Georges Perec once had a work table, 140 by 70 centimeters sheet of glass resting on metal trestles:

“Its stability is far from perfect and it’s no bad thing in actual fact that it should be heavily loaded or even overloaded; the weight of the objects it supports helps to keep it steady.”

—Georges Perec, Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table, 1976

Who is supporting whom? Stability neither resides in the table nor the objects on it, but in the relation between them.

In Iran, washing herbs cannot be rushed. They are soaked in a basin of water and left undisturbed for soil particles to slowly settle at the bottom. Just as the becoming together of soil and herbs—reverberating with mutual influence from irrigation, weeding, rain, wind, birds, insects and much else—has taken time, so does disentangling them.

“You won’t be needing that here,” said the professor of a sketching course to an undergrad holding a pair of compasses. “We draw our circles by hand—this isn’t architecture!” Indeed, this was industrial design, as our circles clearly reflect that fact.

Our different relationships with circles as an industrial designer, graphist or architect, or as a mathematician, a gardener or someone wiping a countertop are hardwired into the materiality of our practices and define to an extent who we are as practitioners.

I was walking down a library corridor in Tehran some years ago and a woman-presenting individual was hesitantly coming towards me, seeming undecided about approaching me or waiting for someone else. After a momentary confusion, I realized the bathroom was nearby and knew what their body language was telling me. We were part of an unspoken network of support which normalizes asking for and providing help to otherwise strangers in the form of emergency pads that most menstruators carry, creating resilience by sharing the responsibility of meeting menstrual needs with others, especially in places where such needs are not accommodated in public bathrooms.

“I was sitting on the bus one morning, passengers jam packed around me, their heads bowed over handheld screens.”

—Adam Kraft, Key Notes on The Unruly City, 2023, p.17

These are the opening words of a dissertation with no abstract, no introduction, and barely a table of contents, that dives right into the story. This refusal to be reductive, partitioned, and “accessible” was insufferable to me when deciding whether to read it. I nearly gave up—three times, to be exact. But once my need for reductionism subsided, and I accepted that there was no line that would cut through the mass of stories, graffiti, keys, chairs, anarchists, tunnels and politicians to designate an “object” against the backdrop of a “context”, it turned out to be a remarkably good dissertation—not despite its processuality, but because of it.

There is a shelf hanging above my sister’s sewing desk—a wooden board held in place by two ropes, knotted underneath, with shredded, tassel-like ends. She keeps small lengths of thread on the left rope’s end, either remnants from stitching or threads salvaged from temporary stitches after machine-sewing. The threads that wish to hang above her desk cannot ask in advance how they will hold together before actually doing so.

“… in trading paper towels for this blower [hand dryer] … [they] are pretending that the only thing you do with paper towels is dry your hands. Not so, not so! You need paper towels to dab at a splash of food on your sleeve that you notice in the mirror; you need them to polish your glasses dry; you need them to wash your face… When you are oily-faced on a hot afternoon in a room made hotter by the hot-air dryer and you decide you want to wash your face before you order your Big Classic, what do you do? Out of desperation, real and true desperation that I myself have experienced, you resort to the toilet paper. So much toilet paper is being used in bathrooms with hot-air blowers that some of the same facilities managers who thought they were cost-cuttingly crafty in moving to blowers have gone to the opposite extreme in the area of toilet-paper dispensers, installing gigantic side-mounted hundred-thousand-sheet rolls the size of automobile tires in each stall. But even so, toilet paper is ill suited to functions outside of a narrow range of activities. You go into a stall and pull yourself a huge handful (that’s assuming that the stall is untenanted), and return to the sink with it. As soon as you dampen it with warm water, it wilts to a semitransparent puree in your fingers. You move this dripping plasma over your face; little pieces of it adhere to your cheek or brow; then you must assemble another big wad to dry off with—but ah! now your fingers are wet, so that when you try to pull more toilet paper from the hundred-thousand-sheet roll, the leading end simply dissolves in your fingers, tearing prematurely. Deciding to let your face air-dry, you look around for a place to throw out the initial macerated flapjack, and discover that the wastebasket is gone. So you drop it in the corner with the other miscellaneous trash, or flip it vengefully in the already clogged toilet.”

—Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, 1988, p. 90-91

with a hand dryer—redraws the boundaries of the stall, sink, waste bin, toilet paper, etc., as user practices spill across them, leading to unintended results: saving paper towels fuels toilet paper consumption, the removal of the waste bin clogs the toilets, etc. How essential and fixed are these boundaries, or, for that matter, the boundary of a public bathroom?

