Social Arrangements with Kenneth Bailey

Kristin Gecan:

Welcome to With Intent, a podcast from IIT Institute of Design about how design permeates our world, whether we call it design or not. I’m Kristin Gecan. This week, I talk to Kenneth Bailey about activism, pragmatism, and the role of our imaginations in creating social change. Kenneth co-founded the Design Studio for Social Intervention during a fellowship at MIT’s Center for Reflective Community Practice. That’s also where he was introduced to design. Here’s Kenneth on how he remembers that moment:

Kenneth Bailey:

And that’s when I learned that design wasn’t just an identity, but that it was a set of methods. And there was another guy in the fellowship there named Rob Peglar who had a design background. And I proposed, I’m interested when, how one describes the world, and when one is not a world of one’s own frames, really. And how one’s frames limits, what is imaginable impossible? I’m interested in, what do you do when you find that is a problem in social justice, social change. And my pal Rob was like, “Oh, you’re talking like a designer. You should be thinking with designers,” they would say, “What you do is you put those people in a room with people with other frames.” And so I was like, “What?” And so once I started learning about design methods and learning that you can use methods to jostle habit bodies and start to make people see the edges of their own ways of understanding. I was like, “Oh yeah, let’s go.”

Kristin Gecan:

Sign me up, great. So I noticed, so Arturo Escobar wrote the foreword to the book and he says there that you provide a framework that articulates ”a radical sense of politics.” I agree with him. He applauded the book for in some being both usable and practical. So I wondered what you thought, if you thought of what’s contained in this book as being radical?

Kenneth Bailey:

I think of it more as pragmatic than radical. Here are things we could actually do. We could propose new ways to be together. We could test them. I think of it more, there are things that could be done that would feel radical. I think some of the ways that we would want to think about sort of intervening would be unusual or different. I think to us in this kind of epoch, without the trickster, without the energy of calling rigid structures into task in a way that, that I think that those things have happened in the past with sort of trickster archetypes being willing to turn structures upside down. We don’t really have that right now in the modern world, sort of playing off of Lewis Hyde’s work in ‘Trickster Makes This World’. I think some of the things we’d like to see happen might be considered radical, but the proposition itself that the social world is arranged, and we should understand how it’s arranged and understand how problems emerge from the ways in which things are arranged and that we can rearrange the world. I think it’s fairly pragmatic.

Kristin Gecan:

Yeah, I agree. And so getting to that idea of arrangements, the book is called Ideas, Arrangements, Effects, I guess, to start out and thinking about design, of course, in this. So a lot of designers, maybe more traditional design people, will talk about the design of a chair and many of these designs are well known. These designers have household names now, but in this book you use an example of the design or the arrangement of chairs, plural. And you ask the question is the chair the reason why….? And so maybe you could talk a little bit about how you think of that arrangement and why it’s important.

Kenneth Bailey:

Yeah. I think not only do we design objects; I want to have us think, or the studio or the book is asking us to think, about context. The fact that someone up with the idea that there will be a thing called a school, it will have these people called young people who will be these other things called students. They will come into this building. It will have these things called classrooms. It will have hallways. It will have these things called lockers. They will have these things called books. The books will last for this long. They will sit in these classrooms every day. They will go to them and sit down.

They will look for all of these decision points at some point were imagined, and they enacted upon and then taken for granted. And so I think what the book is really asking us to do is to really slow down and start to make strange these daily occurrences that we live and are sort of habituated in and start to ask ourselves, what are these daily operating systems in a way, what are they doing with us? How are they informing us and how are we informing them? And to what extent might we start to tie the bad things that we like to decouple from these things that we would refer to as arrangements? How might we start to understand that? A lot of the things that we think of as bad things are really emergent properties from these ubiquitous and often unexplored daily operations that we’re calling arrangements.

