While exploring the umbrella theme concerning our relationship with technology, tools and constructs, I arbitrarily chose a simple component as the starting point. The toothbrush is a humble but indispensable tool that is used widely and takes a backseat in our imagination. A set of material started taking shape while visually and textually unpacking the toothbrush. The intent was to create a set of artefacts that represents an inter-displinary investigation of the object in question. The process led to a collection of artefacts in the forms of a booklet, sound piece, laser cut objects and a set of stories. Different threads from the initial unpacking were woven into artefacts, but the success of the exercise was challenging to measure. There was a positive response from the audience specifically about the poetic quality of some of the pieces, but did it really manage to unpack the phenomena or is that a metric that is perhaps too early to include ? What the exercise successfully produced was an instance of how this investigation can formally manifest. A formation grew without working from a clear mental model as the starting point but the success of it wasn’t clearly understood since there were no functional requirements or expectations within the proposal. This was where Tim Ingold's basket weaving analogy becomes limiting on its own. I found myself borrowing and combining ideas from the rational formalists, specifically the diagrammatic approach outlined by Christopher Alexander as a way of identifying the different forces and intentions.

A structural approach lets you look at the forces shaping the material more clearly. Tim Ingold uses the term 'morphogenetic field as a way of understanding the forces at play. What if this field can be understood and controlled as one of the diagrams that Christopher Alexander talks about. The project proposal defines various forces and lenses of investigation but during the process this field of forces became less visible and the maker gesture took lead. The inherent risks and craftsmanship embedded within each gesture,medium and material as David Pye talks about in The Nature and Art of Workmanship guided the maker impulse further. The structure or force field laid out in the proposal composed of different lenses of inquiry, primarily epistemological and genealogical perspectives. Perhaps the success of the project can be evaluated by seeing if these forces manifest as qualities within the artefacts themselves. The visual language that was used in the booklet investigating the idea of a 'toothbrush' resembled 3d technical drawings, and the text inspired by Bruno Lator’s insights about the use of language resulted in short and simple lines that resembled the journal of an alien anthropologist.

Another challenge posed to the idea of evaluating success in this project comes from David Pye’s notions of risk, specifically when it is considered at different scales of the work. While working with images there is a risk inherent to controlling and balancing the aesthetic interest and semiotic clarity. However, the poetic or expressive openness to the proposal allows images to be manipulated with a greater degree of freedom. But if I was to create a more tightly defined outcome, a mental model becomes imposed on the material. One of the factors I had placed earlier in the rubrics was the degree to which the process lends itself to be generative. This is a success factor that doesn’t impose any direct risks at the material level of the image, but rather at the scale of its totality. If an intended outcome such as a specific context or didactic function is imposed on instead the generative quality might diminish. So to a certain extent articulating the risks more clearly will also define the success metrics further.

I have not yet seen a case for a conditional method being applied directly in the process as yet. The structure of forces that have been laid out allows a possibility of exploring this strategy, specifically in the ways in which a set of material is curated and acted upon initially. The prompts that lend themselves to the making gesture could be set in a conditional framework allowing non-linear movement between the forces, chance operations and a relief of responsibility. For example; Start with an essay, choose three lines from a 2nd paragraph of a random page and create visual translations of the ideas with arbitrary limitations? Could we have an interactive object with pre-defined behaviour control a set of material ?

When patterns emerge from this thesis, they could be then repeated and articulated in more rational forms. This thesis occupies the realm of culture more than the sciences and tends to create unique gestures rather than universal ones. However, I believe that successful processes will emerge and could be articulated in a more prescriptive manner as it develops further. One of the goals would be to then apply prescriptive methods to a context requiring more accountability and communicative clarity as well. Could it be done by introducing this is an element in the force field ? Could the gestures in the process be defined as a workflow ?

One of the interesting discussion that came up was about the nature of encoding knowledge about design practice itself. If Joseph Alber’s work is an extreme manifestation this gesture, to create an empirical approach to design what might be the ways in which such procedures become more crystallised ? Is that the trajectory of all fields of knowledge or does the cultural and creative spaces adhere to different principles ? In this case the identification and design of the morphogenetic field becomes a way of structuring a unique process. Although the components in the field and the gestures of the weaver will keep varying to create unique combinations, the framework lends to a more stable form of defining a method and practice.

The degree to which the morphogenetic field is allowed to adjust itself becomes crucial at evaluating success. The maker could be adjusting the field in order to understand ones own inherent strengths, preferences and patterns or be based on the responses of an audience. But the field might not be drastically edited during the process or adjusted to suit the outcomes, because then we might start losing sense of our success metrics and risk in relation to its earlier iterations. Another possibility lies in creating smaller microcosm of the field which could lend the gestures to gain more focus and then expanding the field to a different scale again. These movements become rationalised but not an implementation of a mental model. Success could be then determined by the self-awareness of the morphogenetic field that is dynamically giving form and meaning to the material during the investigative phase of the project.