Articles and interviews
Interview

Yasin Dündar talks with Dulmini Perera, scientific staff member in the Theory and History of Modern Architecture Department at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

In this interview, we talk with Dulmini Perera, a scientific staff member in the Theory and History of Modern Architecture Department at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Dulmini is the author of studies such as “Wicked Problems and Humour Machines” and “Towards a Playful Architecture: Crisis, Sense Sense-Making and Questions Concerning Method”. Our interview was conducted at the Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference 2024, where Dulmini ran a workshop with Gökhan Kodalak with the title of “Challenging the Bifurcation of Mind and Nature: Deleuze, Guattari, and Bateson”.

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YD

I want to begin by discussing how we can imagine architecture's generative process as an open and indeterminate system with no predefined ends and what this approach would offer us in design. Since the main topic of our project is speculating urban futures, I want to discuss more speculative ways to understand the pedagogies of sensing, intuiting, and imaging design.

In your work, you have used the idea of cautionary tales as a studio method to expand discussions around how to speculate about complex issues within a pedagogical setting. We can start with the point that “cautionary tales” deviate from accepted and established ways of speculating on what is already known, what is already used, and what is already operating in was that offer some new alternative perspective to understand the processes and the dynamism of the all the actions that come with. You draw from Heath Robinson’s work to frame this idea of a cautionary tale (Perera, 2021). What do you think about the playful effect of all unnecessary (in terms of being acts that are more than its most efficient definition) operational cycles, which Heath Robinson often highlights?  How can they generate novel forms of speculation on actions without having any granted and established paths or outcomes?

DP

The unnecessary operational cycles across different actors and systems that are often foregrounded in Heath Robinson's work highlight discrepancies between what could be identified as normative design solutions, driven by some form of a closed systemic understanding of design and the open systemic possibilities of how design can relate to difference. I have argued that the playful effect of what may seem like multiple unnecessary feedback loops is a constant reminder to think of the "Différance" (Derrida, 1967) that escapes a classical frozen image of a normative solution to a design problem.  In other words, the dynamism engendered by different feedback loops becomes a meditation on how design can only provide resolutions bound in space and time, not solutions.  Yet most forms of representation used in design and design pedagogy do not enable us to think about the act of design in this way.

For example, in Robinson’s illustrations for "How to Live in a Modern Flat,” humorous drawings become speculative devices that question optimised approaches to modern housing design.  Modern flats become embodiments of modernist cosmologies of life in their mechanical and optimised forms. Heath Robinson's modern flats are speculative machines open to plural cosmologies and ways of living and inhabiting these spaces.  The stories are often about different types of working and middle-class folks habitually immersed in daily struggles but always dreaming and aspiring towards a better (comfortable life).  The drawing can become helpful speculative devices not only to generate a discussion on specific 'content'(themes) related to the crisis of modern housing but also to provide a departure point to think about methodological ‘forms' design practices could use to frame such crisis sites. As speculative devices, they defy established ideas of linear cause-and-effect relations and suggest a need for more non-linear ways of approaching cause and effect, past and future, design, and the designer. 

One must also remember that Robinson's devices become playful because they are humorous. As a technique, they draw on humour's structural affordances to hold tensions (différance) together. What seems like play is a serious inquiry that brings back aspects classified as externalities—whether through building or cultural codes—as questions internal to inhabiting the house. 

In the classroom, these speculative machines prompted students to think about the crisis of work and disappearing offices and hold on to the multiple tensions during Corona times.  However, the task was not only to explore the form of such speculative devices as an abstraction but also to take up the adventure of thought that the speculative machine triggers to act within one's site of struggle.

YD

All these connections remind me of Karen Barad's notion of response-ability (2010). She argues that response-ability is only about how we can respond to life. To do that, we put ourselves at risk and in an indeterminate mode. For example, the cautionary tales, as you pointed out, are invitations to inhabit this indeterminate mode. There may be some serious or determined ways to think of the systems and other aspects of the design and architecture. But I think dealing with the indeterminate is about dealing with open systems, thus generative interventions on life and its dynamic systems. 

I see this also related to the notion of “wicked problems”. Can we talk about that? How can we connect the idea of wicked problems, which you try to explore pedagogically in your work, to ways of inhabiting the indeterminate mode and working with a speculative imagination? How can we connect this new notion of wicked problems in design education to Simondon and Stiegler’s understanding of technicities?

