Design in the time of metabolism
Kia ora koutou,
We’re nearing the end of the southern summer and it’s been a wild ride. For many parts of Aotearoa New Zealand, very much a psychological transition from the fucking around to the finding out phase of climate change, through an ongoing battering of extreme weather events and infrastructure collapse.
This rolling tragedy is the background setting for my thinking out loud here. I’m not pretending to have all the answers. Maybe I’m not making any sense at all. But thanks to a couple of amazing and perfectly-timed prompts (discussed and referenced below), a whole lot of fuzzy, incomplete thoughts on a new approach to design I’ve been mulling over for a long time coalesced with the label of ‘metabolism’ (naming things is a big deal—it really works in drawing out ideas).
I want to take this much further. As well as practical involvement in design projects and research, I’m going to explore communicating through separate framings involving different balances of solutions, suggestions, and levels of abstractions for different audiences.
What’s here is more an explanation of my thought process and how I got to this place.
In Circulation
The Fediverse is Already Dead is a sober analysis and critique covering lots of different perspectives while attempting to maintain a sense of idealism and purpose.
An interview with Jon Corbett discussing their work on indigenous frameworks for computation and the challenges of designing syntax and semantics to support programming with keywords and metaphors based on the Cree language.
60 Years in Space is Andrew Doull’s decade-long project to adapt the board game High Frontier to a TTRPG format. A weighty amalgam of speculative exopolitics, hard sci-fi worldbuilding, and procedural generation, this functions as a construction kit for everything you’ve imagined about space travel along with many things you haven’t.
New cosmic phenomenon just dropped. The kilonova is a spectacular merger of neutron stars in a binary star system, described as ‘a perfect explosion’.
Bog Era Philosophy
Metaphors exert a powerful influence on our understanding of the world through visions of scientific progress. Encompassing scientific metaphors emerge as restatements evoking the ascendant technologies of their time:
- 18th Century: Laplacian dream of a perfectly predictable mechanistic universe echoing the controlled intricacies of clockwork and watchmaking.
- 19th Century: The energy concept, entropy and thermodynamics accompanying the rise of the steam engine.
- 20th Century: Theories of the universe and markets as pure information processors arising alongside the emergence of digital computers.
Each of these metaphors and connections to reality are brilliant in their own way, but also deeply flawed in reinforcing extractive ideas about nature, decoupled from an integrative, ecologically and biologically grounded holism.
Kelly Pendergrast’s recent suggestion that we could be entering a new era of metabolism as process and metaphor has been massively helpful for me in beginning to meld together a stronger symbolism and approach to talking about how we’re surrounded by latent possibilities for enzymatic transformation, while lacking widely-understood political frameworks and cultural narratives that correspond to this reality.
From cellular biology and chemistry to food and waste webs in ecosystems, the formal concept of metabolism encompasses the particular way that living systems are energetically coupled to their environment and self-regulate through reaction chains and catalysis.
Sociologists and political economists have converged on their own usage encapsulating the scale-free concept of material and energy flows between nature and society, across societies, and within societies. This is social metabolism and—more controversially—the metabolic rift.
Above all, labour is a process between man and nature, a process in which man mediates, regulates, and controls his metabolism with nature. Man confronts natural matter itself as a natural power. He sets in motion the natural forces belonging to his corporeality, arms and legs, heads and hands, to seize the materials of nature in a form useful for his own life. By operating employing this movement on nature outside him and transforming it, he transforms at the same time his nature. —Marx, (Capital Vol. 1)
In architectural design and futurism, the more familiar usage is capital-M Metabolism (メタボリズム), the post-war Japanese movement that explored a synthesis of megastructures and organic growth. Though largely a speculative theory and artistic project, architects from this movement did construct various buildings, most famously the Nakagin Capsule Tower.
We regard human society as a vital process—a continuous development from atom to nebula. The reason why we use such a biological word, metabolism, is that we believe design and technology should be a denotation of human society. We are not going to accept metabolism as a natural process, but try to encourage active metabolic development of our society through our proposals. —Metabolism: The Proposals for New Urbanism (1960)
Speculative proposal by Peter Cook (Archigram, 1970) showing gradual replacement of a traditional town, fusing alternative and changing structures, amenities and facilities with traditional and nostalgic structures.
Widely cited as a failure or modernist curiosity, recent reappraisals of Metabolism highlight a richer and more nuanced narrative of being at the ‘right place, wrong time’.
Dan Hill’s recent tour de force discussion of a ‘new metabolism’ for a circular society with Japanese characteristics traces an outline of this architectural history and its potential to inform circular economy initiatives through a synthesis of traditional craft practices, use of biomaterials, recycled and adaptive design philosophies, and a shift in emphasis away from static structure towards temporality and metamorphosis.
