Talking about design with Bruno Latour

An interview by Dario Mangano e Alvise Mattozzi

Paris, April 7 th, 2007

Well, I do know nothing about design…I mean, in English or in French it will make no
difference …

Let’s start from here: design indeed is not something you took explicitly into account in your work, up to the moment
the title of the conference you held in Manchester in October 2007 came out – “Is there a cosmopolitically correct
design?” 1. Beside that we have known about your presence, as keynote speaker, at Networks of Design, the next
Design History Society conference.
We have then thought that probably it is not completely true that you did not take into account design, even if it is
true that design has never came out as an issue in your work. We would like to know what you said at the
Manchester conference and what you are planning to say at Networks of Design and then discuss why “design”
was never explicitly addressed in your work.

So you want to know why I’m ignorant in design

You came all the way too see why this guy has nothing to say about design!

It’s not exactly like that, we think you know a lot about design. You just never said anything explicitly about it.
We should also consider that the word “design” has at least two meanings: the first is more related to engineering
and it is the English-American way of defining design, more similar to the French word “conception”; and the
second, used in France or in Italy is more related to architecture and aesthetics, than to engineering. You did talk
about design, intended in the first way. For instance, in Aramis (Latour 1992) you do talk about “projets”,
“conception”. Basically Aramis could be considered a book about “design” intended in the way English-speaking
people intend it. But we would like to explore with you also the second way of defining design that you never really
discussed …

1The lecture was given at the Manchester Architecture Research Center, part of the School of Environment and
Development of the Manchester School of Architecture on the 5th of October 2007. Documentation of the event
can be found at www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/research/marc/news/seminars/latour/
 But there is a third way, which is the Scandinavian definition of design

… and that is? …

Which is: design is politics extended to things

Oh that’s quite interesting for us, because while thinking about this interview and the relation between design and
your research we were wondering what kind of “mode d’existence” design is2. Should we just relate it to technology
or not? And in a way we had this feeling that design can’t be just related to technology, since there is a political
side of it. Probably it is too simple to define it as “politics plus technology”, using the terms through which you
define two of the “modes d’existence” you describe in Résumé d’une enquête sur les modes d’existence
(Latour 2007b), but we felt that design could be a way to look at “cosmopolitics”.

The first time I got in touch with design was actually in this Malmö School of Design3…Do you
know it ? A very interesting school, where I was invited; it’s a strange combination. And it was
the first time I realized that a lot of things I was doing – “technology studies”, “science studies”,
“politics of nature” – were actually interesting for people in design, because before that moment
I had a sort of narrow idea of design, I mean a sort of… design of bottles… I didn’t realize
design fell directly into my interests, but this group of people showed me that it was so – I’m still
involved a little bit with them actually, I’m going in November to a meeting they have there (in
Malmö) on design – they combine performing art and design, engineering design – but in a very
Scandinavian way which means … everything. So that was the first entry into design.
My second was when I collaborated with Rem Koolhaas when two different students of mine
(Albena Yaneva and Emilie Gomart) were doing fieldwork (in his studio).
Then, my most direct connection has been with designing exhibitions at the ZKM in
Karlsruhe4. Well, I don’t have special skills but I learned a lot about it. I mean, I experienced at
first hand what it is to design.
Then I collaborated with Domus5 and Stefano Boeri for two years I think. Again the whole
journal was at that time full of design following all direction, from urbanism to coffee pot and
faucets – all sort of things – and bathrooms … which I found quite interesting.
So, as a matter of fact, I crossed the question of design many times without having expertise in
it, but being interested … and … if design means redesigning the whole material condition of
our existence, then I’m in design (in a certain sense)

That is what we think

In Manchester I was trying to introduce Peter Sloterdijk to the English speaking world by using
design as a general cover because he talks about spheres and is very much influenced by

2 During the last ten years Latour’s research has focused on “modes d’existence” or “regimes d’enonciation” in
order to understand how to distinguish the various ways in which existence is articulated. This reflection has lead
to the draft of a still not published treatise on the subject (Latour 2007b), whose inception can be found in
Latour (1998), where he distigueshes nine “regimes d’enonciation”, among others: technology, fiction, science,
politics, religion, law. Beside those two main sources, Latour discussed “mode d’existence” in Latour (2004b;
2006; 2007a).
3 Latour is talking about the program Performing Arts Design within the K3/School of Arts and Communication

of the Malmö Högskola. See: www.mah.se/templates/Page____14411.aspx

4 Iconoclash – Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art, held at the ZKM from 4th of May to the 1st of

Septermber 2002; Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy held at the ZKM from the 20th of March 2005 to
3rd of October 2005. See Latour – Weibel (2002; 2005)
5 Collaboration with Domus lasted from January 2004 (Domus n. 866) to December 2005 (Domus n. 887). The

contributions can be found at www.bruno-latour.fr/presse/presse_art/ .

