top of page

CHAPTER FOUR

Part Two

What is making this "waste"?

Where is the resistance coming from?
What is making this waste?

In crip theory, the bodymind is always in relation to visible and invisible systems and environments that we exist in that effect and affect our bodyminds. It is systems and environments that are not designed for bodyminds with impairment specific needs that disable us, not our bodyminds that are disabled. There are systemic and environmental spaces, places and points of resistance. Alison Kafer talks about extending this awareness of disabling into action and use through what she calls a political/relational model of disability. She writes, "A political relational model of disability [...] makes room for more activist responses, seeing "disability" as a potential site for a collective reimagining. Under this kind of framework, "disability awareness" simulations can be reframed to focus less on the individual experience of disability [...] and more on the political experience of disablement" (2013, p.9).

I have been spending time with the truth of me as a constant and continual everyday unseen, wild, writhing ecological system; both environment and organism. But the outside of my environment... I have been separate from and separating from and so treating them as separate. I am not environmental relational with my invisible bodymind. Disconnected from all that is outside of this. Can I bring these now separate environments together safely and softly? Can I hold onto my pace... my needs... embodiminded sustainability? All I have learnt of the everyday unseen of me with the everyday of the world? Can I bring them together through assemblages of attunement (Figure 1)?

Figure 1: Two figures are shown. To the left is a centred, grainy, black-and-white image of a person in a nightgown lying on their right side. Their hands are together next to their head. Their knees are slightly bent, and their feet are together. Underneath the figure are layered, crumpled blankets in pastel colours—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red—each colour representing a different bodymind experience. Parts of each blanket and its colour can be seen poking through at the edges. The pink doona-form sits on top of the layered pile. Surrounding this form are four grey, curved lines indicating motion and movement. To the right are four larger black, curved lines indicating motion and movement. These black moving lines represent the separate outside world. The image has a white background.

Figure 1

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 (Figure 2). 

Figure 2: There is now one central image, as the two figures from Figure 1 have merged. A centred, grainy, black-and-white image of a person in a nightgown lying on their right side is shown. Their hands are together next to their head. Their knees are slightly bent, and their feet are together. Underneath the figure are layered, crumpled blankets in pastel colours—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red—each colour representing a different bodymind experience. Parts of each blanket and its colour can be seen poking through at the edges. The pink doona-form sits on top of the layered pile. Surrounding this form are four grey, curved lines indicating motion and movement, as well as four larger black, curved lines indicating motion and movement. The image has a white background.

Figure 2

Expanding assemblages of attunement into the world feels like... a centering that is a decentering. A decentering that is a centering of the middles of the outsides. A decentering, blurring of the medical, social, cultural and professional narratives of my sick bodymind. It helps me to be more fluid with the intersectional relational... and a further acknowledging and attuning of my own positionalities, histories and internalised voices, which are still breathing deep down in my creative world.
Disabled bodymind.
Medicalised bodymind.
Non-binary bodymind.
Feminist bodymind.
Privileged white bodymind.
Queer bodymind.

Myself as a centre affords the world that is around me to be explored through the reality of the invisible bodymind relational.
The always changing bodymind is the core and all fixed systems and environments are in complex relation with my experience.
The truth of me as a continual relational centre being in constant and continual relation with everyday unseen systems, structures, environments and conditioning. 
Where is the resistance coming from? 
What is making this as waste?

In an industrial space of creation where does my waste come from?

Who... what... dictates what is creative waste and what is not?

Why is there waste?

Why are there failures?

Who told me this?

What systems... what environments taught me this?

I look for where the resistance is happening.

Where the waste is coming from.

I start local.

A place I know well.

I begin a relational assemblage of my invisible bodymind creativity and my main outside system and environment of creativity.

Here is the dominant practice paradigm and system of design creation: the cycle of design (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A centred diagram of the design cycle is shown. The diagram presents a six-stage iterative design process: 1. Research / Empathise, 2. Imagine / Ideate, 3. Plan / Define, 4. Create / Prototype, 5. Test, and 6. Improve / Iterate.