If we take the assemblage of chairs and the bodies that habitually sit in them regularly over and over and over again, and we take that kind of rhythm for granted, and we actually look at what the chairs, the rhythm and lots of other things are doing, you because there’s the chairs, the rhythm. And then there’s the intention of the classroom, the agreement that I’m here to learn, you’re here to teach. And then there’s this extended agreement that we all believe that sitting here and learning is going to pay off with these things that are going to come to us as these identities, as adults called a home and this, so there’s this projected payoff that it’s supposed to be true in the imaginaries of these people call students that there isn’t any way to actually stop and, and check. Do you all believe that the payoff is real?

Or do you, are you thinking you’re sitting here in a holding pattern? So all of the things that are at play are turning back on all of us and, in ways, creating a lot of the, what we would refer to as effects that we typically then organize as social problems. And so with schools, it’s easy to see a discrete set of effects like ADHD and saying, instead of tying ADHD to the body of a person who’s evidencing it, what would it mean if we said ADHD is the chair and the situation out of which the chair is asking the body to comport to is as culpable as the body itself, evidencing the ADHD. If we start to do that kind of thinking, how does it make problem solving more effective, I guess, but then you always get into politics and power and the body evidencing ADHD has much less power than the social permanence of the classroom. And all the people invested in that arrangement, staying intact and staying seen as the authority as the thing that should always be for this set of people that are young called students.

Kristin Gecan:

At ID, what you’re calling arrangements, I think is the same thing as what is often called infrastructures. Do you see a difference there? Do you think they’re the same?

Kenneth Bailey:

I think infrastructure well, yes. I agree. And I think often how we talk about arrangements as they’re hard and soft. So there’s the chair of the floor, the desk in the classroom, but there’s also time, the conventions of youth, the identity of student, the agreement that I’m here to learn, the agreement that I’m here to learn from these people called teachers, the agreement that those teachers are older than me, the agreement that I’m here with my peers and that they all are the same age. So all of that stuff we would refer to as soft arrangements. And so the infrastructure and the agreements and the rules are all overlapping. So we try to get us to think about the relationship between the material and the conceptual as hard and soft arrangements that are producing effects. They’re not operating separately, they’re always already operating together.

So you step into this, you don’t step into it in a linear fashion and become a student. Then the person becomes teachers like soon as you enter the scene. Everything’s true all at once. And that everythingness is part of what we’re interested in having people who are interested, not just in social change, but in how social life is composed. Because I think one of the arguments we’re trying to make in the book is that if you’re interested in changing the social, you have to understand what is the social. You have to understand how the social is composed and you have to actually be interested in that such that you can actually see it in operation, actually come to experience it in operation and start to make connections between the way in which social situations are in operation and how those things can create the conditions out of which social problems can emerge. It’s almost like being a sleuth and slowing down and starting to see how these situations can lead to things that we typically blame on people as social problems.

Kristin Gecan:

So how do you, and thinking about it as a sleuth, how do you sniff out an arrangement? How do you detect that? How do you discover that?

Kenneth Bailey:

A big part of discovering it is observation and conversation and interest. You have to at some point find the interest to stop believing that people and individual persons are always already culpable and start wanting to see the coordinations of things and, and the coordination of sort of times and all this other, all these other things are actually of interest and that we can start to find how those things are contributing to producing social problems.

Kristin Gecan:

Cause it’s not always obvious, right?

Kenneth Bailey:

It’s definitely not always obvious, but if you don’t have the interest in even looking away from people back to the relationship issue between people and materials, you don’t even start the inquiry.

Kristin Gecan:

If we take this example of the chairs. And if we say, and, and correct me if I’m wrong here, but if I’m just kind of thinking about this, this train of like ideas, arrangements effects, if the chairs are in arrangement that produce an effect, like what you, and like sort of this trend of ADHD diagnoses or something like that.

Kenneth Bailey:

Again, those chairs are part of a larger set of arrangements that have to-

Kristin Gecan:

Exactly, it’s more than the chairs.