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architecture, but it is not just architecture, it’s really remaking the whole conditions, the “air
conditions” of our existence, all the way to the little details. I find Sloterdijk quite useful for a lot
of people in architecture and design. We also wrote this little book on cosmopolitics, I don’t
know if you know this little book where there are interviews of Sloterdijk and myself by an artist,
a French artist, Melik Ohanian. Do you know this book?
(BL picks the book) It’s called “cosmograms” (Ohanian–Royoux 2005) . So Cosmograms is a
bit…it’s a set of interviews by artists. Peter Sloterdijk is in, the guy who invented the word
“cosmograms”, John Tresch is in, Patricia Falguières is in …
So these are my historical connections with design.

What do you think about all these different aspects of design. Design seems to be everything – design of bottles,
design of landscapes, design of the experiences, design of …whatever. Is there something that really keeps all these
different things together? What is that makes a designer able to manage the design of all these different things? Is
there a theory? A deep structure, something that connects all those things that can be approached through design?

I will not be the one to ask because I don’t know enough about the techniques of design
but…the interest of design, of the use of “design” as a general term is certainly linked to
expansion of constructivism. If you have a constructivist view of the universe, then the idea of
redesigning comes in. In Houston I met a lady who is studying NASA programs for planetary
design, they basically redesign planetary systems, which is quite amazing. When you have this
idea – the constructivist version of science, technology and art (although art has always been
constructivist) – then, the next step is to say “ok, necessarily there will be ways of redesigning”
and then when you add to that the ecological crisis and the question of building an artificial
environment, it’s not very surprising that the word design has taken a general relevance.
Also because in the term “design” there is this interesting twist: it is not about mastery, it is not
about modernization; it is a sort of alternative to modernization, it softens the word modernizing
as well as the word artificial, because “design” also means “well designed”. Design descends
from “disegno” that is related to “dessin” (drawing) and “dessein” (aiming). So there is
something in word “design” – I think that is one of the reason why it got so diffused – that
allows it to mean “retransformation with care” which, I think, could be considered the common
element of “design”. It is care of customers in the case of bottles, but it is also care of ecological
issues, of environment for instance. For example, carbon neutral buildings are designed. You are
not going to say that they have to be rebuilt, which is also true, but redesigned. It’s also true if you
talk about genetic engineering - you can talk about the design of plants, for instance. Or, the
word design, besides plants can be used for humans, even though that is still a contentious issue.
This is where Sloterdijk started to become famous, when he said that humans too have to be
redesigned.
Beside the fact that we should look more carefully at the etymology and semantic associations of
the word “design”, I think that the concept of design has this great advantage: it is not related to
building, it is not related to mastering. The concept deployed by the word design comprises –
and this is the interesting thing about it –care, attention, attention to some other people and not
just to technology.
How would you call in semiotics a term which includes “well” in it, so to speak?

A term positively connoted …

If you say: “this is ‘design’”, it is usually means “it is well designed”. It’s not just built, it’s not just
produced, it’s not just constructed. Beside all those things you add attention to details.

So, you mean that beside the idea of putting elements together in order to build or produce something, doing design
means also incorporating the idea of an aim. It’s the aim, the “dessein” of design, that connects the concept of

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 design to care, since as long as you have an aim you must take care of many elements and not just those you are
assembling. Is that so?

In a way, yes. If you consider that all the myth about technology is that it is “value neutral”,
then design is a good counteraction to that, because you explicitly say it has a value, it is made
for a goal and it has to be in addition nice , I mean, appreciated. So you immediately know that
technology is politics from beginning to end. The question one should ask is: is it design? Does it
correspond to a dessein, to a goal? Then, of course, the next question is: “who is designing the
goal?” . This is the very political issue. I think that this way of conceiving design will explain why
so many people are interested in design – by the way, Harvard School of Architecture is called
Harvard School of Design (www.gsd.harvard.edu) not school of architecture, I forgot to ask
why…

Let’s talk about “form” and “function”. All design discourse is based on this dichotomy. Within your work you
are reformulating, “redesigning”, the concepts of “form” and “function” in order to dismiss this dichotomy. For
instance in Résumé d’une enquête sur les modes d’existence (Latour 2007b), discussing about
technology, you did a real harsh critique of “function”; in Reassembling the social, (Latour 2005: 222-223)
the word form takes a completely different meaning: it is completely “redesigned”.

I have always had a different view on design. I always thought of design as a way to overcome
this dichotomy.

In a way yes, but at the same time it seems to us that designers, design critics and design theorist are not able to
elaborate beyond that dichotomy and actually overcome it: they can assume it, as referred to two contradictory or to
two complementary terms, or they can criticize it, or they can reframing it, but they can’t live without it.

