CRISIS, DIALOGUE AND IMAGINATION: THE CRISIS DESIGN NETWORK
WHAT IS CRISIS DESIGN NETWORK?
The Crisis Design Network (CDN) is a Toyota Foundation Asian Neighbors Network sponsored project led by architects Kenta Kishi and Thomas Kong. By combining the multiple dimensions and scales of art and design with open dialogues and imaginative actions, the two-year project strives to cultivate what renowned physicist David Bohm (2004) called, a participatory consciousness among Asian architects and designers towards greater social awareness and responsibilities in their works.
Yokohama and Singapore are chosen as the two cities to start the project. They are significant port cities deeply embedded in the network of commerce and finance in the global economy. Despite the sense of stability expressed by their excellent infrastructure and buildings, both cities are also facing many similar pressing issues and problems affecting developed countries in the West. Although Singapore and Yokohama are Asian cities, they are made up of diverse cultures, languages, histories, traditions, social and political structures that can offer parallel, reflexive and distinct positions for uncovering the many hidden, yet to be defined forms of an Asian city in the 21st century.
Since its inception in 2007, CDN has conducted two dialogue sessions in Yokohama and Singapore. In January 2009, we will begin the second part of the project framed by the ideas and issues discussed in the dialogue sessions. CDN is a still work in progress and this paper will highlight the rationale behind the project and the questions raised.
WHY CRISIS?
The sensitive and fragile balance between the fluxes of everyday local conditions and transnational developments faced by a city can, at any moment turned into a crisis situation. Sometimes the onslaught of a crisis may not be rapid but gradual and almost invisible, with only minor noticeable symptoms or changes to the familiar. Nevertheless, if undetected, it can have radical social, economical and political impacts that will result in undesirable determinants in the way cities are planned, designed and lived. The crisis faced by a city is simultaneously a point of great danger as well as an opportunity for shared imaginative actions. By examining crises, we are able to cut across disciplines and categories that often set up artificial boundaries between them. In this project, we are fascinated by hidden crises that are so ordinary that we do not even recognize them. What are those crises? How do we reveal them?
As much as we hope to anticipate and address potential devastating effects of a crisis, a crisis can sometimes have contradictory, positive effects by bringing about a sense of solidarity and purpose to the community. Examples throughout history have shown us how a crisis garnered collective focus and imagination in the search for solutions. The launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union propelled the United States to embark on an ambitious space exploration that culminated in the first man on the moon (Dickson. 2001) and the 2003 SARS epidemic in Singapore brought political leaders, health care experts and citizens together to face a common threat, while strengthening the bond among its citizens. Therefore, instead of perceiving a crisis in a negative light, it can awaken us from our false sense of familiarity and comfort in our everyday lives while provoking us to action, both at the individual and collective level.
I took this image below on a weekday afternoon in downtown Manhattan in the summer of 2007. There is not a single person on the street despite being the summer tourist season. The clue is in the red luggage. In just a brief moment, the police cleared the whole of Times Square because someone noticed a red luggage at the crosswalk that could potentially be a bomb.
WHAT IS CRISIS DESIGN NETWORK?
The Crisis Design Network (CDN) is a Toyota Foundation Asian Neighbors Network sponsored project led by architects Kenta Kishi and Thomas Kong. By combining the multiple dimensions and scales of art and design with open dialogues and imaginative actions, the two-year project strives to cultivate what renowned physicist David Bohm (2004) called, a participatory consciousness among Asian architects and designers towards greater social awareness and responsibilities in their works.
Yokohama and Singapore are chosen as the two cities to start the project. They are significant port cities deeply embedded in the network of commerce and finance in the global economy. Despite the sense of stability expressed by their excellent infrastructure and buildings, both cities are also facing many similar pressing issues and problems affecting developed countries in the West. Although Singapore and Yokohama are Asian cities, they are made up of diverse cultures, languages, histories, traditions, social and political structures that can offer parallel, reflexive and distinct positions for uncovering the many hidden, yet to be defined forms of an Asian city in the 21st century.