Kenneth Bailey:

It’s always more than the chairs. It’s always more than a thing. I think the move we’re trying to make there is that to move from the body, evidencing the problem, the person who can’t pay attention to the situation that is untenable for that person. And the lots of factors that are probably at play with the situation being untenable, the setting, the repetition, the temporality. So it’s like pulling all of that back into account and making us account for what it’s doing, not just to the body evidence in it, but probably to all the bodies that are experiencing it as well. And trying to get us to, to think better about these sort of permanent social structures and what they’re doing with and for, and to us.

Kristin Gecan:

It’s not a linear path. It doesn’t always start here or there, but do you find that as you’re trying to detect arrangements that you are typically starting with effects, like with the seen things, the concrete things? You make a really good point in the book about how concentrating on like the big ideas, like racism, can be really a difficult way to go because it presents these sort of binaries or really a difficult place to start conversation and to get people to agree. Whereas if you look at maybe more concrete things, like the effects of racism that we see in our everyday life or something like that, and by looking at those, you can start to see what the arrangement is that then might open up some different ways of dealing with the big idea.

Kenneth Bailey:

Yeah. And I think there were a couple points we were trying to make there. I think one is that racism isn’t operating in arrangement by saying we’re racist. Racism is operating in arrangements by saying, be still, be on time, do this, do that. So it’s the ways in which ideas actually operate concretely through bureaucracies or through these quiet, hard and soft arrangements are more discreet that racism breaks down into lot of small and probably even dissimilar ideas in order to operate and have some agency in the world. So if we stay at the level of talking about racism or colony or gender, you don’t see Harlem pass, you don’t see Stand Up. So we, we’re trying to get people to, to see where the action is and to figure out how do we change where the action is versus being at the level of concepts and missing how ideas are actually showing up in the real world.

Kristin Gecan:

This book Ideas, Arrangements, Effects, I think is really helpful because it uses a collection of examples that you have, places that you’ve worked, case studies to say, “This is one way of thinking about this, or this is an illustration of how this,” so for instance, you’ve talked about the public kitchen or another really vivid example, I thought was the lighting up the bridge at night? I can’t remember what neighborhood that was in. I think that was in Boston. So, Ideas, Arrangements, Effects—how do you think of that book in terms of like the work that the Design Studio for Social Intervention does? Is this one way that you sort of practice the work that you do at the design studio?

Kenneth Bailey:

It really came out of 10 years of practice and us, synthesizing our theory of design. So in a way, Ideas, Arrangements, Effects was a way for us to say to ourselves, “This is what we’ve been. This is our theory of the social,” and then to invite other people into that way of thinking that we are positing for their own sort of change practices to say, “This is how we’re thinking about systems. This is how we’re thinking about practice. This is how we’re thinking about social change.”

And I think the book was really an attempt to share that thinking and to help people understand the larger story. I think we’ve been telling ourselves over the last 10 years and even tell ourselves that story, so it emerged after sort of practicing and practicing. I remember, I think I was doing some work in New Zealand or Australia came back to Laurie and was like, “I think I have a framework that sums up my work.” I think I have something that actually can sort of cohere our practice. And so I think that was really the initial point of the book.

Kristin Gecan:

It’s interesting. I imagine it was all kind of there in your head, in your heads, right. And then actually setting pen down a paper to say “this is how it all hangs together.” Must have been quite an exercise.

Kenneth Bailey:

Exactly, and it was funny because it emerged. It just said, “Here we are. Here it is. ” It just came to us. But it really, I think it always comes back to some sort of relationship between hard and soft conceptual and practical arrangements that we’re trying to get at. And we always are trying to get people not to just focus on where they see problems evidencing, because we always are. We see the emphasis on blaming victims or over emphasizing heroes at the behest of less apparent social systems that we’re referring to as arrangements.

Kristin Gecan:

I wanted to talk to you a bit about Public Kitchen, because I’m interested in it specifically because we have a version of a public kitchen at ID. We have a community kitchen, which is specifically for folks in the ID community. But since we have that, I do understand some of, probably the difficulties that were presented by the Public Kitchen, just in very, maybe basic things of like, clean up after yourself, or having to do that sort of social learning, I guess, or set those expectations for how to use the space. And then of course there are real benefits that having a place like that present, which is the community itself and the conversations that happen there. So I wonder how you think about the benefits of a situation like that and the drawbacks or the disadvantages and how you weigh those out when you’re figuring out how successful an intervention is or how you think about the success of any given intervention.