The idea of a function is tied to la necessité du fait, the necessity of an efficient action, a substratum
on which adding up some arbitrary or conventional element. So here we go again with another
avatar of the modernist divide, nature vs culture, i.e. in addition to technical factors, which are
due to the resistence or constrains of matter that determine the function or the tendence, as
Leroi-Gourhan would say, there exist forms and styles. The materialists, in the seventies
definition of the word, were the ones who had this point of view and saw functions through
forms and that still holds if you go, for instance to the Musee de l’homme in Paris, where they do
what they call “material culture”, they still do this distinction. I did a volume on this question
(Latour 1994)6.
But I always considered that “design” was a way to overcome this dichotomy.
This idea of function can work only for very simple technologies, all the “primitive” ones that
are historically important . It won’t work with this thing (points at the iPod) which is entirely
designed from beginning to end.
So “design” is the word that eats in… eats from the form into the function, so to speak. In any
case the form/function dichotomy has never really worked: also for the form/function people
“to function” meant already answering some sort of costumers, or lobbies, or interests coupled
with the ones of the industry. The entire field of “technology and culture” is based on that: the
eating up of function by forms. So form/function doesn’t work.
Design is often mistaken with packaging, beautifying, communication, PR, but it is, on the
contrary, the idea that every single aspect of a piece, of a thing, of a technology is related to
someone, to a customer, for instance (not necessarily the final customer), that you can actually
identify .

6 See also Latour (1993) and Latour (1996).

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 A stakeholder, as it is common to say today

Yes stakeholders.
If we consider that the word design indicates all that and hence the care for other instances that
have to be related to the object which has been designed, then that is why we can say that form
absorbs, so to speak, eats up into the function. It’s easier to state that for an iPod than for this
teapot (points at a traditional Japanese teapot), because a teapot is a traditional element where
the whole functional elements – I mean, the heat and what is related to it – are structural
elements which are unmanageable, then the relation between form and function looks true! It is
immediately understandable. But for this (points at the iPod) it’s impossible: every single element
has been designed.

But let’s get back for a moment to the second definition of design and let’s consider aesthetic and aesthesical aspects
a little more (i.e. the elements that have to do more with aesthetics considered in relation to senses other than to
beauty). We were wondering how to account for these aspects of design that are usually more connected to art.

My impression is that it goes in the other way, that design is more and more used in a non
artistic, non aesthetized way. Let’s take for instance Rem Kolhaas, once he was showing me one
of his projects and I asked him: “Is this ugly enough for you”? What I mean is that design is also
a matter of ugliness: it’s not just a nice shape in the vein of “form follows function”. You can
consider this issue from a completely different point of view. There was an exhibition at the
Grand Palais (Design contre Design) full of typical ugly, uninterestingly ugly, old design, and
probably a guy would say yes, these objects are entirely designed. So the aesthetical aspect is not
so much the issue. That is why I would say that design is attention to details – care for details –
which is a great virtue of the word “design” from the beginning.
This fact, the relevance given to details, has now taken an important political dimension because
up to not so long ago people used to intend the idea of political transformation in a very radical
way, as a revolution, following the myth of tabula rasa. But now people realize that no tabula rasa
is possible. The total revolution implies that we can’t change anything without changing
everything, but there is an unexpected consequence: we can’t change everything!. Today it
seems that the problem is not the whole but the details and this is why today’s politics is
connected with the traditional idea of good design, which is: every single element in coffee pot
or in door knob should be perfect. This brings us to the precautionary principle which is one of my
“chevaux de bataille” and also a typical design issue7.
To sum up: the present situation has changed a lot the role of design in a way in which could be
very useful if applied to politics. Thinking about politics as “political design” could give us great
advantages.

Ok for the aesthetical dimension, but what about the aesthesical one, the one related to the senses, to emotions,
passions. It seems that this issue is connected with your idea of care, of taking care

Again we have to dismiss the packaging definition of design, where design is something that you
add: you may want to add something which would attract attention but the basis would still be
functional .Today it is impossible to assert such a point: there are products that are entirely
designed to catch interest… I mean, again, the iPod, is a great example.
The iPod looks odd from the modernist point of view because technology was supposed to be
first function and then passion if you want, but if we agree that design is a symptom of a
complete change of our look, it seems to me that designing an object comprises always the
design of passions. Actually, a translator of passion is what design has become. Let us think about

7 See Latour (2004a, 2007c).

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 cars, for instance, and how they now elicit different passions from before – now that we care for
carbon neutral technologies. For instance in my university we have students forcing us to assume
a carbon neutral behavior by telling us what you should do to balance the waste of carbon
through car use. So we now look at cars like we were looking at slavery at the beginning of the
nineteen century. Something like that happens with meat-eating: there are people now that
have begun to talk about meat eating as if it were slavery. So there is an entire moral economy
of passions related to technologies of all kinds.
But, on the other side, what is now interesting is not so much the passions elicited by design, but
the design of passions. There are pills of any sort. I mean, that’s not so much a new thing, but
the notion of body design is of course quite new and becomes more common. Body design
means that you can do plastic surgery – in French, more interestingly we say chirurgie esthétique –
but also that you can actually redesign passions.

