Symbiotic Design?

I believe that design is a complex systemic discipline, were good designers make the right questions. If you pay deep attention to the questions, you will find the answers embedded in them. In Design, as in Biology, when we are confronted with new problems or specimens, we have been taught and told to dissect them in order to try to understand and grasp them. This approach leaves us with a series of segmented ideas of what we are observing, but without a real response for our initial question. A second approach would be to go towards a dynamic understanding of the phenomena we are confronting. Instead of dissecting them, shouldn’t we set them free and embrace their vivid existence to understand them??The idea of an ever-changing problem requires an equally changing model of observation based on an always evolving question. If the ecological niche we are imbedded is always changing, shouldn't we think our outcomes as designers in the same dynamic space?

Living entities are in a symbiotic relation with their ecological niches only if they are in an internal equilibrium. If this equilibrium is not reached, the entity (or design project) will collapse and change of state. Once they collapse or stop being in harmony with the environment, they will become detached from it. They will no longer have a symbiotic relation and become harmful for the environment and in consequence for its own species. This is what has happened with human evolution, with design. The outcome we have been producing at some point became detached from the environment and started destroying it and taking us to a new era, to the Anthropocene. Design is responsible for incrementing the damage in our ecosystem by creating outcomes that have ended mostly in landfills. We, as a discipline must tackle our responsibility and change our roadmap.

As designers, we are creators of our own discipline based on what we are capable of observing and understanding. Design is a shared compromise where users, petitioners and designers work on a one-to-one basis in a collective decision-making process. The construct that results from this interaction is achieved through the relation between all the involved components and the ecological niche in which our discipline will evolve: therefore, a symbiotic set of relations. If we want our projects to reach true sustainability they must be grounded in a symbiotic relation with the environment. Something we have not been doing.

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela stated that autopoiesis is the unique characteristic of a living system that enables it to self-define, self-construct and self-repair. This is what differentiates living entities from non-living ones. Their autopoietic phenomenology is what has enabled them to stay alive for the last 3.7 billion years. If this has worked for living beings, shouldn’t it also work for our outcomes as designers? Niklas Luhmann has already stated that social groups evolve in an autopoietic state, so if design as a discipline is understood and exercised as an autopoietic non molecular system, shouldn’t the outcomes we produce be in a symbiotic relation with the environment? Shouldn't they be sustainable?

During my Ph.D. research I was able to illuminate design from an autopoietic perspective, enabling the model with which I am working now. Its main objective is to give us tools for making the proper questions in an ever-changing environment to achieve symbiotic design. Symbiosis is the only possible and feasible way to integrate design into a biotic environment. If this relation doesn’t exist, we will always be producing asymbiotic entities that will continue collapsing our ecosystems. Design projects can become extremely dynamic and complex systems; therefore, it is necessary to implement a framework that empowers us with a set of guidelines and relevant initial questions to permanently understand the evolution as an autopoietic organization, so that we can embrace them and fully understand them, and respond properly.

This has led me to be in the process of creating a?Symbiotic Design Academy, an online school to teach the framework. This model was partially presented in Cumulus Roma 2021 and it established seven components for design. They were identified through an extensive qualitative and quantitative research of design history, theory and the design discipline community. All of this research together with decades of practicing the profession, teaching and talking to hundreds of designers were also addressed during the process of defining the Symbiotic Design Framework (SDF).

Design shouldn’t just conform with being “sustainable”, design should understand the relations that makes it a social autopoietic system, and as such, a system in a symbiotic state with its ecological niche.

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