Kenneth Bailey:

So Public Kitchen, it’s a design research project we’ve been doing probably half the life of the studio. And the premise is that we propose is if we had, if kitchens were part of our public infrastructure, the way in which public transportation is in schools are, and libraries are, if they were ubiquitous and tax funded and we had access to them, how would they make social life different and possibly better? We proposed them as an imagining a new arrangement to counteract the problem of, at that point of time, was child obesity. When we started doing this work and it was really about not blaming children for that public health sort of crisis that people were talking about, where we had lots of babies and young people were overweight, but to say the problem isn’t children or the families, the problem’s higher up. It’s a problem with the way in which neighborhoods are arranged, the way in which food procurement is imagined.

I mean, you go to the grocery store and most of the things you encounter are in fact, different forms of glucose. So there’s so many different ways into perceiving the problem that instead of circling where the problem is evidencing, and then pointing backwards at the problem and making the problem an interior one, having to do it, the behavior and the will of the person presenting the problem or the will of that family out of which that fat baby is emerging. And so all this blaming when you sort of look backwards at the problem down at the person versus turning around and looking out at environment then when you look at environment, you start to break it down into concrete things.

What we call arrangements, what that tells you it’s one thing to look at the child, and it’s another thing to go and say, “Oh, look at all of these rows and aisles in this store, where are the stores? What do things cost? Why do we have so much access? Like why are there so many different kinds of sugar? There’s sugar you can drink, there’s sugar you can eat, savory, there’s sugar. You can eat in a candy bar. There’s sugar you can eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why is everything packaged? Why is everything processed?”

So that’s a different inquiry. And so I think this thing, what we were trying to do with public kitchen was this say, we can rearrange our environment to make food procurement more interesting, more social, I think more interesting, more social, more nutritious. All of these things can be possible and doing things in that direction, starting to create solutions at the level of arrangements. These kinds of things also give opportunity for people to figure those things out. How would we share all of these kitchens? What rules would we set? And to really be part of co-imagining and co-producing within an actual kitchen and beyond is so much a part of how we like to practice.

Kristin Gecan:

So I wanted to ask you about how you feel about world building versus futuring, and if they’re the same. And if they’re different, how are they different?

Kenneth Bailey:

I definitely to consider myself more in the world building business than the futuring business, because from what I understand about futuring, it’s much more about being able to read what might seem like a dissimilar set of signs or signals, learning from Institute for the Future that are presenting themselves in a social world, and then developing a narrative about the world yet to come, like how a set of signals are pointing to a world. You have to come and starting to predict that world yet to come. I feel like world building is about trying to…It’s like you’re also paying attention to signals, but you are trying to produce a world quicker.

You’re trying to produce a world to come moreso than, and I don’t want to say that one begets the other. I think that they’re like brother and sister technologies, but I think the world builders are trying to either propose or be part of building the world yet to come. And I feel like in a lot of ways you can have a futuring practice that is about tea leaf reading and understanding. Whereas I think the worldbuilding sort of world is about, we want to make cocoa and we want the world to have cocoa. So I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think of the work of the studio as much more in the field of trying to produce and participate in building worlds.

Kristin Gecan:

And on that note for your studio, and you talked about the need for activists to stop reacting to things and start acting or imagining, or building new things. And so I wonder how you might imagine or how you might see an activist to deciding to take something and make it into a real intervention. How do they go from what’s real, what’s now, to acting instead of reacting?

Kenneth Bailey:

Yeah. I think the way we’ve been thinking about that is how do we get more in the position of proposition? And I think it gets back to of this. One of the things we like to say in the social justice sector is: another world is possible. And I think what we are trying to say at the studio is then let’s make it, let’s make that possible world and have people embody it, have ways that they can change it or give it feedback and try to really figure out what makes this distinct from the world that already is. Or how is it? How are these proposals we’re making different? It’s been, it’s hard to sort of carve out the space to create space for more proposition politics in the social justice sector, because we’re so organized to, and I, but I do think that again, reading tea leaves, there are signals.