But how to account for passions?

Actually, isn’t that an issue within semiotics? So I guess you are much better placed than me to
account for passions. In any case, considering passions something hard to understand looks to
me as a sort of modernist bias. I think that passion is much easier to understand of what we may
think, because, also if we start from the “natural” common sense of the word, it is related to the
concept of “being acted by”. It does not mean that you are passive, it means that you are acted
by something. It seems to me that the difficulties reside in describing the autonomy of the
subject …
But the issue of the redesign of passions through pills takes us back to the idea of human
redesign, Sloterdijk’s idea. This idea is very different from the post-human issue that is
completely elaborated, after Heidegger and Baudrillard, on the idea that something has been
lost forever, that humanness has been lost and we can’t be nothing but post-humans – we are
doomed to be post-humans. Sloterdijk’s approach and mine are different: humans have been
always constructed, designed – as Sloterdijk says: “Dasein is Design”. Redesigning is just part of
the process.
And this leads us back to design as politics and the great advantage of design as care for details,
straight to another Heideggerian’s idea: the etymology of “thing” that hasn’t much to do with
objects but with the first parliaments: the Icelandic Althing. Therefore with the idea of assembly,
of gathering. Things are issues which have to be publicly discuss – this was the idea behind the
Making Things Public exhibition8. One way to do it is collaborative design – I learnt something
about it from Norwegians …
But let’s tie to this issue another one. I was somewhat expecting you would rise: the relation
between design and drawing. Design without drawing, in the general sense of “representation”,
has no meaning. Design is deeply tied with “representation” – as long as we think that here we
are not considering "mere representation” intended as way of showing or describing something
that exists independently from it – but as a way to approach design problems. Sketching as a
practice within the design process.
So, if we really think that design is politics extended to things and, at the same time, we assume
taking care of details as an important aspect of design, then we should be able to represent
contested design. How to represent contested design? This is the question I ask to designers.

Today’s design puts much stress on friendliness…

Yes design is too often a “città ideale” (ideal city), but there are conflicts, and discussions and
disagreements. Now the point is how to represent all that within a design project.

8 See note n. 4.

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Pubblicato in rete l’ 11 febbraio 2009

Bibliographical references

Latour, Bruno
1993, “Ethnography of a ‘High Tech’ Case” in P. Lemonnier (ed.), Technological Choices.
Transformation in Material Culture since the Neolithic. London/New York. Routledge. pp. 372-398.

1996, “Lettre à mon ami Pierre sur l'anthropologie symétrique" in Ethnologie Francaise 26/1. pp.
32-36.

1998, “Piccola filosofia dell’enunciazione“ in Basso P. e Corrain L. (eds.), Eloquio del senso.
Dialoghi semiotici per Paolo Fabbri, Genova, Costa e Nolan.

2004a, “L’avenir du principe de prècaution”, in Le Monde 12/6/2004.

2004b, La Fabrique du droit. Une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat, Paris, La Découverte; trad. it. La
fabbrica del diritto. Una etnografia del consiglio di stato, Roma, Città Aperta, 2007.

2005, Reassembling the social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Oxford, Oxford University
Press.

2006, “A propos d’un livre d’Etienne Souriau: Les Différents modes d’existence“ in
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/98-SOURIAU.pdf.

2007a, “A Textbook Case Revisited. Knowledge as mode of existence”, in Hackett, E.,

Amsterdamska, O., Lynch M. and Wacjman J. (eds.), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies
–Third Edition, Cambridge (Mass), MIT Press.

2007b, Résumé d’une enquête sur les modes d’existence ou bref éloge de la civilisation qui vient. Manuscript.

2007c, “Vive l’audacieux principe de précaution”, in Le Monde 7/11/2007

Latour, Bruno and Lemonnier, Pierre (eds.)

1994, De la préhistoire aux missiles balistiques. L'intelligence sociale des techniques, Paris, La Découverte.

Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter (eds.)

2002, Iconoclash – Beyond the Image-Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Boston, MIT Press

2005, Making Things Public. Atmospheres of Democracy, Boston, MIT Press.

Ohanian, Melik and Royoux, Jean-Christophe (eds.)

2005, Cosmograms, New York, Lukas and Sternberg.