DP

"Wicked problems" is a concept that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in systems research. It was proposed by planning theorists Rittel and Webber at a historical moment when the discourse of the system explicitly started to confront the politics of what a design or planning problem is and who has the agency to name it as such (1973). However, "wicked problems" as a concept has become quite limiting because it tends to instrumentalise the more significant quality that Rittel and Webber were trying to describe, which is the "wickedness" of a system that is living and evolving in time. Wickedness is a different term for "difference" and is explained in terms of "variety in the system." This is where I think some resonances can be found in relationship to Simondon and Stiegler's framing of "open systems." The problem framing system should contain enough or more (informational) variety than the system it is attempting to frame. This means what is named a design problem often relates only to the aspects that could be framed and brought to presence. Since one can never bring all problem elements into presence, all design approaches must automatically deal with an element of "indeterminacy." The différance that escape relates to the indeterminacy of the system.  

What is interesting to note are the ways the original Rittel-Weber idea and specific approaches that draw from this idea in systems design remain predominantly humanistic. This means these approaches focus on variety across humans and social systems. They resort to a form of domestic pluralism, i.e., it does not consider differences across different scales of political organisation across institutions and planetary contexts. It is an approach towards (informational) difference and variety that significantly emphasises the social system over technological or environmental systems. In contrast, Simondonian and Stieglerian approaches consider how the changing nature of technological systems (various mapping, presentational, modelling technologies, and technics) have complicated how we define the "variety" of systems that matter in framing a design problem. Given how psycho-social systems are stimulated and constrained by evolving technical systems and the more-than-human effects of these systems, all this makes a significant difference in the way one thinks of framing and acting on wickedness and the indeterminacy that comes with it.

Making design problems present across such extended agent networks and acting within such contexts would require meaning (semiotic frameworks) and action to be framed and described in more expansive ways. All this prompts ways of thinking about "gathering difference" in ways beyond "the conversational", and this is where I have introduced the notion of "the playful." To be playful is to remain open to difference and to be open to indeterminacy. In various educational projects, I have used playful speculation as a pedagogical method to deal with indeterminacy at different crisis sites and moments. Regarding pedagogy, I have been particularly interested in making play "a meta-context." Introducing play in a learning space is not about presenting an activity. Instead, it is a frame where particular forms of investigation on "Différance" can emerge.

YD

In Learning about Designs Colonial Pasts, you work with narrative games to develop a playful project to question design historiographical methods used to teach students histories in a non-didactic way (Perera, 2023). This project has led students to destabilise established ways to formulate the notion of spatial and temporal “contexts” and, perhaps more specifically, how one approaches contexts in historiography, such as in relation to the question of positionality. This reminds me of Stiegler’s argument that one needs to focus on analysing and discussing “what makes the who rather than the who makes the what” (1994). How do you think this speculative pedagogical method enabled students to approach historical material more openly, systematically, and speculatively? 

DP

Before I answer this question, it would be helpful if you could tell me a little bit more about your thoughts on Stiegler’s argument about “what makes the who.”

YD

What I understand about playful design is that it is not only about the subject but also about habits, constraints, rules, and ecologies that all come with them and affect how we evolve. We cannot just say that we solely design things; designed things also affect and shape who we are. Human beings are not the only efficient cause that pushes things to happen a certain way. The top-down approaches of a designer’s mind or abstract concepts are not only the efficient pushing factor that would make architecture more generative and productive. Nevertheless, there are also some different causes, such as formal and final causes, which would open new possibilities and potentials for a design without efficiently putting energy into a dynamic system. In other words, catalysts of the environment are as valuable as efficient reasons and causalities in terms of their productive speculative effect to exceed the optimised understanding of architecture. For example, I think constraints of the physical and behavioural environment are some of the most generative aspects of architecture that catalyse its dynamism and push the boundaries of efficient definitions to develop indeterminate yet productive ways to produce and understand architecture. Rather than sticking to understanding who makes architecture, it is a more responsive way to focus on analysing and discussing what makes architecture and its generativity. This is the way I understand what makes the who part in architecture.

