In the 1940s, claiming the office as his studio, Muzak executive Don O’Neill dedicated days to observing workers’ moods and mobilities as a means to counterbalance the ebb and flow of productivity. The result? Stimulus Progression—a soundscape that harnessed the power of art, science, and technology to literally propel people forward. Building on early 19th century inquiries into the physiological affects of environmental stimuli, Muzak’s trademark innovation used sound as a means to harness human biorhythms, affectively “reducing stress, enhancing concentration, improving morale,” and, perhaps most importantly, increasing office productivity (Lanza, 1994, p. 49). If we embrace this morphogenesis of mind and matter to be design in the expanded field, in which meaning, making, and memory or learning are the affects of design—i.e. preferred situations—then we can begin to challenge the interdependencies that converge in the commodification of design and, consequently, development or education (Nash, 2014). By investigating, [dis]assembling, and [re]framing the prevailing lexicon, discourse, and practices of design, perhaps we can begin to [un]learn, by design.

A note on aesthetics: Brackets '[  ]' indicate instances when aspects of the thesis and antithesis of a word seem equally valid. For example, [un]learning is intended to read as learning and unlearning. Italics are used to highlight key concepts, such as ‘theories of action' that are inspired by or borrowed from the investigations of other practitioners.

Theories of Action

Wayshowing: A Step Toward Sustainability

In the industrial era, machines began to replace nature as the conductor of circadian rhythms. Today, corporations and governmental entities continue to seek out new strategies and tactics to automate the beats, tempos, and frequencies of our everyday, propelling us toward a seamless soundtrack of efficiency, productivity, and, more recently, sustainability (Nash, 2014). 

Traversing the every day, we are in constant dialogue with a vast network of [in]visible infrastructures—complex, often contradictory, and inherently incomplete. Whether standing in the kitchen, strolling through the park, or browsing the web, every environment is a classroom and every classroom is a conversation that frames our perception of the world, and, consequently, ourselves. It is unclear exactly how this process of meaning, making, and memory or learning works. However, individuals working in fields ranging from psychology to sociology to urban planning often begin with the assertion that humans develop cognitive maps to facilitate [dis]orientation (e.g., Lynch, 1960; Tolman, 1948). Like the environments we inhabit, each map is an equally complex, contradictory, and incomplete assemblage of [in]visible infrastructures that translate into the sights, sounds, tastes, and feelings that guide our everyday actions. 

Design in this expanded field is inherently a political, social, economic, environmental, and, therefore, pedagogical practice. Functioning as a map of space and for identity, design, one might say, guides our every day by showing us how, where, and when to act (or not act). It also constructs the realm of possibility within which those actions can happen by foregrounding certain ideas, institutions, and infrastructures in the map, and often omitting others (Carey, 1989). Design, therefore, communicates knowledge and constructs the space within which that knowledge is deemed valid, truthful, or real. Through his parable, “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges reminds us that the map is not the territory (Borges, 1998). Yet, we have fooled ourselves into thinking the map is the territory, or at least designed it to seem so.

Sound is an invisible, albeit phenomenally powerful, form of communication that infiltrates our every day. Consider the earworm. 99% of us have been host to these invasive invertebrates at some point in our lives. Each cunning microbe, "micro-riff or audio instantiation seeps into our ears and taps out mnemonics on its drum,” explains cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun. “It smirks, sated—because as soon as you drop the needle on the track, you're in its domain" (Eshun, 2000, p.51). This is the point at which listening to said song becomes the preferred condition for the afflicted—which is, of course, also a preferred condition for the songwriter or designer. Sociologist Manuel Castells might refer to this process as power making by mind framing (Castells, 2007). Like Muzak, it serves as a cognitive map designed to [dis]orient individuals toward a preferred condition—someone else’s preferred condition. By leveraging biorhythms, design has “the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (Agamben, 2009, p. 14). 

In the U.S., design has been utilized in this sense, forming the foundation of our educational apparatus to orient individuals’ thoughts, actions, and identities toward the market (Labaree, 1997). In this context, education is employed as wayshowing—to “identify, claim, define, and circumscribe space” (Hunt, 2003, p.61; Mollerup, 2006). Often, individuals are unaware of the perpetual propping of the dominant ideologies or preferred situations toward which they are subtly yet forcibly propelled by design. 

