The problem of circulation

It has long been the case that the perception, emergence, and/or creation of new dangers has lead policymakers to turn to designers for technological fixes to security problems. What tends to be ‘new’ in this combination of new dangers, new securities, and new designs are what needs to be managed and what technological form design ‘solutions’ to management ‘problems’ take. As intellectuals like Michel Foucault and Paul Virilio argue, in modernity states have turned increasingly complex flows of ‘circulation’ into a management problem that states must administer and control.Footnote ³⁶ And so policymakers and designers have long been collaborating on how to ‘design out insecurities’ and ‘design in protection’ with respect to circulation. But what circulates, how it circulates, where it circulates, why it circulates, and at what speed it circulates have all been changing. So finding the balance between making life liveable and making life safe is an on-going challenge for states, for citizens, and for designers.

In works like Speed and Politics and Security, Territory, Population, Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault respectively make a seemingly obvious point about the world we live in – that this world is only possible due to the complex forms of circulation that surround us, be these the circulation of money, goods, food, machines, armies, diseases, animals, or ideas. As such, circulation is vital to modern life and to modern living. Yet unregulated circulation is often perceived by states as a security problem. So states (often collaborating with designers and architects) step in to carefully and ‘cost-effectively’ manage circulation. As Virilio and Foucault note, these management strategies are always political because they are always infused with the interests and desires of states.

Even so, some regulations on circulation seem to be unproblematic. For example, if we were allowed to drive our automobiles as fast as we wanted to, then fatalities on the roads would most likely increase. So it makes good sense to have enforced speed limits.Footnote ³⁷ Yet other regulations are far more problematic. For example, many states currently justify the management of their territorial borders by arguing that if the global circulation of people crossing borders were unregulated, then some countries would be ‘swamped’ with undocumented bodies that states claim threaten their economy, security, and health.Footnote ³⁸

States, then, face a predicament – how can states address the desires of their citizens for the accelerated mobility that modern circulatory systems can provide while at the same time putting in place controls devised to manage circulation that do not unduly irritate or impede the circulatory systems their citizens reply upon. One way is for states to regulate the speed of circulation. For example, the speed of the economic circulation of goods and services might be increased (through, for example, the quicker delivery of goods ordered online) while the speed of human circulation may be decreased at international borders to allow states to interrogate those people and packages whose transit the state may want to inhibit (whether they threaten to import disease, unemployment, or terror).

The management and control of circulation often relies upon ‘low-tech’ solutions, like speed bumps placed on roads or paper passports at border crossings. Yet as we move from a geopolitical to a metro-political era,Footnote ³⁹ increasingly powerful technologies are becoming part of our everyday lives, in part because our daily lives are constantly recontextualised through old dangers like crimes perpetrated by ‘dangerous classes’ and new dangers like threats created by ‘terrorist networks’. This has the effect of increasing the number of products designed to protect our bodies and property from crime and terrorism through new ‘networked’ technology, smart materials, or biometric technologies like domestic surveillance, knife-proof clothing, or fingerprint activated laptops. At the same time, these technologies enable new ways of monitoring the circulation of people and products while making circulation faster, more efficient, and more individualised by using everything from RFid devices to ‘responsive environments’ of the sort seen in films like Minority Report.Footnote ⁴⁰ In these ways, states attempt to ‘design out’ uncertainties, insecurities, and inconveniences while they ‘design in protection’.

Many of these designs have a connection to the military or the militarised mentality that modern citizens live with(in). For example, because the attainment of security seemed elusive for Cold War citizens, one of the prevailing imaginaries and technologies of ‘safe living’ during this period in US/Soviet history was for citizens to barricade themselves against a nuclear attack. On a low-tech level, school children were trained to ‘duck and cover’ when they saw a nuclear flash; on a high-tech level, nuclear shelters were built into backyards and mountain sides. In our contemporary world, though, moving around is often seen as safer than being a sitting duck (covered or not). As design theorist Susan Yelavich explains, ‘In the end, mobility appeared the better course than perpetual internment [like in a nuclear fall-out shelter], and the shelter became just another decoy.’Footnote ⁴¹ So new designs like Kosuke Tsumara's Final Home Jacket – a garment designed as a ‘nomadic home’ in times of disaster – were created that could protect mobile citizens from mobile dangers, something that makes more sense in our post-Cold War, post-9/11 era.