DP

This is a good question. Notions of open systems and speculation touch on the project on Designs Colonial Pasts and Narrative Games in multiple ways. Mainly because it is also a project that critically looks at design historiographical methods and their role in preparing students in a futural manner, helping them to think critically about processes of change. It is a project that looks at what a complex open-systemic framing of historiography can mean when we discuss the relationship between coloniality, its afterlives and contemporary design questions. Instead of teaching or narrating the history of a female practitioner (Minnette De Silva) in the colonial periphery, I tried to enable students to understand better the emergence of her subjectivity and how it was related to her design practice with its multiple political, social, and environmental contexts, deeply intertwined with various aspects of coloniality. However, showing how both design subjectivities and design actions emerge is different from talking about subjectivity and action. It requires a lively encounter with historical material, the archives, De Silva's buildings, and oral recollections of other people's encounters with De Silva. In teaching design history, mainly through lecture formats, one often speaks of and presents the contested and complicated nature of the different actors, agents and systems that come together to inform change. However, it is still done in a manner of telling a story. Showing how these forces interact requires more immersive frameworks for working with the same material. Designing games was an invitation to explore the complex causal relationships between the 'who' and the 'what' and what defines the other. 

Designing and playing narrative games is one way of teaching not only the role that design plays concerning coloniality, but also the role established design historiography plays in relation to coloniality. A different way of explaining this in line with your questioning and the intellectual sources that you refer to is to try to make clear that design and its relationship to the past cannot be reduced to design and its relationship to history because the former is of a far more complex kind than the latter. Design projects (in this case, De Silva’s buildings, intellectual projects) exist in time. Design history is constructed through accessing the past using a particular set of techniques (tools, methods, etc) that have a more formal nature. Often, the norms surrounding the use of such historical tools and processes are determined by the discipline. But all those dealing with change must deal with the past. Whether one is aware of it or not, a specific form of historical consciousness always influences decisions about change. Yet, how someone who is not a trained historian (specialist) might access this past and construct narratives differs from a scholarly form of engagement with narrative. And yet, all those techniques play a massive role in the broader decision-making and political processes around design. 

In thinking with Simondon (and Stiegler), it is vital to think of the bi-directional role technics can play in the role of design history education. In other words, it points towards moving beyond thinking of historiographical technics as emerging out of a form of design history education and instead identifying that it is the technics that create the form of education. To go back to the language of play, to set up a particular form of game mechanics to engage the past is also about setting up the form of "knowledge games" one wants to play in the contemporary world. It is about asking questions such as, for whom should it matter? Where does one see the impact? Through setting up the game mechanics, students become aware of the methods and techniques involved in narrativising and what is at stake within the politics of such a process. Also, some people would associate a narrative game's 'playful' character as based on fewer constraints than a 'serious' narrative presentation of the same history through a lecture or writing a paper. However, this is not a proper comparison; narrative gameplay does not emerge from not setting constraints but is about setting constraints so that the system remains open to emergent factors. For example, in this particular project, designing and playing narrative games enabled a nuanced way of teaching about practices of resistance in the colonial periphery where students could explore the "differential" ways oppositional consciousness emerges between sites, actions, objects, conscious(intentional) acts and affective moves (unconscious). It was also particularly helpful to see how personal narratives deeply influenced by the students' positionalities could play a role in opening up different aspects of De Silva's practice story.

YD

As Simondon highlights in his various works, this reciprocal relation is also connected to the creation of technical objects and their technicities. All these acts offer novel affordances to dynamic systems, pushing the boundaries of what already exists. Rather than a result-oriented optimisation-based approach that would produce a predefined way of erasing differences, what is the vital value of emphasising the playful responses and pedagogies of technicities?

DP

Given the current conditions of a runaway planetary condition and the compound crisis that informs what call I call complex geometries of change where diverse forms of life (biological, sociological, technological, noological) are under erasure, I think it’s essential to think about how our pedagogies can contribute towards ways of addressing this condition. Such an exploration relates to what you previously identified as cultivating response abilities towards crisis, change and emergent conditions. Here again, I think Simondon and Stiegler have a lot to offer in terms of thinking about how response-ability is not only a psychological, biological, and social condition, nor is it only technological (tools), but rather a condition related to technicities produced through specific and situated coupling across these systems. All this is a reminder to understand what an erasure of difference means more expansively and how to address this condition.

YD

Thank you for your time, mind-provoking ideas, and beautiful speculations on the topic!