Autopoesis, Design, and the Chair

I originally wrote this on November 7, 2013 for my masters seminar. It’s some of my early thoughts on how the idea of autopoesis might apply to problems. In this case, the problem of how to design a comfortable chair …

I am sitting here in my garret office, the sound of rain on the roof, smells of coffee and cats and morning activities wafting up the stairs. My nose is stuffed up with some kind of material, and I don’t feel like working. My chair feels uncomfortable, or I’m ascribing the concept of discomfort to my experience of sitting in the chair. It’s hard to tell anymore. Most likely the latter, as it’s logical to assume that the chair is not causing anything to happen, rather, the condition of my body, the muscles in my legs, the neuronal connections between those muscles and my brain, and the other components of the vast network that makes up the “my” of the sentence are all coordinating in response to a physical connection with the chair. Which is interesting to think about, because the chair is a set of coordinating responses as well, isn’t it.

Electro-chemical bonds at the atomic level creating a social network of sorts, a social network of atoms to molecules to compounds. Compounds that are shaped and formed and manipulated in the human plane in such a way as to elicit the thought “chair” from those of us who see or sit on this object-of-objects. And then that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it?

This object was designed by other objects-of-objects to counteract exactly the impression that I have at this time: that it’s uncomfortable. I know this to be the case, because the marketing material that came with the chair described it as such, because I understand a bit about industrial and ergonomic design, etc. Whatever the case, the primary purpose of this object is to support me while I’m sitting. The secondary – but only be the merest of margins – purpose is to support me while I’m sitting in such a way that I don’t have the feeling of being uncomfortable. That leads me to wonder, then, if the designers of the chair were unsuccessful.

Could they possibly have accounted for all possible conditions of comfort and discomfort of those people who would sit on this design? No, of course not. Instead, they opted to design for a specific targeted position of sitting that was most likely to be the most common among the users of their chair. They didn’t account for time of day, lack of coffee, leg ache due to bad mattresses, or any of that. They accounted for researched nuances into the proper angle for sitting, optimal viewing angle between a head and eyes, best typing position, and proper adjustment of seat and armrest height for the chair itself. And to be honest, none of that is in play here in my situation. This chair then is designed for a universally shared experience, whereas, the experiences it will more likely have are decidedly and staunchly singular. It stands to reason that every time this chair model is interacted with, that interaction will be different in some way from the previous interaction. Whether it’s one person or 100 people, this is a safe assumption. The reason for this is not the chair, nor the fault of the design, nor anything that could be accounted for by the designers. The reason is a matter of perspective.

The chair was not designed for individual sitting patterns, but for an aggregate, “average” pattern that was derived from research. The research looked at individual sitting responses, I imagine, combined that with existing data on sitting responses, and resulted in a description of a certain bandwidth of sitting responses that the design should try and fit within or encompass. This is the observer perspective. The problem is that the chair is not used within that perspective. The chair is used by a single data point that helped create that perspective.

The perceiver is the one who sits in the chair, who experiences it as it is for her. This is the perspective for the chair designer that ultimately matters, but it’s impossible for that designer to understand it because of its very nature as a truly singular and individually-preceived thing. The best that the chair designer can do, and what she did do, is design within parameters understood at the macro level of sitters and hope that the individual sitters fall somewhere within those parameters. Inevitably, however, this will never be enough.

For design, this paradox is counteracted through the consciously data-driven and iterative evolution of the form of the chair. Over a period of designs through the course of time, the parameters are narrowed and refined so that more and more sitters are accounted for with each new version, thus creating the likelihood that more sitters’ individual experiences are addressed. In this way, the design of the chair in which I am sitting uncomfortably shares characteristics with other iterative processes: learning, growth, problem solving, evolution.

The chair-design-sitter connection is a system in which the comfort of the sitter is the ultimate output and measurement by which the system is judged. As a system, the components also serve as inputs to the system in which they’re contained, making the design process for creating a chair autopoetic. In fact, this concept can be applied to any design process where an aggregate research view is meant to meet the needs of an individual perceiver. That relationship between the aggregate and the individual and the motivating desire to meet the needs of the individual are the two components that create the autopoetic loop. The loop is perpetual because while the parameters will continually be narrowed and refined, they can only approach the individual need of the sitter. Why? Because the designer can’t possibly know what each and every sitter will be doing. I think that the same loop be used to describe or deal with problems.

Let’s call the triptych the object-creation-perceiver cycle. It doesn’t really do it justice, because it doesn’t reference the cycle implicit in the process, but it’ll do for now. So, one of the characteristics of the OCP is that it is self-perpetuating. The second is that it has driving parameters, and the third is that it does not stop until the driving parameters are met. In our example above, OCP becomes chair-design-sitter. This process is driving by the need for the chair to meet the needs of the sit, and until that happens, design still happens. In an example from nature, we could say meal-evolution-cat. The need for the cat to find a meal drives iterative designs that narrow and remove parameters on an approach to perfection. The components “meal”, “evolution,” and “cat” all bring input to the system, driving change and adjustment in the system in line with what drive change and adjustment for them within the environment outside the system similar to my sore back from sleeping on a bad mattress and the effect it has “on” the chair in which I’m sitting. So, yeah. Basically, we can apply this model to any system in which the system seeks satisfaction of a parameter for a component of the system.

In the case of a problem, the problem will persist until it is solved to the satisfaction of the perceiver of the problem. While the previous examples perpetuated to a state of infinitude, in the case of a problem, we are looking to perpetuate to a state of entropy. We want the system to die, leaving only the perceiver left. Let’s call this loop the solution-solver-perceiver triptych. The solution is what is modified by the solver in order to remove from the perceiver a problem. Okay, so I think it fits.

There is the problem of messaging. For example, with the solution-solver-perceiver system, symptoms are the method by which the system communicates within itself to indicate whether it can close. For the design process, we would call that feedback. For evolution, we could also call it feedback. In this view, then, symptoms would become feedback as related to the problem. They are not the problem, but are the ways in which we know the problem exists and are clues to finding the right solution. However, just like with the design of a chair, the solution we find on behalf of the perceiver can only be an aggregate one and will never close the gap for a single perceiver completely because it’s impossible to account for every perceiver with every solution. This is not the case for a self-designing or self-solving perceiver.

In the case where the perceiver is also the creator, it is possible to craft very personal chairs or solutions. What becomes impossible in that case, then, is crafting global solutions. We find that just as an externally-designed solution can never fit our own individual needs precisely, so can an internally-designed solution never fit the needs of another person precisely. We have to make a trade-off. The width of this gap in solution and problem is dependent upon the relationship the perceiver has to the environment in which the problem exists, the relationship the problem has to the environment in which it exists, the state of either problem or perceiver at the moment of perception, etc.