And I think most of the signals have to do with, where there’s lots of energy around proposition is new economy. You see, a lot of propositional work happening around the future of money, the future of enterprise, like the work that Institute for the Future is doing cooperative work. And I think what we have to do is just create more opportunities to continue to amplify and experiment and not always propose something that we think already works, but to have more time to experiment as well. I think that’s where we really need to start building a bigger investment is with communities and artists and activists to start to really get out and test how they would like to be living and what that would look like and feel like.

Kristin Gecan:

So do you think of your interventions as experiments then?

Kenneth Bailey:

Yes. But experiments that sometimes you learn enough about that, then they’re worth trying to take to the next level of experimentation. And that would be a little bit more social permanence. We’ve done enough with Public Kitchen and know that it’s time to see four, five of them built out. We’ve done lots of design research in the United States, and we’ve been able, we’ve been fortunate enough to do some design research around the ideas where people are rehearsing the concepts and walking through mock versions of what they could be enough to say, it’s worth saying “Let’s build some places and have them exist for 10 years or longer.” We’re doing experiments. But we also are interested in experiments going from a first phase where it’s design research and you’re learning. And some of them might actually get from design research to another iteration where they hit a level of social permanence or a level of lived reality that you learn even more from.

Kristin Gecan:

And in the case of Public Kitchen, it’s almost scaling or something, right? So if you’re going to bring it to different places, and that probably brings up a whole nother host of questions about like localizing the particular kitchen. Cause it can’t be identical, I would imagine?

Kenneth Bailey:

No, no, no. And that’s the thing, one of the reasons why I think we’re so interested in moving out is like, you start to take what you’ve learned as a set of pattern language in a sense or relation language, but then how it translates from context to, context to, context be different. So a Public Kitchen that you might have say in an indigenous community in Indian country would look and feel different than one you might have in proximity to a set of communities of color inside of Mid-City community might be different than one that’s closer to a suburb bar, one next to a place with more in proximity to different forms of agriculture.

Kenneth Bailey:

But I think what we’re interested in is building a series of them at one time, such that all of those different kitchens would be in relation to each other so that there isn’t like just one Public Kitchen, but there are kitchens that are public like schools, the libraries. So I think that’s what we’re trying to figure out how to, how to make happen next in the, in the next iteration where we’re sort of helping people understand the kind of pattern language that we’ve learned from developing public kitchens down into how they then actually would translate into specific site, specific architecture site, specific understandings about food and foodways and site specific desires.

Kristin Gecan:

So, how do you for the Public Kitchen situation, you’ve decided this is what you’re getting out of it, where the community is getting out of it, people involved or getting out of it is good enough to bring to other communities, too, to continue to test and refine, I guess. So how do you make that decision? How did you, I mean, is this like a cost benefit analysis? How do you decide, “yeah, there’s something here. We want to take this further.”

Kenneth Bailey:

As we get bigger. I think we’ll be more, we’ll become more codified with how we make the decision, but this one was just like eyes lighting up whenever we would just say the first sentence people would be like, “We want in. What’s that? We want it”. We did something right with this one. And so how do we?

Kristin Gecan:

There’s demand for It.

Kenneth Bailey:

Exactly And delight. It was demand and delight. Right now, we’re in sort of strategy session in the studio and it’s like, “How do we build out the practice so that we can hit more of those people really want this one. They really want that one.” And we can actually start to move out more things from design research and to social reality.

Kristin Gecan:

Do you have a new project that you’re working on now, or even something that’s just like the very beginnings of like, you’ve noticed you’ve detected a new arrangement or something is boiling up with different effects that you’re seeing. Is there anything that you can, or even, even just things that you’re noticing in everyday life that you’re like, oh, that’s arrangement right.

