As happens in collaborative writing, we were already several and now only more so. This article marks a moment——one of many——a bringing together of vastly different discourses of expertise and theory that are amalgamated by us, by our names, by our practices. We are both teachers, philosophers and practitioners of product and packaging design to greater and lesser extents; and sometimes all at the same time. This is not a frivolous beginning. The mashing together——like good felt——of these several selves will be the point of this piece. If felt can have a point. To navigate different discourses and practices in order to create something that, even if for a fleeting moment, is creative, is what this piece is about. But it is also a testament to this idea of becoming felt; a material manifestation of its point. The next movement in this mashing up will be to send the ideas out to be chewed over by others and for their responses to be gathered back into the mix. This, too, is the point. We offer a way of designing that follows our principles and practice, in order to product truly innovative outcomes.

Digesting
We have written elsewhere about digesting design and will only mention briefly the main ideas here. Consumption has defined, for some years now, the relationship between people and things. This gives nuances to discussions of taste, of cultures of choice and a myriad other related notions. The hegemonic nature of this discourse of consumption has, however, glossed over some important differences that are in need of highlighting. Consumption is predominantly a mouth-centred activity and cannot stand for the “living-with” of designed objects that takes place (with some things: houses, furniture, white goods) over many years. Consumption and tasting can rarely stand more than 20 chews before the objects are broken down and sent off to other places, for other processes. We argue that these “other places”——where digestion happens——offer a better metaphor with which to understand the everyday, elongated practices that describe people’s real engagement with designed objects. For example, though we may have exercized judgments of taste in the initial purchase of our sofas——consuming them proper——after four years of living with these objects, when we are away from home but we know they are sitting there in our living rooms, we cannot be said to be consuming them still. Everything that defined the moment of consumption of this object has passed. Nevertheless this object remains in our lives, giving off different values as our lives change. We are left, then, with a refinement of the metaphor to account for the post-consumption life of objects: and this gives us digesting. We should remember that this is more than an issue of academic pedantry over definitions. When we fold the whole concept back into the design process, we find that such theorizing has real, material, everyday effects.

Designing
Designing, as practiced, is a teleological process. It starts with a brief, goes through a number of stages——sometimes folding back to earlier stages in a reiterative loop——before reaching a goal in an outcome. Innovation through design only happens within tightly controlled boundaries. For the philosopher and ex-monk Georges Bataille, such a process was a “project”; which defined the whole experience of something launched at a particular target. (This was also subsumed under the notion of discursive experience, which prioritized the values of the written, the rational and the logical over the passionate, the destructive and the creative; following Nietzsche’s Apollo versus Dionysos.) The design process already mentioned is such a project: discursive, teleological, constrained. Even when it tries to break out of these strictures——by, for example, making the User the Centre of Design—the project remains, even if the conditions according to which the goal is conceptualized shift slightly. The top-down project still rules——and either the Designer or the Client occupies this tyrannical position. We wonder whether a different conception of the design process will offer a different social, cultural and political outcome. Our contention is that this change will occur by following a design process motivated by a concept of digestion. We have found a project to do away with projects.

Innovating Democratically
For Bataille, doing away with project was “ecstatic”: ex-stasis, the moving out of rest, clinches the deal. Moving out of the top-down constraints of the design process into something more fluid and creative, as Bataille does philosophically, offers much. We say that recognizing the digestive nature of our engagement with designed things will provide a similar ecstasy of design process.

Designers have been used, over recent years, to looking at people and their practices as part of the design process. The use of Ethnography as a tool for doing design research is commonplace. Our initiative is to remove such observations from the hierarchy of control in which the Designer Knows All (discovering opportunities in insights) and reposition them in a way that allows people to initiate design opportunities through their digestions. Within a digestive project, the designing and redesigning that people (who were once merely users, or consumers) undertake, are taken seriously, adopted and adapted. This is more than user-testing or focus-grouping, as these two activities merely set the responses of the users etc. in already well-defined projects, as digested things are folded back into the designers’ projects swerving them in hitherto undreamt of directions. The removal of the locus of power and control from the hierarchic project of design, will lead to opportunities for innovation that will be constrained only by the tardiness in producing digestable objects.

Unlike the “sustainable innovation” discussed by Clayton Christensen (1997)——where innovation happens in tiny steps, building only slightly on what has gone before——or even his “disruptive innovation”—which targets different markets and/or uses with existing technologies——this ecstatic innovation allows the possibility for design projects to take utterly chaotic directions. The outcome of such a digestive approach is a process which is non-linear and non-teleological, where control of designing is bottom-up and truly democratic, where clients, designers and people——digesters all——can negotiate ecstatic innovation in properly creative ways.

——

References
– Bataille, G. 1988. Inner Experience. Translated by Leslie A. Boldt. New York: SUNY Press
– Brassett, Jamie & Peter Booth. 2008 forthcoming. ‘Design Digestion. Work in Progress.’ In Design Principles & Practices: An International Journal
– Christensen, C. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston: Harvard Business School Press
– Nietzsche, F. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music. Edited by Michael Tanner. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books Ltd.