As Tsumara's Final Home Jacket illustrates, our relationships to everyday objects change when our military imaginaries and technologies change. The German designer and social theorist Stephan Trüby elaborates on this point:

Trüby also notes that many ‘marketable design products’ (such as the R-Designed Volvo, for example) often have ‘a very close resemblance to military artifacts’,Footnote ⁴³ as if the militarisation of the product provides emotional security and comfort from a dangerous world.Footnote ⁴⁴

In addition to the everyday objects that we do see, there are everyday electronic impulses circulating through our environments and our bodies that we don't see – things like radio waves or micro waves that have their own spectral geography. These electromagnetic impulses make the circulation and exchange of data possible without us necessarily being aware of their invisible movements as they happen, yet we respond to them all the time – through broadcasts we watch, products we use to heat our food, and haptics (technologies that use touch to interface).Footnote ⁴⁵ We are not just surrounded but permeated by these electromagnetic impulses, as we rely upon them to circulate the signals of modern life. Sometimes these signals have to do with security. In the US, for example, television viewers are familiar with the Emergency Broadcasting System that tests whether or not radio and television signals could be transmitted during a national emergency. A more playful recent example is FutureFarmers’ Homeland Security Blankets. ‘Each blanket is wirelessly networked to the internet and responds to the Homeland Security Acts fluxuating (sic) Color coded “Threat Levels”. As a means to “disseminate information”, these blankets disseminate temperature change and an indicating light which alerts the user of the current threat and comforts them accordingly.’Footnote ⁴⁶

What designs like the Homeland Security Blanket illustrate are how designers make security intelligible and accessible to us and liveable for us, often through everyday objects that provide both information and comfort.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the Homeland Security Blanket does something else. It also makes us hyperaware of the invisible electromagnetic security-space we occupy and that occupies us. As such, it embodies two critiques of what attempts to ‘design out insecurity’ and ‘design in protection’ do in our daily lives.

One critique suggests that these new technologies are themselves merely hype, designed to first make everyday citizens aware of what their states designate as dangers and then to make citizens feel comforted by their state's ability to provide them with ‘safety’. While states are very accomplished at achieving their first goal of instilling fear in their citizens, they are less good at providing actual protection and safety. For as Mike Davis writes in his history of the car bomb, ‘Although science writers like to fantasize about “vast networks of imaging or trace sensors deployed through cities,” such Orwellian systems, if they actually become available, will probably be too expensive to find widespread use, especially in poorer countries.’Footnote ⁴⁸ In other words, the technologies we may really need to keep us safe from in our modern systems of circulation do not yet exist, and if they did exist, they would unlikely to be available to those who need them.

‘Security’, as the anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom suggests, might be little more than a trompe l'oeil – a fooling of the eye – than a lived reality. She comes to this conclusion based on her research on US shipping ports. While she confesses to being lulled into a ‘sense of security well-being’ by the ‘formal’ voice of security,Footnote ⁴⁹ she cannot escape the conclusion of her research that if ‘you want to believe in security, don't visit ports. A journey to these borderlands shows that security is an illusion. The notion of security is the magicians trick: smoke and mirrors, with a good dose of mis/direction.’Footnote ⁵⁰

Yet the mere possibility that these technologies of surveillance, control and protection might exist and could function leads to a second critique of the security/technology relationship, which is that new technologies introduce new dangers into our daily lives rather than (as promised) eliminate new dangers. This position is shared by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. In his short essay ‘No to Bio-political Tattooing’ published in Le Monde in January 2004, Agamben explains why he cancelled a course he was meant to teach at New York University later that year. For Agamben, the fact that his visa and fingerprints would be placed on a file is an example of the state's control of circulation reaching ‘previously unimaginable levels’. Practices once considered inhumane or exceptional, designed for the control of ‘dangerous classes’, are becoming normalised, contributing to what Agamben sees as the progressive ‘animalization of man’, noting that tattooing at Auschwitz ‘undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrollment of deported persons into concentration camps’.Footnote ⁵¹ So whereas Davis and Nordstrom view the use of new sophisticated techniques of surveillance and control as ‘hype’, Agamben sees ‘bio-political tattooing’ as another act of closing down the citizenry's ‘free and active participation in the public sphere’. And what is more, history ‘teaches us how practices first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the rest of the citizenry’.Footnote ⁵²

All this suggests that design may well provide us with too much security and too much convenience, which can end up making us less secure – physically, emotionally, ethically, and politically. Making visible the ethico-political dilemmas designed into everyday objects and processes of safety is what ethico-political and critical designers do. In so doing, these designers help us to think about how security-obsessed objects, architectures, and impulses not only shape our environments but shape us as contemporary subjects. As such, they present us with a whole range of new security questions, including ‘Do we need protection from what the state designates as “dangerous”’, or are we endangered by what the state tells us is ‘safe’? Consider the following examples.

Image 1.

