Tonkinwise “Design Away” DRAFT June 26, 2013 Page 1 of 14 Design Away Cameron Tonkinwise School of Design, CMU “My field? Um, ‘Design Studies,’ with a ‘Sustainability’ bent, you could say. … Well, what I mean is, I don’t teach students how to design; my job is to get them to think about what they are going to design – and why. … Yes, I suppose that’s right. My colleagues teach the students to design stuff, and I teach them not to.” ___________ Having had this conversation more times than I care to, I think I might now have something to add. The way this exchange runs, it looks like we in ‘Design Studies’ are doing the opposite of teaching students to design, as if questioning and rethinking were not ever part of the practice of designing. But I want to suggest that not-designing is also a kind of designing; it can be proactive, a deliberate strategy to undesign, to make existing designs disappear. The opposite of the vita activa of making, of designing things into existence, is not merely the privatively passive vita contemplativa, but rather the very active act of unmaking aspects of our locked-in world; the designing of things out of existence. In a seminal article, “Prometheus of the Everyday: The Ecology of the Artificial and The Designer’s Responsibility,” 1 Ezio Manzini asks: if a primary driver of human being is ‘doing,’ as in, accomplishing, effecting, achieving, what does this driver look like in an era of material limits? Prior to any widespread ecological awareness of finite resources and the damageable sustainability of ecosystems, ‘to do’ meant ‘to make,’ to make things better by making better things, many more better things. Environmental constraints, Manzini argues, necessitate a shift in objective, from the quantitative to the qualitative, from a culture of producing to a culture of reproducing – designers as caretakers of “a garden of objects.” But, to strain the metaphor, gardening also requires weeding, pruning, composting. To do more with less also means getting to less, getting rid of more. Can there be a practice of undesigning, of what Tony Fry has called ‘elimination design’? 2 Should there not be such a practice, given the imperatives for enhancing the sustainability of our societies? And could such a practice qualify as a satisfier for a new generation of designers? Would not designers as hunters, cullers, eradicators, or less violently, designers as waste managers, cleaners, problem dissolvers, be an importantly ‘productive’ contribution to the project of transitioning our societies to less stuffed futures? Usually the act of design seems to us to be a beautifully creative and intelligent craft. By contrast, destruction seems stupidly simple, a brutish, quick act. I will try to point out that, in fact, eliminating some aspect of our everyday material existence, removing it from our