Since its inception in 2007, CDN has conducted two dialogue sessions in Yokohama and Singapore. In January 2009, we will begin the second part of the project framed by the ideas and issues discussed in the dialogue sessions. CDN is a still work in progress and this paper will highlight the rationale behind the project and the questions raised.
WHY CRISIS?
The sensitive and fragile balance between the fluxes of everyday local conditions and transnational developments faced by a city can, at any moment turned into a crisis situation. Sometimes the onslaught of a crisis may not be rapid but gradual and almost invisible, with only minor noticeable symptoms or changes to the familiar. Nevertheless, if undetected, it can have radical social, economical and political impacts that will result in undesirable determinants in the way cities are planned, designed and lived. The crisis faced by a city is simultaneously a point of great danger as well as an opportunity for shared imaginative actions. By examining crises, we are able to cut across disciplines and categories that often set up artificial boundaries between them. In this project, we are fascinated by hidden crises that are so ordinary that we do not even recognize them. What are those crises? How do we reveal them?
As much as we hope to anticipate and address potential devastating effects of a crisis, a crisis can sometimes have contradictory, positive effects by bringing about a sense of solidarity and purpose to the community. Examples throughout history have shown us how a crisis garnered collective focus and imagination in the search for solutions. The launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union propelled the United States to embark on an ambitious space exploration that culminated in the first man on the moon (Dickson. 2001) and the 2003 SARS epidemic in Singapore brought political leaders, health care experts and citizens together to face a common threat, while strengthening the bond among its citizens. Therefore, instead of perceiving a crisis in a negative light, it can awaken us from our false sense of familiarity and comfort in our everyday lives while provoking us to action, both at the individual and collective level.
I took this image below on a weekday afternoon in downtown Manhattan in the summer of 2007. There is not a single person on the street despite being the summer tourist season. The clue is in the red luggage. In just a brief moment, the police cleared the whole of Times Square because someone noticed a red luggage at the crosswalk that could potentially be a bomb.
Image 2. A red luggage left at the crosswalk in Times Square, New York.
As architects and designers, clients come to us expecting us to offer spatial solutions to their problems. Instead of problem solving, can we be like the red luggage? We are not proposing that designers or artists go around the city using scare tactics in their works. At the same time, we cannot help but be amazed by how this act jolted us out of our everyday complacency and made us more attuned to the world around us. Can the work of an architect be a provocation?
WHY NETWORK?
The network of people formed during this project is extremely important for our project. We hope the network of collective intelligence and participation in such an event will help us to calibrate the degree of visibility of these crises and the appropriateness of our responses. Forming our network is one of the many approaches in this project as increasingly, the complexity and ecology of crises demand different eyes and tools. One of the participants, Mr. Kawasaki from the Corporate Design Division of NEC Corporation reminded us in Yokohama that despite the pervasiveness of contemporary social networking sites as well as the ease in which the modern electronic communication devices have connected geographically distanced individuals, forming networks should not be our final goal. Instead he suggested that we should ask the following questions during these two years: What can network do? Why do we use network? Must the network be always available? Can we find crises by using network? What kind of crisis is solved by network?
DIALOGUE AND IMAGINATION
Central to our strategy during the first year is the notion of dialogue. CDN is an experimental practice; one that rely less on the singular vision of an architect and more on cultivating and shaping a project into existence through dialogues among a network of individuals and groups.
David Bohm, in his book On Dialogue says,
"The object of a dialogue is not to analyze things, or to win an argument, or to exchange opinions. Rather, it is to suspend your argument and to look at opinions- to listen to everyone’s opinions, to suspend them, and to see what all that means." (Bohm, 2004, p. 30)
The process of dialogue is contrary to how architects are trained in schools. The design project is conceived by the professor and handed to the students. Tucked away in an embryonic environment called the design studio, where their design skills are nurtured and honed, students work on the project through a variety of media and progressive series of discussions and reviews with their professor within the studio setting. The reviews, which are also called ‘crits’ in architectural schools, compel students to defend their design decisions from questions and criticisms by the review panel made up of architects and academics. Moreover, given the limited time that each student has to present the project, the ability to articulate a clear concept is crucial. Messy and contradictory needs and situations are abstracted and reduced to manageable fragments that can be reconstituted into a cohesive concept. Originality and individuality are also heavily emphasized and the culture of an architectural school reinforces that. We do not deny the need for a conducive environment that encourages creativity. However, the process of imagining possible future scenarios for our built environment is also a dialogic process between self and others. Bohm describes another form of originality that is not built around the individual but evolved through the process of dialogue.
