INTRODUCTION

We eat, sleep, dream, fuck, fight, play, and even perish by design. To design is to affect and⁄or effect change. "Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones."1 The present work navigates this expanded field of design in attempt to understand its culpabilities, capabilities, and capacities as a political, social, economic, and environmental practice.

Biologist E.O. Wilson traced the birth of “modern humanity,” to a moment “about ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture… the economic history that followed," he wrote "can be summarized very succinctly as follows: people used every means they could devise to convert the resources of Earth into wealth.”2 Today, the migration, allocation, and accumulation of wealth is transforming our Earth.

And fundamentally altering our lives. However, the transactional costs and relational complexities of this phenomenon—affectionately referred to as development—are often cloaked in our everyday. In my perspective, there are few places where this paradox is more pronounced than in New York.

Following the development and distribution of resources, this inquiry, both historic and theoretic, traverses a vast terrain (perhaps too vast) —from the hollowed hinterlands of upstate New York to the concrete jungle of New York City. It spans a multitude of scales, from municipal to molecular. Occasionally, however, the relative complexities that characterize our contemporary context lead me beyond these borders to contemplate national and international correlations and contingencies.

The point of departure is Governor Andrew Cuomo's crusade to manufacture a "New New York." Analysis of Cuomo's socio-spatial strategies to transform prevailing perceptions of the Empire State reveals the formidable interdependence that exists between politics, culture, and identity. At this intersection, I'm particularly interested in the [in]visible infrastructures that masquerade as everyday practices. How might such an elusive apparatus foster meaning, making, and memory, or learning?

1 Simon, Herbert Alexander. The Sciences of the Artifical. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1996: 11. Web. <http:⁄⁄m.friendfeed-media.com⁄092e5a73c91e0838ee b11e0fe90edaf9e9afc065>. Note: When possible, I have tried to cite resources available online. 2 Wilson, E.O. "Foreward." Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

By Jeffrey Sachs. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

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4 From there, I explore how The New School—a New York City-based institution for higher education, employs similar strategies that manifest architecturally, administratively, and organizationally as a pedagogical practice. By tracing the contours of identity formation, I hope to expose the transformative capabilities of design strategies to radically alter the historiographies, geographies, and psychologies of our everyday.

This is a journey into the Empire States of […]

The trajectory of this journey is guided by an inverted analytic framework that regards solutions as problems and questions as solutions. In this context, doubt becomes the primary vector for critical thinking capable of interrogating the legitimacy, authority, and ethics of the cultural status quo. Throughout the development of this thesis, I have come to refer to this praxis of explication that aligns theories of action, in action as [un]learning. Behavioral theorist, Chris Argyris and Urban Studies and Education Professor, Donald Schön identify a similar process as double-loop learning or thinking in action through which governing variables—i.e. the [in] visible infrastructures that shroud our environment, automate our everyday, and impact our perception, conception, and mobility—can be critically confronted and challenged. Within this moral milieu,3 I begin to [dis]assemble the prevailing lexicon, discourse, and practices of design, including my own. To this end, I employ several tactics that contribute to the aesthetic of this thesis as a text.

ON AESTHETIC

Words are privileged as my primary means of visual communication. Words, like the environments we inhabit, are best understood in context. In the context of other words. In the context of the author. As well as that of the interpreter. In the tradition of Raymond Williams, I interrogate many words in attempt to better understand the intended denotation, connotation, and signification of their author—including,

3 My precarious position within this moral milieu is compliments of Clive Dilnot. I am grateful to Clive for expanding my understanding of design and holding me accountable within this expanded field. Dilnot, Clive. "Ethics In

at times, myself.4 Keywords are highlighted with a boldface ' ° ' and explicated in the margin of the corresponding page. As you will note, I'm particularly suspect of words that migrate across cultures. This is by no means an exhaustive analysis; there are many aspects of this thesis that warrant further attention.

Brackets '[ ]' indicate instances when the thesis and antithesis of a word seem equally valid. For example, [un]learning, as referenced above, is intended to mean as learning and unlearning. [Dis]assemble— assemble and disassemble; [in]visible—visible and invisible; and so on. More often than not, I've found that privileging one aspect of the dialectic over the other(s), proves too easy.