Wayfinding: A Step Toward Adaptation

By harnessing design as a means to ask questions, we can begin to [un]learn: to investigate, [dis]assemble, and [re]frame the [in]visible infrastructures or wayshowing strategies embedded in our everyday. As a transdisciplinary praxis of explication, [un]learning is constructed on an inverted analytic framework that regards solutions as problems—prefigurative, inflexible outcomes—and questions as solutions—opportunities for reflection and adaptation. Such questions do not seek answers, but more nuanced questions. 

Understanding the dialectics between power and knowledge is central to the praxis of [un]learning as a critical pedagogy that questions that which has been learned. To this end, it is necessary to identify and [dis]assemble the [in]visible infrastructures that support both power and knowledge, including our cognitive maps. Through this process of dialectical [dis]orientation or wayfinding, individuals develop the capacity to orient themselves within a given context by designing new maps both of and for space and action. [Un]learning foregrounds difference and dissonance as vehicles to foster accountability and adaptation by aligning theories of action, in action at various scales (Argyris & Schön, 1974; Lefebvre, 2014). Here—as opposed to the practice of wayshowing that O’Neill demonstrated with Muzak—affect is harnessed as a means to stimulate “a physical system’s ’grappling’ with variance in order to resist the inertia of its ongoing mechanics” (Rudrauf & Damasio, 2005, p. 236). Acknowledging, in real time, the linkage between behavior and affect and the factors influencing both is a process of thinking in action or double-loop learning through which the governing variables or preferred situations of an individual, organization, or institution can be identified and critically challenged (Argyris & Schön, 1974). In this, doubt becomes the primary vector for critical thinking that challenges the authority and aesthetics of what we’ve come to know as common sense. Creating systemic change is contingent upon challenging existing paradigms (Meadows, 2008). Yet, the highest leverage point in creating systemic change, is “to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is ‘true,’ that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension...It is to let go into the not-knowing” (Meadows, 2008, p. 164). 

As design educators, we develop tactics for everyday [dis]engagement that facilitate [un]learning or not-knowing through dialectical [dis]orientation. Each mind-body-space mash-up seeks to tune up perceptual affordances, so that individuals can tune out of habitual patterns, and tune in to a heightened environmental awareness. Each tactic seeks to: expose latent assumptions; unveil the structure, operations, and context of the corresponding infrastructures; and, ultimately, disrupt the dominant order—rendering it as one possibility amongst many (Nash, 2014). 

The practice of [un]learning is as elusive as the everyday.* Therefore, the capacity for [un]learning to advance critical consciousness is contingent upon frequent intervention into our normative landscape in order to disrupt the beats, rhythms, and frequencies that modulate our minds and bodies—engaging and [dis]engaging, learning and [un]learning, by design. By identifying and harnessing the affective potential of difference and dissonance, we can propel the practice and pedagogy of design forward. With limited knowledge and expanded literacies, perhaps we are equipped to journey into the terra incognita of sustainability (Nash, 2014). 

• An underlying assumption in the development of [un]learning is that, over time, learning—be it actively or passively via environment, culture, and identity—actually inhibits our capacities to innovate. Choreographer Lucy Guerin provides an illuminating demonstration of this assumption in Untrained, a performance in which: "Four men take to the stage. Two of these men are highly skilled, experienced dancers and two are acclaimed visual artists with no movement training whatsoever. The complex, refined movements that one man can do with ease, another can only approximate. All are given the same instructions. It’s how they execute them displays an individual portrait of each man’s character, as well as an unavoidable comparison between the participants. It’s the evolution of information, built up through units of action, that shows what they have in common and where their physical histories set them apart." (Guerin, 2012)

Theories of Action, In Action

Livestream: [Un]Learning x Design from the Ground, Up

Biologist E.O. Wilson traced the birth of “modern humanity,” to a moment “about ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture…[T]he economic history that followed," he wrote "can be summarized succinctly as follows: people used every means they could devise to convert the resources of Earth into wealth” (Wilson, 2008). Today, the migration, allocation, and accumulation of wealth is transforming our Earth, and fundamentally altering our lives. The resulting relational complexities and transactional costs of this development, however, are cloaked in our everyday (Nash, 2014). 

Groundwater is one of our most valuable, albeit [in]visible, resources. Nearly 2,000,000 people throughout Kentucky rely on groundwater everyday. Families, farms, entire ecologies depend on it. Yet, like many systems that sustain this enchanted neck of the woods, groundwater is invisible. Without being able to see the water that runs beneath the Bluegrass, it is difficult to imagine how human actions affect this valuable resource, and, conversely, how groundwater impacts our every day. The faucets in our homes and the bottles of water we drink—which some might qualify as developments—do very little to tell us about the process by which the water has come to arrive in the faucet or bottle itself. Our interactions with groundwater are rarely—if ever—foregrounded in the preferred situations of development/design. How much groundwater do we have? Is it enough? For how long? What aquifers are most sensitive to contamination? Why? How does this affect us? And, conversely, how do we affect the quality of our groundwater? These are just a few of the questions geologists around the globe are asking, including Charles Taylor and Bart Davidson at The Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS).