"Thus, in a dialogue, each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it may be said that the two people are making something in common, ie. creating something new together." (Bohm, 2004, p. 3)
There are several stages to how a building is conceived and built. At the start of most projects, the architect receives the brief from a private or public client. The brief outlines the physical needs and serves as the basis where design concepts and programming of spaces are derived. The brief is usually predetermined to a large degree although the architect can expand upon the needs. Primarily, the architect’s role is to resolve and integrate the aesthetic with spatial, programmatic, construction, structural, health and safety concerns. CDN, on the other hand, hopes to seek a different path towards the conceptualisation of a project. By holding dialogue sessions with artists, designers and the public on matters that have significant impacts on the way contemporary cities are planned and designed, our project challenges the assumptions on how a project is initiated, who the architect is responsible to and the role in society. Imagination as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is “the faculty or action of forming ideas or images in the mind”. (http://www.askoxford.com/dictionaries/?view=uk. Retrieved Aug 19, 2008).
Therefore, to imagine, we need to visualize and represent the ideas and images. However, as Bohm pointed out, there is a multiplicity of representation even for a single image.
Take the example of a forest. It could be represented as a source of lumber, and it would then be presented to the lumberman in a certain way. To the artist it could be represented as something worth painting. To someone who wants to take a walk, it would be represented as a place he could enjoy himself walking along a path. There are countless representations of the forest, which will present the forest in different ways. (Bohm, 2004, p. 65)
Given the multiplicity of representations that confront us and by its extension the variety of voices and possibilities that a project can have, we find the existing conditions in which architects are educated and practice their craft narrow and insular. Furthermore, in describing Herbert Marcuse’s faith in the imagination, Carol Becker, Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University writes of imagination’s
“...regenerative abilities to remain uncolonised by the prevailing ideology, continue to generate new ideas, and reconfigure the familiar.” (Becker, 1994, p.114)
THE ROLE OF ART
In his presentation, architect and curator Takahashi Serizawa compared the artist to that of a canary bird. The ability of the artist to pick up silent shifts and faint signals in our changing social, cultural, economical and political landscapes is not unlike how a canary bird can detect poisonous methane gas inside a mine. This sensitivity, coupled by the freedom of art making can be a very powerful force and influence, which architects and designers can draw and benefit from. CDN is particularly interested in art practices that reveal hidden conditions that lie below our everyday life and consciousness but are nevertheless present. In describing the two conditions essential to Herbert Marcuse’s concept of the aesthetic dimension, Carol Becker writes,
“The first is that the artist has a responsibility to help society to deal with its hidden conflicts and contradictions. And the second is that the work must embody hope in whatever way possible.” (Becker, 1994, p. 122).
In this regard, the expanded role of art in society opens up enormous opportunities for a more inter-disciplinary mode of creative practice between artists and designers.
CONCLUSION
CDN embraces diversity as well as the long and sometimes messy process of dialogue. We find this mode of working more conducive in drawing different stakeholders from a diversity of backgrounds towards a focused and sustained effort in revealing and overcoming possible hidden crises amidst our environment. Through this process, we hope to bring forth projects in the form of public events, tactical interventions and object-based propositions; projects that are transdisciplinary and can slide across multiple scales during the second year. By identifying and forming connections where none previously existed, as well as the ability to work with and shape a multiplicity of voices towards a collective goal, CDN aspires to reveal, amplify and transform ordinary, unsystematic and hidden crises within our social and cultural landscapes into certain possibilities across a shifting bandwidth of disciplines and fields, while promoting social agency through design.
REFERENCES
Becker, Carol. (1994). Herbert Marcuse and the Subversive Potential of Art. In Becker, Carol (Ed.), The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (pp. 113-129). New York: Routledge.
Bohm, David. (2004). On Dialogue. New York: Routledge.
Dickens, Paul. (2001). Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. USA: Walker Publishing Company, Inc.