CHAPTER FOUR
Part Four
... second practice
I am not saying that the above and phases are not part of design creation. I am not methodologically disputing that these exist and afford generative solution-based processes and outcomes. They are all parts of the work I am creating right now; researching, ideating, iterating. I am saying that in the past three decades... these ways have become the only ways of creating in design. That this sequential movement through each phase has become the underpinning directional movement in creating design. That these ways and this movement is what hiring, labour definitions, labour pace, project length, job payment, job retention is based on. People have to bend toward the system.
There are clear ruptures between bodymind expectations in professional creative practice and actual bodymind practices. And these practice ruptures are hidden by people due to industry and workplace productivist expectations and stigma.
"[...] such expectations can exacerbate stress and tiredness, (and) for those with an invisible illness hidden from colleagues or employees, such expectations are simply unrealistic and exclusionary" (Dore, 2017).
Alison Kafer says a disability model and framework like political/relational affords ""disability awareness" simulations". Can I engage my assemblages as simulations? Re-engaging and re-exploring with possible damaging "outside" systems and environments but... attuning from my inside out. Assemblage attunements emerge as a kind of relational positionality anchoring. I've always liked the analogy of anchors. Fluid aids. Impermanent bases. Gentle responsive temporary tethering. The anchoring is a tending to the always moving. The always changing. The always becoming.
In conversation with Madeline Dore, Jessica Ibacache, co-founder of Art Collective, Sickness and Stealth, discusses that there is a culture of hiding any form of unwellness which results in a workplace of isolation, marginalisation, stigma and lack of support limiting what people will disclose (2017). Margaret Price calls this particular instability around work, bodymind needs and disclosure, "ambient uncertainty" (2021, p.263). Through an eight-year research project, where she interviewed thirty-six disabled university faculty members, Price shares how the people describe their experiences with their disability needs, demands, were an emotional "ongoing self surveillance" and how "their own efforts to manage their disability identities were based upon laborious guesswork" as the institution offers no explicit support guidelines (2021, p.263).
The personal and community experiences that arise from performing wellness in industries and institutions to push beyond your sustainable and embodiminded limits in order to produce and to remain employed are causing so much damage; temporary and permanent. I stay with, follow and trace my unseen practices. Not just where they are happening... but also why. We have a system and environment that moves in a particular way. Wants you to move in this particular way too. That we must publicly move to. But... I am my own system. My own environment. Shifting... moving in ways that are not of this system. My environment automatically becomes another. The Other environment. A second environment.
The way my sick bodymind is, does, makes and creates in my environment are not acknowledged and accepted in the primary environment; in industry. I often can't perform the primary practices that make up the design cycle in the primary ways they are expected to be done. But I still need to create for my job. So I create through my own ways. I create in ways that exist in a second environment. I create through and with second practices.
My everyday unseen second practices of doing are outliers to the fixed design production cycle (Figure 1).
Figure 1
The devaluation of disabled bodies is due in no part to those bodies' failure to adhere to norms of bodies as unchanging, impermeable, long lasting and stable" (2013, p.41). My unstable bodymind is shifting constantly so my practices will be shifting constantly. My pace. My expressions; verbal and visual and abstract. The modalities of exploring and creating. My materiality energy. My sensory sensitivities and needs. My environmental needs. My bodymind needs. My laying down needs. The time of creating needs: morning, noon, 11:00 PM. I am constantly shifting. I cannot plan ahead.
My second practices are responsive and soft to what my embodiminded needs are. My lovely leaking, inefficient bodymind.
Working within my second practices means an embodiminded sustainability of creating. Practices that are full of flow and lightness and personal complexity. Creative movements that are accessible for me and safe for me. They dynamically and fluidly support my needs every moment. Cognitively, physically, emotionally and creatively sustainable.
But to have my second practices still somewhat connected to the primary system, I notice I have to go through what I call a process of industry translation. Firstly, I have to extract and translate out from dominant industry phases, methods and workplace conventions into my own embodiminded modalities, second practices, that will support and work best for me (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Translating out from the primary production cycle
Once this initial phase of second practice translation has occurred, I, the practitioner, can then make "outside" in ways that sustain me uniquely. Places where I create from and stay with. When these unseen, unique, safe and sustainable ways of making are complete, I have to translate what I have made back into dominant modalities of production.
For me... this phase of translation is often where the main ruptures with unsustainability occur because I have to spend additional time, labour, translating my second practice activities, activities that sustain me, back into a more accepted way of designing (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Translating back into the primary design cycle
This process is exhausting and devaluing. Second practice translation is an intense cognitive and physical and emotional load.
This is what professional creative work looks and feels like when your physical and cognitive systems need second practice support (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Complex duality of professional creative production
This is negotiating self, bodymind sustainability and work. It does not resemble neat circles of clearly delineated phases. There are the ruptures between expected practice and actual practice for many people in the design industry.
These points of tension... the starts and stops where I hit something, where there is resistance of me, are experiences I always blamed my body and mind for. Immediately, implicitly, automatically, it was my fault for these failings. "I can't do this. My body can't do this in this way." "I can't do this. My brain can't do this in this way." "Something is wrong with me."