Since 1990, KGS has amassed information for more than 92,000 wells and 5,100 springs across the state. Little is known, however, about the water that runs beneath the Bluegrass (Kentucky Groundwater Data Repository, 2014). “In order to compile a hydrologic record that represents the potential range of…fluctuations…over time,” explains KGS geologist Charles Taylor, “measurements must be collected...without interruption over one or more decades” (Taylor, 2001, p.57). To date, KGS has lacked the resources necessary to establish a long-term systematic groundwater monitoring network. Instead, they have had to rely on a handful of state agencies and independent researchers for groundwater sampling. Consequently, data collection is infrequent—the most recent data for some areas dates back more than three decades—until now. 

We are collaborating with the KGS to transform how the state collects, monitors, and sustains groundwater. The project, which we call Livestream, will transmit and translate groundwater data from across Kentucky into an interactive soundscape that will manifest as: a public art installation (phase one: 2014 –2015); an online archive (phase two: 2015–2016); and an educational outreach program (phase three: 2016–2017). Each phase of this participatory action research project will be designed to raise environmental awareness, literacy, and accountability from the ground, up.

Phase One: Toward Environmental Awareness

"For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it” (Berry, 2012). 

Since the days of Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), Western culture has privileged sight as the arbiter of truth, knowledge, and reality. Our language and cultural practices are littered with visual metaphors. Visual perception, however, is contingent upon the interdependency of all sensory receptors to identify, organize, and interpret environmental stimuli. Psychologist J.J. Gibson refers to this phenomena as the visual world. This is the world that exists beyond the visual field in which sight is detached from the sensorium in order to [re]present and [re]produce dominant infrastructures and ideologies (Gibson, 1950).* Within the visual field, the world is reduced to a spectacle within which we are mere spectators and “our vision is itself an artifact, produced by other artifacts" (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.27). "This separation and reduction fragments the innate complexity, comprehensiveness, and plasticity of the perceptual system, reinforcing a sense of individual detachment and alienation," concludes cultural theorist, Juhani Pallasmaa (2005, p.39). 

• Cognitive psychologists Richard Held and Alan Hein believed human perception to be plastic, or adaptable. However, the extent to which “concurrent self-produced movements” affected adaptation had yet to be determined. Held and Hein therefore designed an exercise to test if "being moved around and seeing the environment change was sufficient to develop visually-guided behavior, such as depth perception, or whether an individual needs° to experience self-generated movement in order to learn." In the center of a cylindrical carousel was a roundabout to which two kittens were attached—active kitty’s (A) paws touched the ground, passive kitty (P) was suspended in a basket. Neither one could see the other. The movements of kitty A propelled the roundabout and hence kitty P. If kitty A walked clockwise, so did Kitty P. Over the course of six weeks, 10 kitties spent 3 hours a day in the carousel. The experiment found that Kitty A learned to see while Kitty P was effectively blind—its eyes could see, but its brain couldn’t interpret the sensory input (Held & Hein, 1963).

Disrupting the visual field is imperative in order to [re]negotiate the maps that guide our everyday practices—to [un]learn. Through the development of Livestream, we are exploring the capacities of [un]learning to serve as a pedagogical framework that brings human and non-human agents together in dialog to transform how groundwater is collected, monitored, and sustained, by design. By situating ourselves in the visual world, we seek to disrupt normative fields of perception and practice. To accomplish this ambitious agenda, we are collaborating with composer, Ben Sollee; engineer, Sean Montgomery; public artist, Bland Hoke; educator Dan Marwit; and KGS geologists, Charles Taylor and Bart Davidson. 