Figure 3

I am using the design cycle as a symbolic representation to engage with professional design methodology functions and design culture critically, through care. I am showing and engaging with the six-stage model (Cross, 2011). There is also a four-stage model. A five-stage model. These models show a methodological approach to design problem-solving; moving through a design problem and/or creation through distinguishable sequential phases and then iterating through the processes again to achieve the best logic-based, neoliberal productivist creative solutions. Compartmentalising and segmenting creation and providing them with a one-way direction.

I have been taught the doing of my design practice creativity through education and professional practice from this one base system. I want to explore this system and environment relationally. On thinking earlier with Michael Polanyi's Tacit Dimension, I talked about how overlooking the implicit, the hidden of invisible and bodymind knowledges and experiences within systems, leads to social erasures of the invisible of humans. I want to explore the erasure of invisible bodymind creativity. What about the invisible embodiminded knowledges and experiences of the designers who have to work to the design system? Work to the legacy of the design system. The legacy of productivist phases and phasing. Of particular expected cognitive sequential processing, analysis, "good" logic rationales and outcomes. Of particular physical expectations of production durations and efficiency. The biases of the "good" body and the "good" brain are woven thick with the expectations of who uses the design system. 

As I am writing this part of the research telling... being here again makes me uncomfortable. It is not so much the past experiences with shame or waste of this cyclical environment that bring me discomfort. It is the constraint and restriction it makes me feel. I experience an affective nature of the cycle of production, design, while looking at it from a now decentering place. I feel tense. It brings me back to not being able to express my bodymind. I feel the soft and slow rhythm of my tongue hide away. I find myself writing defensively. I don't like thinking here. It feels blocked and combative and full of tension. I have been coming here and leaving this place of the sharing and telling for a year because I don't like to stay in this place too long. It is another system for me that moves to the linear beat of locate. Isolate. Control. A cycle, a circle, after all is a bent line.

But I have to come back here to this point of the research story because when I place the cycle of design environment within my newly expanding invisible bodymind assemblages... a place within me that is a mix of history, doubt, freshness, theory flesh, laser audit anger, rested rest, calm and playful thought experiments bubble and spit out a shifted vantage point of a place I once knew very well. And I suddenly know it again very differently (Figure 4).

Figure 4: A centred diagram of the design cycle is shown. The diagram presents a six-stage iterative design process: 1. Research / Empathise, 2. Imagine / Ideate, 3. Plan / Define, 4. Create / Prototype, 5. Test, and 6. Improve / Iterate. Underneath the diagram is a centred, grainy, black-and-white image of a person in a nightgown lying on their right side. Their hands are together next to their head. Their knees are slightly bent, and their feet are together. Layered arrangements of crumpled blankets in pastel colours—blue, pink, green, yellow, light blue, and red—have watercolours that have expanded from their individual forms, surrounding the person in the centre. Each colour represents a different bodymind experience. The coloured forms have thin and thick abstract lines traced over them. Each line represents a lived experience of bodymind creativity. The image has a white background.

Figure 4

I bring in the cycle, system, environment of design and superimpose its structure over my emerging invisible bodymind practitioner assemblages. It feels like I have brought in large immovable rocks into an environment that is always moving. I can feel the fixed nature of it immediately. I have brought this into my assemblage environment to explore as a possible outside environment that may create resistance. An environment that is not accessible. An environment that may disable. "Disability occurs when the environment contracts and becomes affordance-less, no matter where that "less" comes from - whether it is a barrier, an ableist habitus, or the experience of chronic pain, disease, or debilitation" (Dokumaci, 2023, p.51). If these shapes of design are rocks... then my creativity feels like water running around them. Like moss growing on top of them. Like the bugs living underneath them.

I want a long exposure of where this is pushing at me. Restricting me. Resisting me. I want to attune... slowly... the invisible bodymind practitioner experiences I have never processed before. That I have ignored and hidden and buried. I want to slowly and softly explore the conditioning, socialising, hidden scripts, habitus of the experiences of my creative everyday unseens... to slowly and softly explode them in relationship with newly forming assemblages of centering the practitioner. 

I follow my experiences of slowness and its places of resistance in my creative life.
"I can't process things fast enough or move fast enough."
This enough... this place of comparison comes from this design system.
I stay with slow and trace.

bottom of page