Swerve, or invert. Look behind, a common strategy I employ for being more certain of whence I have come. Nothing fancy, other than I get lost easily in new places, and know that returning, hopefully, to where I have come from will present an entirely different landscape and skyline than the one I see when setting forth.
..when we are confronted with an apparently clear choice, sometimes the correct thing to do is choose the worst option, so that the thing may redeem itself, shedding its old skin and emerging in a new unexpected shape.
Why do I blog this? An informal lobby for inversion as a design strategy. Lifted (briefly wordsmithed for local context) from the introduction to the new edition of Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology
. The possibility that doing the opposite of what seems the clear choice may lead to deeper, richer, creative insights into a question or problem is a persistent theme here in the Near Future Laboratory’s Bureau of Creative Opposition. It’s a strategy for untactful sideways glances at things. Provocation to make the very normal seem very strange. Often enough, it is the Laboratory that appears strange, which is just fine with us. We’re wearing Swedish workman’s kilts these days, and being confused by the family for janitors with our Dickies work shirts. Etcetera.
I've been thinking a lot about critical design lately… although never in reference to Lacan