During phase one of the project, we will install live monitoring stations in four springs throughout Kentucky—including Cave Branch Spring in Carter Cave State Resort Park; Blue Hole spring in McConnell Springs Park; Turn Hole Spring in Mammoth Cave National Park; and Brown Spring in the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area. Equipped with state-of-the-art sensors, each station will collect and transmit data measuring groundwater depth, pH, conductivity, turbidity, and temperature to the KGS Groundwater Data Repository. The data will be relayed from the spring to the survey in 15 minute intervals, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Using a bespoke sonification system, Livestream will translate this data into sound. A library of sounds will be composed by local artists, beginning with team member, Ben Sollee. Within the library, each parameter will be represented by a scale of sounds. Each sound will correspond to a data point within the average range of that parameter to date. The resulting soundtracks will be integrated into a public art installation in Lexington’s Jacobson Park. This interactive soundscape will be fabricated out of twenty pipes divided into four clusters that correspond to the four springs where groundwater data is being collected, effectively forming a map of Kentucky. Each pipe in the cluster correlates to one of the five groundwater parameters being measured. When people are present, sound, i.e. data, is activated. Volume is dependent on proximity. Moving through this interactive soundscape, individuals literally play the ground.

Approaching the landscape/soundscape, individuals are invited—through play and gestural interaction—to explore the multiple modalities by which they commune with the environment. Through their [dis]orienting interactions with the sonic manifestations of groundwater, individuals will begin to embody an agonism of sorts. The phenomenological attributes of these interactions, or bodily ways of [un]knowing, distribute deviances at a range of intensities throughout the body, penetrating and gradually eroding the conditioned relations between individual and environment, knowledge and power. As the complexities unfold, salient contradictions and contingencies emerge that begin to [dis]assemble the latent beliefs, bias, and practices integrated into the affective networks of our environment and corresponding political, social, and economic infrastructures. 

Essentially, Livestream [re]appropriates the techniques of Muzak to foreground the subjectivity and the perceptual affordances of individuals within the visual world—the technologies of the self—as a way to [re]imagine the technologies of production and power in the visual field. The [in]visible infrastructures of knowledge and power embedded in the visual field not only aid in the production of our perception, but also provide the possibility for us to assemble a visual world within which we can commune, differently—as critical beings. 

This theory of action was tested in action during the summer of 2014 when Livestream: An Eco-Art Prototype was temporarily installed in Lexington’s Downtown Arts Center. This initial prototype demonstrated the capacity of designed [dis]orientation to stimulate critical thinking, prompting questions such as: What is this? Groundwater? How is this possible? Wait, I’m controlling the volume? Such interactions suggested the beginnings of our preferred situation, [dis]orientation (Public Works, 2014).

Phase Two: Toward Environmental Literacy 

Beyond seeking to serve as a provocative framework for expanding environmental awareness, Livestream aims to increase environmental literacy through expanding access to experimentation. Groundwater data gleaned from springs across Kentucky and correlating sounds will be uploaded to the Livestream website. Phase two of the project will transform this groundwater archive into an interactive platform for analyzing groundwater quality by sampling and mixing sounds. Visitors to the site will be able to: (a) view the archived data and listen to the corresponding sounds for each measurement; (b) create unique soundtracks by mashing-up groundwater data with a variety of environmental perimeters that unfold across time and space; (c) upload, download, and share individual mixes/studies; and (d) discuss one another’s compositions, i.e., their findings. An intuitive interface inspired by early samplers and DJ decks will serve as the platform for this playful investigation that visualizes groundwater data—as well as the structures, operations, and context of the corresponding infrastructures—as soundtracks are composed. The resulting rhythms, harmonies, and/or dissonance has the potential to provoke novel insights, interpretations, and, ultimately, innovations toward the sustainment of Kentucky’s groundwater. Indeed, sonification of data can be particularly useful in helping both novice learners and experts identify new and emergent patterns in data sets (Alexander, et al., 2011; Alexander, et al., 2012). Through a sonic and aesthetic experience, visitors to the site are enticed to investigate groundwater. Like the physical interactions with the installation piece, the site may provoke questions and confusion, leading to a [dis]orientation, and subsequently, a [dis]assembly of the user’s relationship to groundwater and to the [in]visible infrastructures to which it is connected.

By leveraging “computation to facilitate the creation of human-readable meaning, as opposed to machine-readable meaning,” a DJ methodology of [un]learning “can catalyze creative inquiry, illuminating connections and exposing previously unseen relationships” (Kaiser, in press). This form of improvisational inquiry is evident in Zachary Kaiser’s prototype for Sampler —a digital platform that employs the interface metaphor of an early sampler to engage individuals in research bound by limited resources via play (Kaiser, 2013). By providing constraints in the context of an experimental environment, Sampler expands opportunities to build on the investigations of users in order to [dis]assemble visual and content-based connections. 