Casa Segura Interiors.

The first example, which addresses the flow of undocumented bodies across international borders, is media artist/designer Robert Ransick's Casa Segura (see Image 1). Casa Segura (Safe House) is a small, solar-powered shed-like structure stocked with non-perishable food and water. Designed to be located on private land in the Sonora desert in Southern Arizona, this unmanned shack can be used by undocumented migrants who have decided to cross this dangerous desert to try to avoid detection by US Border Patrol agents as they journey from Mexico to the US. Because of the harsh conditions of the Arizona desert and the general under-preparedness of crossers to make their journey, Casa Segura's shelter and provisions can mean the difference between life and death. But Casa Segura is more than just a transitional space that migrants can anonymously pass through. For Casa Segura also houses a computer touch screen that is linked (on a time delay) to the internet. Choosing between options ‘to draw, write messages, or make a pictogram from a set of ready-made graphical icons’, migrants using Casa Segura may not only mark their existence but also comment on their experience as they make their journey.

According to Ransick, ‘[…] Casa Segura engages three distinct groups: Mexican migrants crossing the border through this dangerous landscape, the property owners whose land they cross, and members of the general public interested in learning more about border issues and the intricate dynamics at play in this heavily trafficked region’.Footnote ⁵³ In so doing, Casa Segura does not only provide a temporary refuge and site of engagement to migrants. It also ‘provides concerned private property owners on the border with an opportunity to create a life-saving beacon in the desert, a platform for engaging with the anonymous individuals crossing their land, and a non-aggressive means of protecting their homes’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The overall effect of this project is to make ‘manifest the compassionate choices available to individuals who live within this highly charged border region. As an alternative to the future militarization of the border, Casa Segura offers a new method of engagement and free exchange. Shifting away from the abstract rhetoric of numbers, the project focuses on the anonymous – yet intimate – relationship between a property owner and the individual migrants walking their land’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Image 2.

Faraday Chair.

A second, very different example is designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby's Faraday Chair (see Image 2), which comes from their project Hertzian Tales Footnote ⁵⁶ and addresses the flow of electromagnetic impulses, defamiliarising the familiar in the spaces we inhabit. Unlike designer Robert Ransick's Casa Segura which is made to actually function in the Arizona desert, Dunne and Raby's Faraday Chair is a non-functioning prototype that illustrates the sort of shelter we might actually need to keep us safe from the circulation of hidden electromagnetic fields that surround us everywhere. The prototype is a yellowish-tinted Perspex box large enough to house a person curled up in the foetal position. The box is elevated on steel legs and contains an air mask for ventilation. In line with much of Dunne and Raby's work, the Faraday Chair asks questions about ‘the social, cultural, and ethical impact of emerging pervasive technologies’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Specifically, the question raised by the Faraday chair is if ‘[a]s electronic devises invade our houses, wave-free spaces may be our only refuge’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Image 3.

James King's In-Vitro Meat Project ‘Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow’.

The final example comes from Dunne and Raby's former student James King's In-Vitro Meat Project, ‘Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow’,Footnote ⁵⁹ a project that considers the roles of design and technology in practices of food preparation and consumption. King's interest is in how existing technologies make it possible to clone edible meat without the need to clone and then slaughter an entire animal. This leads him to speculate on ‘how we might choose to give shape, texture and flavour to this new sort of food in order to better remind us where it came from’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In his project, King designs in-vitro meat that in no way resembles the meat we are accustomed to eating these days, meat that is a discrete part of an animal like a leg or a breast. Instead, the meat King imagines might be served in the future is grown in-vitro in moulds to resemble colourful (almost candy-like) cross-sections of an animal's inner organs, what he calls ‘MRI steaks’ (see Image 3). By playing with ideas of taste and palatability, King's work challenges us to think about how existing technologies enable unforeseen relationships among humans, animals, and food. It raises questions like: ‘Should cloning meat replace herding and slaughtering animals for food?’; ‘If so, would cloning make animals safe from humans or would more species of animals become extinct because humans don't cultivate them?’; ‘Is cloned meat safe for human consumption?’; ‘If so, how might cloning meat introduce new practices of ethical eating beyond, say, vegetarianism?’; ‘And how will designers make these developments normal and acceptable?’

Structures like Casa Segura and objects like the Faraday Chair and MRI steaks are designed to hold social, cultural, political, and ethical values in ways that provoke questions. By building and/or circulating these designed structures and objects, ethico-political and critical designers are effectively circulating their questions, about the normal and the abnormal, the real and the imaginary, the possible and the impossible. It is for this reason that critical designers sometimes refer to their work as ‘design for debate’.Footnote ⁶¹ Included in this debate are not just the intended uses of designed objects, but also their unintended uses. For one never really knows how an object will be used in a specific context by a specific individual with all sorts of emotions, desires, and needs that commodified technology cannot or will not recognise.Footnote ⁶² Think again of Colomina's example of the cell phone, which was designed to enable communication and connection but which was used, misused or abused to trigger destruction in the Madrid bombings.