We cannot simply let circularity only be found in a narrow definition of the faster-moving currents of consumer products—the product representing a tip of the fast-melting iceberg—but we must truly ‘pull the thread’ to reveal these broader flows, resources, systems, environments and agency. Working at the scale of the living environment gets us there, and across slow as well as fast layers, moving principles and practices emerging at that product ‘tip’ through into the more intransigent sectors, like the building industry.
This thinking has a clear resonance with responses to the recent cluster of environmental disasters in Aotearoa. Cyclone Gabrielle exposed the fundamental futility and dangerous instability of attempting to control rivers by constraining and restricting their flow while at the same time, yielding total control over land use and logging to multinational capital interests and their local industry subordinates with minimal regulation or standards. Far from being a purely natural disaster, this is a perfect emblem of modern capitalism’s failings.
Millions of tonnes of clear-felled logs, branches, whole trees and shredded undergrowth left scattered on vast swathes of steep erosion-prone hill country, while the highest quality straight logs are shipped off to export is metaphor made real: the ecological realisation of balance sheet optimisation and extractivism.
This ongoing waste stream is inherently usable, both as timber and as raw carbon inputs to other processes. But effectively metabolising the forestry ‘slash’ isn’t a question of value, material potential, technology or design, it’s a question of labour, strengthening social organisation, and investment in energy and ecological efficiency rather than capital efficiency.
Facing the scale and urgency of necessary changes to incorporate the living environment and biosphere into human decisions that shape transformations—digestions—of space, form, energy, and classifications of value versus waste over time, we need more than consultancy-driven models of ‘human-centered’ innovation to develop ‘solutions’ to ‘wicked problems’.
Can metabolism be developed beyond a vibe or evocative description to become a genuine and purposeful challenge to the status quo and a syncretic design philosophy for our time? What is the kaupapa? Where can we go with this?
While still in the very early, messy, gastric stages—and by no means developed, mature, or coherent yet—I’ve been thinking about a range of principles and ideas that are important when considering transformation at different scales.
- Theories of change, economic models, taxonomies and descriptions must acknowledge both living entities and industrial assemblages as embedded in open systems, self-regulating in flux, far from equilibrium.
- Waste outputs of metabolic pathways are inputs to other pathways. This can be constructive (decomposition and composting) and destructive (swarms of pests, disease spread, pollution impacting earth systems).
- The relationship of parts to the whole is not mechanistic. Boundaries are blurry and non-hierarchical. Components have multiple functions within complex systems that are not always reducible or directly observable.
- Rather than positioning ourselves at the apex of planning and human intention, design methods are best understood as enzymes that can catalyse and accelerate reactions and transformations.
- Site-specific adaptations and streets finding uses for things can diffuse and enrich supply chains. Economies of scale and monocultures have limits that must be understood holistically, rather than via min/max optimisation.
- Digestive organs loop and twist and fold back on themselves. This is an under-utilised model for both physical form and organisational structures (cyclic program management over linear project management is a banal-sounding yet actionable way of understanding this).
- Wetlands and biofiltration swales are the new gardens and lawns. Daylit streams and urban forests are the new stormwater pipes.
- Resist temptation to repurpose old models with bio-inspired bunting or metabolism as decorative aesthetic.
- Favour eroding, eating and digesting over smashing, clearing and burning. This can be both an abstract response to capitalism (vis-à-vis Erik Olin Wright) and a materialised approach to landscapes and urban transformation.
Any one of these points could easily expand into a whole essay and there are many unresolved problems, contradictions and disjunctions to work through. While woefully inadequate, I do think all of these ideas are deserving of further exploration and development, with the unifying principle of design as enzymatic.
An important practical consideration is how to strategically co-opt widely understood clichés like ‘perfect is the enemy of good’ and ‘worse is better’ within feedback loops that support system transformation, rather than lapsing back into ‘business as usual’ and ‘least cost’ ways of operating. Metabolic approaches and larger scale circular economy loops will become more viable—and quickly become common sense—when their activation energy is low enough to stand-in as immediate, accessible paths of least resistance and solutions to problems in a local context. Design, designers, design methods should act as catalysts to lower the activation energy of such interventions.
How we handle the sociopolitical problems of monopoly power, decaying democracy, malfeasance of billionaires, politicians, public-relations industry, compromised media, the economic priesthood, et cetera, blocking change and radicalising suburban consumers in service of maximising profits is a whole other question that I don’t have any clear answers for here, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge. Design as an industry itself is deeply implicated in that order.
We’re still a long way from a coherent synthesis of this developing trend in design and circular economy thinking with the insights on metabolism from eco-socialism and political economy. Perhaps such a synthesis can help open up new pathways for action, or perhaps it’s better suited to broadening and deepening our understanding and analysis of the problems. Watch this space.