Preface
A Question of Praxis
As I looked up, taking a moment to think about the question, I was distracted by the visual excess that attempted to signify to the patrons that this was a British pub—we were at Tom’s Little Havana Café in Halifax, Canada.
“What do you mean by design praxis?”
“Right, sorry.” I returned my attention to the question.
“I’d never heard it before” he continued “so I looked it up on Wikipedia and it just seems to mean taking ideas and putting them to practice.”
“Well yeah, that’s a basic explanation. At the root, it’s taking knowledge and practice, or action, and applying them for some ultimate result, I guess.”
“But that’s already what we do as designers so why don’t you just call it design practice?
“Well look, stripped away of all its details, this place we’re in is just a bar, but its the details that give it significance. You said to meet at Tom’s Little Havana Café, not the bar, so I would know where to go, and you told me the street. Still, it was hard to find, and when I entered it looked nothing like a Havana Café, so I was confused and uncertain. But now, with these details I will know exactly what you mean when you refer to the Havana café, and if we come here enough you could just call it the pub.”
“So what’s your point?”
“My point is that language is the the same as this place.If you strip away all the details you just have a basic word that doesn’t really signify anything. Praxis can mean almost nothing, but it has details in it. It has a rich and deep history of usage that has evolved over time. If we allow it to lay dormant it will die but if we use it we contribute to its evolution and it has the potential to signify uniquely, unlike any other word or even phrase can, a dense and detailed meaning.”
“And that is?”
“I mean it in the way that Marx used it in Capital, or I think it was Capital anyway, and more recently, since the English publication of The Prison Notebooks, the sense that Antonio Gramsci had of the term. In this sense praxis is the union of a wide body of knowledge with action, or in design what we call practice. And this…”
“But design practice uses knowledge every day, so how is praxis different?”
“Well first, when I speak of a wide body of knowledge I’m talking about reaching out beyond design’s basic knowledge, you know, the one that often expresses itself in technical or aesthetic areas. I’m thinking more of what Jiménez Narváez, in Design’s Own Knowledge, referred to as the ‘Noesis of design’. She said that the Noesis of design was derived from the social sciences, and so what I’m talking about is a deeper knowledge that may be part of design but isn’t necessarily in most cases. I’m talking about incorporating domains of knowledge such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics, or philosophy. But here’s the thing, whether you call it knowledge and action or theory and practice, that’s still not praxis in the sense I mean. If we follow on from Marx and Gramsci then we come to here” I said, drawing an imaginary line and pointing to an empty space on the table. “This is praxis, and it includes, it requires actually, the directing of that ‘ultimate result’ of knowledge and practice toward the betterment of society. It requires the process be directed toward social progress.”
“Okay, but I still think what’s the point if no one knows what it means.”
“If we use it people will. Tell me to meet you back at the pub tomorrow and I’ll know what you mean.”
“Hey!” Another hungry voice from the table spoke out. “Are we going to order something or what?
.
Driving home that night I wondered why I felt the need to defend this notion of praxis. Beyond the issues of language, what was it about the concept of praxis that was so important to me? Why was I so concerned about applying design to the process of social progress? In fact, I knew very well that it started over 20 years ago on a day that is never far from my thoughts.
Loss and Impact
On Christmas day in 1987, a grenade exploded in the small coffee farming town of Matagalpa in the Central American country of Nicaragua. Though now a distant event, both in time and space, back then the shock waves of that explosion reverberated all the way back to Canada and and its debris found a place on the front pages of every national newspaper. For most in Canada the news was of a Canadian social worker violently killed in what appeared to be one strange accident with many unanswered questions. Back in Matagalpa, a sterile room held Jenny’s body and with her, my inconsolable grief. As I looked out the window on the waking town, behind me the sun was beginning to break through the trees. Morning light had begun to fill the streets and with it came a new day, the end of a vigil, and the end of an unfulfilled life. Slowly, sunlight began to mingle with a mist that seemed to rise in the distance, and soon a brilliant rainbow enveloped the entire valley.
How could it be that a scene so sublimely beautiful could be laid out before me while behind me lay the desolation of the deepest love I had ever felt? How could I turn my back on that pain to look upon a serenity that seemed to speak of a world of wonder and a future of promise? That morning I chose to find solace in the sunrise, if only with the hope that it might temper the cold of my grief and keep back a slowly creeping depression. In the end nothing could keep away the anguish that would lead to depression, then anger, and finally to hatred.
This hatred was directed toward those who I felt were responsible for her death, responsible for the war that had been waged against the people of Nicaragua. This hatred was directed toward America. But as time passed and my hatred waned, I was able to see a different America. I had always known that many progressive Americans opposed the policies of the conservative government, but I was also discovering that many conservatives–people who would have supported that same war against Nicaragua–were actually caring, generous, and likable as individuals.
This was baffling to me. How could someone with values and morals, in many respects similar to my own, believe in such a war? How could they believe that in order to secure greater wealth for America, not only was such violence and oppression necessary, it was actually just and right? It’s easy to see the world as a dualism of good and evil, where one can be resigned to the notion that the problems are too big to change, but that’s the world of the cynic. In a pluralistic world resignation is much more difficult to justify as there are spaces where action can bring about change. Emotions like anger and bitterness breed cynicism when what’s needed for action is optimism, and when the world view is a pluralist one, what’s also needed is pragmatism.
Designing Change
This research is about finding a space where action can bring about change and how design can have an impact in the form of a new design praxis. While there exists many spaces in which a new design praxis can operate, this research is sociopolitical in nature and specifically focuses on communicating ideas of global social justice.
Some might immediately question what kind of role design could possibly play in the process of creating formative change within the area of global social justice. This is understandable, as many people have only vague and often antiquated ideas of what design is. In fact, even designers have difficulty defining what design is. Often design is understood by the qualifier that comes before it — communication design, graphic design, industrial design, environmental design, architectural design — the list goes on. But as Walter Groupius wrote, “design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society” (20).
This frees design from the above constraints and allows for a new design thinking that ” lies in a concern to connect and integrate useful knowledge from the arts and science […] in ways that are suited to the problems and purposes of the present” (Buchanan 06). As John Thackara writes, “In an economic world dealing in knowledge, the secret to success is the re-combination of different types of expertise in a productive manner. This new kind of design sets out to increase the flow of information within and between people, organisations and communities” (qtd. in Cottam & Leadbeater 28). Speaking to this notion, Thackara also quotes Victor Papanek as saying that “design is basic to all human activities — the placing and patterning of any act towards a desired goal constitutes a design process” (Thackara 01). As a designer who was educated in multimedia, I am particularly interested in these more open notions of design practice. Design should not be about the confined spaces of technical activity but rather about recognising where problems exist and addressing them, utilising a broad base of knowledge and practices.
Building on the Past
While the emphasis of global social justice in this thesis is founded on personal experience, its realisation will be found through new ideas and approaches in design practice, and it will be informed by the growing body of knowledge within the wider design community. My hope is that this thesis contributes to that body of knowledge and, in some small way, helps to shape growing perceptions of design as a new avenue for social praxis.