Kenneth Bailey:

Right, no, we’re talking a lot about, we’re really interested in what people are referring to this ‘Great Resignation’ phenomenon. And so we’re really interested in trying to have people understand that, to have us all understand, like what’s going on here. Like people are pulling out, there’s some interest in, in the studio, with us, like maybe this is the beginning of a more extensive pullout. What would it look like if right now we’re resigning from work. But what if that’s just the beginning? What would it look like to resign from these arrangements that are producing all of these adverse effects on us? I just saw an email from one of my colleagues on Micah Sirfre asking us to get off of Facebook. I’m like, well, there’s this energy, and it gets back to signals and the work that Institute for the Future, there’s this energy around pulling out from work.

There’s some ask for energy to pull out of Facebook. What would it look like to amplify that all the way to, let’s pull out of social life? What would it look like if we had six months where we stopped all of it and just said, what is going on right now? You know what I mean? Did the COVID sort of pulled back, but with more intention and more civic organization to say, let’s really think about the direction the world is going in right now. And how might we sort of rearrange our lives to go in different directions? I feel like that’s the kind of thinking that where we have time to think at all, what we’re really kicking the can around inside the studio is sort of looking at this, this energy to pull away, to pull back right now.

Kristin Gecan:

Yeah. I think that’s a really interesting question for a number of reasons, but one of which is thinking about this ‘Great Resignation’. And so this is number of people are making the decision to say like, “Nope, I’m out and I’m not going to put any energy into changing this situation. I’m just going to say I’m done with it.” And so I wonder too about what that means, because I think part of what you’re asking activists to do is, is to imagine how it could be otherwise, to how it could be different rather than just reacting against something. How could the great resignation be otherwise in some ways, right? Like how could we ask people instead of just like, it’s sort of just quitting. Could you take some actions to maybe just change the situation?

Kenneth Bailey:

Right. But I’m, I’m totally down with quitting for a chunk. I want to say I’m into the act of quitting as a gesture of resistance. And I’m in interested in those of us who are interested in new world making to capture those bodies and to invite them into new forms of sociality and to invite them into other ways of more interesting ways of coming to new futures.

Kristin Gecan:

Yeah. It’s that idea of deciding whether to work within the system or just buck the system altogether and start something new. Right.

Kenneth Bailey:

And I feel like we have this opportunity to try to get more people in this zeitgeist of proposition and into this “we can pull out of toxic arrangement and we can imagine otherwise” that’s what my head is. I think that’s what we’ve been talking a lot about is a sort of excitement with this energy. But wanting to amplify it, like how to turn it up, it would be great if in 2022 instead of just resigning from work, we could all like say, “Well, let’s just take six months and resign from all of it.” You know what I mean? The climate would probably thank us. There’s so much going wrong, everywhere, like what’d look like to just pull out from all of it and say “How did we get here? What is this? And how do we re-reroute ourselves?”

Kristin Gecan:

How do you define design?

Kenneth Bailey:

For me, it’s about intentionally looking at the way in which we are sort of enmeshed in situations, trying to find lots of different ways to make sense of lots of different sense making devices, to make sense of a situation and then starting to, to test lots of different solutions towards a problem. That’s the best I can do right now.

I’m sure I would have a better one. I don’t know why it feels really dull to me, that definition, but I know one thing that really matters to me for design is intention and making sense of how you make sense. You know what I mean? Like looking at the limits of your own sense making capacity and being open to multiple reads of a world. I feel like that’s one of the primary distinctions between an advocate and a designer. An advocate is always thinking from how they make sense. And I feel like designers are always interested in multiple ways of making sense, and you have to be interested in jumping from one sense making regime to other ones and, and find that kind of moving across disciplines and discourse and boundaries has to be part of what delights you in order to get to the next phase.

Kristin Gecan:

Thank you to Kenneth Bailey, a 2021 Latham fellow at ID for joining me today. You can learn more about Kenneth and the Design Studio for Social Intervention on the IIT Institute of Design website, id.iit.edu/podcast. Please subscribe, rate, and review with intent on your favorite service. This is a new show and your support really helps. Our theme music comes from ID alum, Adithya Ravi. Until next time.