Diving into Transdisciplinary Design
Posted on October 7, 2011 | posted by:
A section of the painting "The Swimmer in the Econo-mist #2" by James Rosenquist
A couple of weeks ago, in connection to reading Donella Meadow’s “Thinking in Systems”, we were given the task to map out a complex system of our own choice. A small side effect of that particular reading is that you start to think of everything around you as a system. Excited by this, I set out to map the system of love between two people.When I was finished, I looked at the result thinking to myself that it appeared too simple and too clean. And a similar feeling came over me when I saw the systems that my classmates had made. Certainly, we all knew that these system diagrams were only models of reality. Still I could not help but thinking that they deceived everyone that looked at them. The diagrams were simply too neat and too perfect. A week later I continued this train of thought:
It was a Saturday afternoon at the Guggenheim Museum and I stopped in front of a large painting. “The Swimmer in the Econo-mist #2”, made by the American artist James Rosenqvist in 1997. I am not a big fan of this kind of pop art, and I found myself to be a bit nauseated from the way it was painted. I read the text describing it. When I was done reading, my whole perception of the piece was changed. The picture was painted after the fall of the Berlin wall, describing the mess and disorder that followed. When I understood what it was about I could suddenly relate to it. I felt at home in how shattered it was. Rosenquist said “I thought of a person struggling and working, like a swimmer in the fog, going somewhere, not knowing quite where [he or she is] going, but forcefully working, working, working”. For me, this describes the frustration of trying to create a system diagram. It is as if you have all the pieces, yet it is still hard to gain enough perspective to create a complete and coherent picture. You are always more or less related to the system you are mapping and you can never manage to see it clearly. In a way, I found this painting to be a more proper representation of a system than any of the diagrams that I saw in class. This experience also reminded me of that the purpose of a system changes its behavior. For me, knowing what the intent of the painting was changed how I perceived it. At first I did not know the ”purpose” of the painting and I was ready to dismiss it. But after I had read what the intentions of the artist had been, it was as if the painting behaved differently in my eyes. To someone else viewing this painting, something else could probably be read into it. I believe it depends on the context of the beholder. Art does not end with the artist hand, but with the mind of the observer. We are free to see and interpret art and design, drawing different kinds of knowledge from it. This is similar to how we perceive systems since one person might experience a system in a completely different way than another person.
When embarking on a new program such as Transdisciplinary Design it is easy to feel a bit lost at times. One moment it feels as if you see everything clearly. The next moment that sense of clarity is gone, and you have no clue of what you are doing whatsoever. At times, I do not even know what I am learning, or why. The experience at the Guggenheim gave me some hope. It seems to me that Transdisciplinary Design has gradually started to change how I see things. The painting added a layer of understanding for me of what we have been reading and discussing in class. Simultaneously, Transdisciplinary Design has given me a vocabulary and understanding of systems that gives an additional layer to almost everything around me, including that painting. This new depth of understanding allows me to draw new connections and relations between areas that may appear to be separated at first. I believe that this experience also shows the importance of learning through other mediums than the traditional ones. Transdisciplinary Design cannot be understood by only reading or writing, but instead it needs to be experienced and understood through design. And it needs to be understood in the context of the world outside of the university. I guess we just have to dive in and swim.