Overall, what these ethico-political and critical designs do is use the imaginative space of design in which security and technology meet to make politics, values, and ethics visible. They do this by illuminating many taken-for-granted assumptions, values, and utilities designed into this relationship and highlighting questions about why a particular security/technology relationship exists, on whose behalf, for what stated and unstated purpose, and for what intended and unintended use. In so doing, they allow us to think political, critically, and ethically about what the application of these everyday technologies of protection means for our ‘safe living’ right here and right now as we think about how we will live safely today and how we will live safely in the future.

‘Do you want to replace the existing normal?’Footnote ⁶³

As the above discussion makes clear, the work of ethico-political and critical designers can embody unexpected and therefore disarming critiques about the relationship between security, technology, and design. It can do this by, in the words of critical designer Fiona Raby, ‘replacing the existing normal’ in terms of what design is supposed to do.Footnote ⁶⁴ For critical designers like Raby, what traditional design is supposed to do is use technology to provide consumers with market-driven systems, services, and objects that are useful as well as aesthetically pleasing rather than raise questions about new technologies. From our new securities perspective,Footnote ⁶⁵ what traditional design also does is smooth over and depoliticise the relationship between technology and security by providing slick, sellable technological ‘solutions’ to what mainly states but also corporations and individuals designate as security ‘problems’.

During 2007/2008, we began working with ethico-political and critical designers to learn about the protocols and procedures of doing ethico-political and critical design and to expose these designers to how we think about safety and security.Footnote ⁶⁶ Just as we would not claim any expertise in the area of design, none of the ethico-political and critical designers we work with would claim any expertise in the area of security studies. Nor would these designers necessarily appreciate all of the ways their work occasionally interrupts traditional and even new ‘security dialogues’. So it is just as hit and miss that ethico-political and critical designers might direct their attention to traditional, critical, and new ‘security issues’ as it is that traditional, critical and new security scholars might stumble upon the insights of ethico-political and critical designers to help them ‘replace the existing normal’ in terms of what security studies is supposed to do. The challenge, then, is to create a new, sustained dialogue among ethico-political and critical designers and security studies scholars and practitioners so that they might work together to influence public policy agendas that claim to ‘design out insecurity’ and ‘design in protection’ now and in the future and to expose dangerous contradictions bound up in these security agendas.

One of the ways we are taking up this challenge is by developing a new approach to security studies, what we call Redesigning Security. A Redesigning Security Approach combines the insights of new security studies and the insights of ethico-political and critical design to rethink the security/technology relationship in ways that may influence security policy. More specifically, it involves three moves: (1) interrupting the conventional conversation about security by broadening who takes part in this conversation; (2) identifying new research questions that emerge from this conversation and, (3) combining new security studies insights and ethico-political and critical design practices and research methods/attitudes as a way to explore these new research questions. We will elaborate on each of these moves in turn.

Conversations about security tend to be limited to social/political science academics, government policymakers working directly on security issues, and scientists developing technologies that may be deployed to solve security problems. Occasionally, stakeholders like ‘the public’ or corporations are included. Our conversation about redesigning security draws upon these and three additional groups – (1) academics working on critical organisational management, critical science/technology studies, and critical humanities studies; (2) critical policy analysts working for independent public policy Think Tanks and, (3) design practitioners who understand themselves to be doing ethico-politically-motivated design or to be employing ‘critical design’ methods/attitudes in their practice of design. What these additional conversationalists add are alternative perspectives on what politics is and how it is practiced. These dialogues also broaden the resources we draw upon to re-imagine and therefore rethink what security is, what technology is, what design is, and what the security/technology/design relationship should be, particular on behalf of states and citizens. They do this through references to aspects of the ‘real world’ that traditional security studies scholars, analysts, and practitioners often neglect and through references to ‘other worlds’ in film, literature, art, music, and performance.

What is emerging from this refigured conversation are a range of research questions that are markedly different to those found in traditional, critical and new security studies because they require us to rethink security, technology and design separately and together. These questions are:

1. 1. What products, services and assemblages are designers, scientists and policymakers imagining and proposing in order to ‘design out’ insecurity and ‘design in’ protection’?