Footnotes manifest as literary references, personal acknowledgments, and reflections. Similar to the keywords called out in the margins, I embrace footnotes as opportunities to dig into the minutiae—speculate and, occasionally, pontificate. The informal nature of this process is reflected in the tone and tenor that characterize this portion of the text.

Italics are used to highlight key concepts, such as theories of action that are inspired by or extracted from the investigations of other practitioners. In either case, the original context is footnoted when the concept is initially introduced.

Tactics for Everyday [Dis]Engagement or TEDs are theories of action that manifest in action as critical environments and objects. By [re] framing the governing variables that characterize various contexts, each tactic aims to: expose latent environmental assumptions; unveil the structure, operations, and context of their corresponding infrastructures; and, ultimately, disrupt the dominant order rendering it as one possibility, amongst many. This section is essential to my development of [un] learning as a praxis of explication. While tactics are by nature situated within the strategic strictures from which they seek to emerge, for the purposes of this text, they are detached. However, each is referenced throughout with boldface capital letters and number that corresponds to the page on which the tactic appears: TED N o 12345.

4 Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New

York: Oxford UP, 1976. Web. <http:⁄⁄www. graduateglobalissues.files.wordpress.com⁄2012⁄08⁄raymond-williams-keywords.pdf>.

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6 Images are relegated to the appendix and catalogued by page number. This thesis was constructed upon many assumptions, one of which posits that sight has been privileged as the arbiter of truth, knowledge, and reality since the days of Aristotle. In my 'perspective,' our infatuation with aesthetic form has severely limited our capacity to understand our multiple modalities of communication and hence design and [un]learning.5

[Un]learning engages design as a means to interrogate or question the foundations and aesthetics of what has come to be known and ⁄or accepted as common sense. The resulting aesthetic may seem like an unnecessarily convoluted strategy designed to obfuscate intent. It may be unnecessarily convoluted. However, I can assure you that my intent is to explicate, rather than obfuscate, my interests. By highlighting keywords and bracketing others, I offer opportunities to reflect on their context and corresponding connotations, denotations, and significations. By following a curiosity down the rabbit hole otherwise known as the internet, I am allowing intuition and chance to momentarily command circumstance (as well as admittedly indulging my amazing propensity for digression). By subordinating pictures to words, I am challenging my capacity to communicate. I am thinking in action…and asking you to do the same. That said, I recommend viewing two videos—The New New York6 and Yes We Can7 —prior to digging further into this thesis, so that you might begin to form your own theories of action that will undoubtedly be challenged in action.

In order to advance the capacities of design to serve as a redirective practice toward alternative modes of being, unfettered by the 'free'market, the practice of design itself must be transformed, by design.

5 That said, I find the resulting index to be an interesting analytic tool. 6 The New New York, A Whole New Approach to Business. Dir. Spike Lee and

Linda Honan. Screenplay by Nick Sonderup and Kurt Lenard. Perf. Featuring the Voice of Robert DeNiro, with Contributing Music by Jay-Z & Alicia Keys.

YouTube. Web. <http:⁄⁄www.youtube.com⁄watch?v=aQgILlGg1E8>. 7 Yes We Can: Barack Obama Music Video. Dir. Will.i.am. Perf. Barack Obama.

YouTube. Barack Obama Presidential Campaign, 02 Feb. 2008. Web. <http:⁄⁄ www.youtube.com⁄watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY>.

ON THE AUTHOR

Considering I have resided in New York State for 24 out of the 37 years of my life, called NYC home for the last 6, been employed as a designer on and off for the last 10, and am currently enrolled in Parsons The New School for Design's School of Design Strategies, this project could be framed as one of radical proximity8 that works within a context to problematize political, social, and economic interdependencies from the inside, out. Or, it could be perceived as an insular investigation advanced from a privileged perch with relatively minimal risk. It is undeniably both.

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8 Cruz, Teddy. Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else. Ed. Esther Choi and

Marrikka Trotter. Cambridge, MA: Work, 2010: 81.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

Charles A. Beard Co-founding Father, The New School

ASSEMBLING THE EMPIRE STATES OF […]