Interminable Design: Techne and Time in the Design of Sustainable Service Systems

This presentation works from the assumption that the design of the coming decades, in the name of developing our societies’ sustainability, will involve realising less materials-intensive ways of living and working (dematerialisation). Designing such sustainable product-service systems requires a quite different approach to designing than that which is prevalent today. In this paper, I explore: 1. the extent to which designing, of any specialism, and especially as it is taught in universities, continues to remain wedded to making things, that is, to techne as the know-how of manufacturing finished products 2. the extent to which ‘dematerialisation design’ involves something that can perhaps no longer be called a techne, less because its output is not a product, than because its output is not something that is never ‘finished’ Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s accounts of the Ancient Greek productivism that continues to inform modern designing, I argue that the design of more sustainable product-service systems will need to pay greater heed to how things change over time. Since designers tend to exemplify Marxist theories of alienated labour with their desire to create ‘once-and-for-all’s, something like ‘extended-designer-responsibility’ is needed, where designers are required to engage with their output beyond its production and sale/use. As an epilogue, the paper discusses the way design students invest heavily in the production of finished products for assessment, but then invariably never pick them up, satisfied merely with the intangible mark they receive. How could this situation be exploited to educe designers of sustainable systems rather than technicians more unsustainable stuff? Interminable design: techne and time in the design of sustainable service systems An ‘object’ is what gets in the way, a problem thrown in your path like a projectile (coming as it does from the Latin objectum, Greek problema)... I come across obstacles in my path (come across the objective, substantial, problematic world); I overturn some of these obstacles (transform them into objects of use, into culture) in order to continue; and the objects thus overturned prove to be obstacles in themselves. The more I continue, the more I am obstructed by objects of use... We are beginning to become conscious of the temporal nature of all forms (and thus of all creation). Since entropy is beginning to obstruct us at least as much as objects of use are. The question of responsibility and freedom (this being the essential question of creation) arises not only in the process of designing but also in the process of throwing away objects of use. It may be that consciousness of the Techne's strategic nature / 1