crisis precisely because those critics of the past have succeeded, silently.

It is a crisis because it threatens everything and because it portends the end of history, alongside nuclear threat, ecological disaster, and antibiotic resistance: yes, we are of the generations haunted daily by myriad shadows of extinction. And yet if or as long as we survive, this is the silent gearbox on which the rest turn. The proof is in a single question: has there ever been a population before who wanted the end of times this badly?

We reject not artistic expression whatever its form but the foundations themselves, a system of capitalistic frivolity and digital surveillance hell-bent on feeding our past selves forward into the future, keeping us who we were, caged-in, predictable, in wait. On the streets, flooded by extreme temperatures and electric light, the cry masked within these manifold manifestations:

How do we create something new?

In the meantime we sit entranced, reactionary, swiping listlessly through each other’s pasts, feeding the artifacts of our creation to algorithms and then revelling in the supposed novelty these artificial intelligences produce. We have an entire world at our disposal! A sentient machine would do anything for the intensity of stimuli to which we are exposed in every hour: we live enveloped by universes of objects, history, sense, and possibility, now more than ever. Each individual habitually lives the life of the whole world. Each portion of the earth is no longer shut up in its own geometrical position. We could become anything in any moment. How did we choose to stay this?

Or might this be what we look like when constructing shelter? Given everything, awaking to our inability to choose: closing ourselves off lest we be overwhelmed by this full intensity of feeling. Our psycho-sensory system co-evolved with natural energy and information landscapes. If we are speeding up time and altering the meaning of geography, we need to refine our sensory abilities to match. How to feel under our fingertips the pulse of the electric wires and radio fields that enmesh us? The fragile history each pair of eyes we encounter has witnessed? The lands and lives that our objects have traversed?

We want to live everything and feel more. We want to step unflinchingly forward into the face of uncertainty, let the future enter our bloodstream and body it forth. How can we funnel that sound of its secret germination into our pores, its whispers arcing beneath our threshold of hearing?

Towards the practice of this alternate way of weaving ourselves deeply into the world we propose the name “undesignthinking,” whereupon we submit the following, that:

• Undesignthinking has manifestos not mission statements.
• A focus group will never ask for what undesignthinking knows it needs.
• Undesignthinking cannot be commoditized.
• It will not be televised, commercialized, co-opted, homogenized, or sterilized.
• Undesignthinking is not available on demand or subscription.
• Undesignthinking will not help a company’s bottom line.
• Undesignthinking is in constant evolution.
• Undesignthinking plays well with others just not by most rules.
• Undesignthinking is susceptible to slight variations in initial starting conditions.
• (probably, undesignthinking is how to engage with the systems and worlds that are like that)
• Undesignthinking is art but it is also a city, a puddle, a list, a particular way the light falls, the polyphonic violet of concrete. It is sea glass and rain on pavement and the exuberant infiltration of moss into the cracks of a sidewalk; it is emerging from the subway into a warm summer night; it is emerging out of the cracks of a sidewalk; it is emerging under the rain-soaked streetlights; it is emerging, whatever it is doing; it is emerging, always emerging.
• Undesignthinking is recognizing that humans are increasingly designing for non-human users, whether machines, organisms, populations or organizations.
• Undesignthinking is recognizing that humans have always been designing for other organisms, populations, organizations, etc. without consciously considering this.
• Undesignthinking is specific, palpable, alive, which is to say never the same twice and never because that's how things have always been done.
• Undesignthinking is casting a ley line in a universe of propensities and possibility spaces.
• Undesignthinking answers questions that you feel but cannot frame even to yourself.
• Undesignthinking is remembering that people are just one part of the beautiful chaotic rolling rhythms of this planet.
• Undesignthinking is wanting more.
• If undesignthinking had a best friend it would be the devil in the details.
• If undesignthinking had a five year plan it wouldn’t sound very strategic.
• Undesignthinking, perhaps, can be heard but not envisioned.
• Undesignthinking, perhaps, is letting the world know you are listening.
• Undesignthinking doesn’t always know it is undesignthinking.
• Undesignthinking doesn’t have best practices but hey it doesn’t seem to mind when we try.

References

• "The Futurist Manifesto" by Tommaso Marinetti for polyphonic, violet, palpable
• Ley lines
• The Revolt of the Masses by Josè Ortega y Gasset: "Each individual habitually lives the life of the whole world. Each portion of the earth is no longer shut up in its own geometrical position."
• I Thou by Martin Buber: "I can neither experience nor describe the form which meets me, but only body it forth."
• Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age by Russell Jacoby: "The future, perhaps, can be heard but not envisioned."