ABSTRACT
‘Everyone designs’, political scientist Herbert Simon famously declared in 1969, ‘who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ (Simon 1969, 130), but those courses of action depend on assumptions about what the world is and how it can be acted upon. Accepting Simon’s initial premise – that beyond the variables of design like style and programme, it is at core about making change – I propose that design necessarily ‘imagines’ the situation in which it operates – that in setting out to make things and change things, designers (whether amateur or by vocation, singly or collectively) assume or create mental models of the environment in which they will work. As Simon explained, problem-solvers delimit and reframe problems in order to allow the calculation of best-fit solutions; design, in short, projects ‘operating environments’ for its ‘change-making’, and so it is ontological, delving into the mechanisms of being. To offer an obvious and stark illustration, in a Western technocratic culture, the environment is considered a resource to be brought under control by design, top-down – rivers dammed, spaces enclosed, food cultivated, regions planned. But that relatively stable, ‘modernist’ model has been upset over the last half-century or so by an ecological, inside-out worldview: the sort of command over the world found in Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) shifted to the eco-ontological uncertainty described by Gregory Bateson’s Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind (1972) or Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1989), with their emphasis on the interconnection of many systems, organic and inorganic, technological and natural, observers themselves subsystems along with their languages and mental processes, allowing no ultimate outside, centre, control, or truth.