2. 2. How can we begin to use alternative practices and methods/attitudes – such as ‘critical design’ – to imagine how these new products, services, and systems will be used and (mis)used in the near future and to potentially interrupt and/or redirect these future applications of new technologies?

3. 3. What are the ethico-political implications of these attempts to ‘design out’ insecurity and ‘design in protection’?

How we investigate these research questions is by combining new securities insights with ethico-political and critical design methods/attitudes. As our earlier discussion pointed out, a new securities perspective offers a number of insights about the relationships between security and insecurity, security and fear, and security and politics/ethics. One of the mantras of new security studies is that attempts to increase security are often also accompanied by increases in insecurity. At the same time, though, multiplying insecurities can be a policymaking technique (as we've seen in the so-called War on Terror). But it is a policymaking technique that always threatens to get out of hand. This is because the sorts of fears that bubble through all of the contemporary circulatory systems we discussed earlier are explicitly created, directed, containable, and predictable fears as well as unexpected, misdirected, uncontainable, and unpredictable fears. All responses to these insecurities and fears – whether we think they make us ‘safe’ or not – have ethico-political dimensions that are sometimes difficult to grasp when we are caught up in them (like the sometimes hidden histories of iris scanning technology in airport security ‘fast lanes’).Footnote ⁶⁷

Much of the work of ethico-political and critical designers engages (either explicitly or implicitly) the ethico-political issues circulating through contemporary networks of security and insecurity. What these designers are very good at is making visible the relationships between security and insecurity through the production of material objects (like Casa Segura, the Faraday Chair, and MRI steaks). The reason why these objects are so effective at materialising relationships between security and insecurity (particularly in the realm of science and technology) is because these objects embody paradoxes about the circulation of securities and insecurities through technologies that either exist today (border patrols, electromagnetic waves) or that are being imagined to secure us in the future (Homeland Security blankets).

What we are calling ‘ethico-political design’ accomplishes its critique of the security/technology/design relationship by proposing self-consciously ethical and political designs that intentionally complicate prevailing knowledge about politics and the values contained in this political knowledge while (usually) offering alternative design solutions and/or ethical choices in the face of these political problems (as Casa Segura does, for example, in relation to the prevailing wisdom and practice of dealing with illegal immigrants). How what designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby call ‘critical design’ accomplishes its critique of the security/technology/design relationship is by standing outside the prevailing knowledge about design (that design should offer marketable ‘solutions’ to pre-given ‘problems’). From this position, critical designers are able to design objects that are themselves questions about the ethico-political values and biases designed into everyday technologies and their intended uses, as well as questions about the traditional way of doing design. This position also allows critical designers to speculate not only about what appears to be normal in the present but also about what might become normal in the future, especially in relation to new sciences and technologies. And it also allows them to question how what is normal in the present is uncritically projected into the future by corporate (and we would add, state) futurologists.Footnote ⁶⁸ On this point, Dunne and Raby argue,

Rather than buying into these conservative forecasting strategies, Dunne and Raby explore fantastical future scenarios that often have a bleaker quality, what they have sometimes referred to as ‘design noir’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Of course, futurists and policymakers concerned with security also often develop bleak scenarios that stress the need for innovation to respond to the ‘state of emergency’. Yet what connects the corporate futurists with security futurists is a concern with designing out insecurity through technological innovation. Commenting on this practice, Anthony Dunne explains,

Unconventional speculation and imagination about the future, then, are among the most important tools of critical designers. But, as Dunne points out, this speculation must be grounded in more than mere fantasy. For this reason, Dunne, Raby and their students in the Royal College of Arts Design Interaction Program work (critically) with top-notch nano – and material scientists, bioengineers, and emerging technologists, with corporations like Microsoft and BT, and with government departments like the Department of Trade and Industry. By ensuring that the science and technology they engage with is on the drawing board (if not already in the marketplace) critical designers ‘blur the boundaries between the real and the fictional, so that the conceptual becomes more real and the real is seen as just one limited possibility among many’.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, the slippage between the real and the fictional as attempts to secure by design intensify leads to a situation where critical design not only examines the future of our attempts to control and secure life but also creates a sense of anxiety and uncertainty as to what is real and what is fictional in our desire to secure by design, alerting us to our habituation to new innovations in the securitisation of the body and everyday life.

The results of critical design are objects that both fascinate and alienate, thrill and repel, aesthetically please and morally repulse. James King's MRI steaks are a good example of this. And all of this is, of course, intentional. It is what Fiona Raby calls ‘the space of dilemma’Footnote ⁷³ and what we call ‘thinking space’. It is in these sorts of spaces, through some very unexpected encounters with objects, that we might create new opportunities to think again about the security/technology/design relationship.