Phase two of Livestream will harnesses the DJ methodology of [un]learning as a critical pedagogy to construct an experimental environment (classroom)/digital playground that offers new ways for individuals—from a diversity of disciplines and demographics with a range of expertise—to [dis]assemble the maps that shape their understandings of, and relationships to, groundwater, the environment, and, more broadly, aesthetics, authority, and authorship. It is this process of [dis]assembly, a [re]negotiation, that forms the pedagogical framework of Livestream and engages citizens as geologists capable of contributing to the sustainment of groundwater on which they and millions of Kentuckians rely every day. 

We are currently working to develop an evaluation plan for phases one and two of the project in order to understand the affects and effects of both the installation and the online archive on the people and infrastructures of Kentucky. This evaluation plan will leverage the quantitative data we capture about interactions with the installation and the archive, as well as qualitative data about the language and discourse around the project—who talks about it, what they are saying, and where it is being said. We recognize that any data we collect will not be objective, and that merely by deciding what to collect we are inserting subjectivities into the evaluation of the work. A critical lens imbued with the values of [un]learning will therefore be applied to the evaluative process as well. 

Phase Three: Toward Environmental Accountability 

Phase one of Livestream invites an investigation of groundwater and phase two aims to catalyze a [dis]assembly of relationships with groundwater and the [in]visible infrastructures to which it is connected. Phase three of Livestream aims to mirror the third facet of the process of [un]learning and [dis]orientation: a dialectical [re]framing of the topic itself. If we operate within communications systems that are cognitive maps both of and for, that circumscribe space and program our actions, such communications serve to frame the way in which we understand the spaces being circumscribed. In order to facilitate experiences of wayfinding, a [re]framing process is therefore essential. We argue here that [re]framing is an act that builds upon the previous two phases, investigation and [dis]assembly. As we move forward with the first two phases of Livestream, we are therefore beginning to consider how various tools might offer opportunities for learners to build on their experiences with phases one and two in order to [re]frame their relationships with groundwater and the environment. 

Wash, Rinse…Repeat as Necessary. 

Reflections: Two Steps Back, One Step… 

To learn and unlearn; engage and disengage; orient and disorient—ideally, the dialectic inherent in and between each of these negotiations reveals the maps and hence mechanics of our everyday—the [in]visible infrastructures that we follow, knowingly and unknowingly. In this context, design has already ceased to be what it once was—per Papanek’s plea. The power of design has been employed by academics and executives to catalyze systemic change that would not have been considered part its purview half a century ago. Unfortunately, the underlying assumptions about the capacities of design—its affects and effects—are as antiquated as its aesthetics. From existing to preferred, its complexities, contradictions, and culpabilities are reduced to tidy narratives that we read about in Fast Company and Wired. Its products, whether an Apple Watch or a service such as Uber, seem still to exist. They reflect the continued and ever-increasing faith in a unified notion of design—the preferred meaning, making, and memory or learning. Consequently, we as designers often ignore our capacities and culpabilities as political, social, economic, and environmental producers and consumers. 

As a pedagogical framework for [un]learning, Livestream seeks to subvert the prevailing notions of design and development or education. The project itself aims to [dis]orient those who experience it, opening opportunities for [un]learning in each phase. In addition, this theory of action, in action has succeeded in [dis]orienting those participating in its design and creation. As such, the design of Livestream itself is a process of [un]learning that we believe can be modeled in the design classroom. 

Reflecting on Livestream as a theory of action, in action has expanded our understanding of meaning and making as each relate to design and development. While we believe that the critical capacities fostered by [un]learning are integral to the [dis]orientation of design and education (or development), we realize that this is one way. Moving forward, this critical lens, imbued with skepticism of expertise and authority—including our own—will continue to contribute to our work.

Designing environments (classrooms) and curricula that function as frameworks for [un]learning is a challenge when you are also [un]learning—particularly when your theories of action, in action interrogate your authority, privilege, beliefs, biases and, hence, tools and technologies. The process carries with it an implicit sort of delay, a slowness required by reflection. Such delays and the slowness that results can be important in the health of dynamic systems (Cillers, 2006; Meadows, 2008). In today’s world of agile innovation, a process valuing delay feels very un-agile. At the same time, such a pace may be more agile: avoiding a singular trajectory that perpetuates the prevailing paradigm—its tools, technologies, individuals, institutions, and ideologies. 

While this paper is a reflection on the capacities and culpabilities of design to foster the literacies necessary to critically confront the present and enact alternative futures; it is also a call to action: to engage and disengage, learn and unlearn, to find your own way(s) of designing a more sustainable tomorrow, today.


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