In 2000 the Galehead lodge in the Appalachian Mountains was forced to install wheelchair ramps and grab bars in accordance with accessibility regulations. The idea was ridiculed widely as the lodge sat at the end of a rough 4.6 mile mountain trail. Jill Gravink led a group of five wheelchair and crutch users up the trail, at the end of which they were asked by a reporter why, if they could drag themselves up the trail, could they not drag themselves up the stairs into the lodge? To which Gravink responded:

“Why bother putting steps at all? Why not drag yourself in through a window?”

—Tobin Siebers, Disability and the Theory of Complex Embodiment, 2013, p.294

Disability does not reside in the individual, nor entirely in stairs or other environmental elements. But in the relationship between bodies and spaces. Stairs make some people disabled, windows as entrance would make others.

A century before Iris young’s 1977 essay “throwing like a girl”, a certain fictional Mrs. Judith Loftus at Mark Twain’s pen articulated a similar theory of gender, only with regards to catching like a boy.

At some point during his adventures Huckleberry Finn finds himself crossdressing as a girl in the company of Mrs. Loftus, who spots him out for a boy by simply throwing him an object to catch:

“When a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don’t clap them together, the way you did”

—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884, p.102

Gender determination gets into the detail of materials we surround ourselves with, which in this case was the typical clothing for girls at the time, i.e. dresses.

Sandy Stone* did not want to hear Hawking’s lecture from a loudspeaker on the campus lawn. So, she sneaked into the crowded auditorium, to hear “him” give the talk. Once in, she saw Hawking in his usual mode—in his wheelchair, with his laptop in his lap, giving the talk through a computer-generated voice, and she wondered: Am I any closer to him now than I was out on the lawn? Where are Hawking’s edges? Where does he end and the world begin?

* Sandy Stone, Split Subjects Not Atoms, 1994

Tangledness of yarn can be a measure of time. By observing how long it takes to untangle it into a neat ball. But more interestingly, how long it took for the originally neatly ordered yarn to become such a tangled mess. The tangledness holds the story of all the house closets the yarn has been in, all the cars that have transported it, all the items it has found itself sharing boxes with, the humans that have opened and ransacked those boxes looking for things that maybe turned out to be elsewhere, and all the other inexhaustible relations that go into producing tangled yarn.

Squat seats, squat toilets, beautiful rugs rather than furniture, eating on a decorated Sofreh on the floor rather than a table, roll up beddings rather than fixed beds. These are part of an ecology of things that train specific muscles, draws on a specific temporality of space use, a different understanding of spatial capacity, and much else. Links disappear one by one from these ecologies, destabilizing and erasing ways of life.

What does learning to increasingly sit on chairs rather than on rugs, on our knees and squat seats do to our relationship with other objects in our surrounding? What does it do to our capacity to revive those relations should we choose to?

Standing next to a Moroccan friend as she delicately placed one layer after another of vegetables in a mounting pile, while the broth simmered away at the base, I learned about the common-sense logic of a processually formed mound in order to achieve a relatively even consistency across differences among vegetables. Attending to the cooking needs of each item, the time they take, the desired consistency one wants to achieve, and how the layers interact demonstrates a Moroccan relationship to matter and time, manifested in the beautiful ceramics of a Tagine.

One of the first Cultural Probes designed by Bill Gaver and his colleagues* in the 90s was a disposable camera labelled with requests for particular pictures, such as “the spiritual centre of your home” or “something red.” The project was focused on new technologies for the home—a fact not easily inferable from the requests. But Probology asserts that asking unambiguous questions rarely gives us answers that exceed what we already know, as they are unable to challenge the ontology underlying our questioning. This is why an answer to “something red” might stand a better chance of bypassing the pre-understandings and stereotypes that we carry with us to design projects.

* Bill Gaver, et al., Cultural Probes and the Value of Uncertainty, 2004

This is a performance I grew up watching: a Southern Iranian way of performing mourning during the Shia ceremonies of Muharram. Every man—and this is a practice that remains exclusively male—places his hand on the waist of the man next to him, and takes a step with each motion of his other hand striking his chest. No participant knows how big the circle is or where they stand in relation to the whole. New participants simply join the chain and are integrated. There is no directing, either from outside or prior to the performance. The living circle is an emergent result of many simultaneous, entangled relations.

Robin Wall Kimmerer* recalls a moral dilemma in her attempt to make a pond swimmable for her daughters. She set out to “improve the habitat” by clearing some things out of the pond and was troubled when her rake came back with a whole food chain dangling from it. Rather than letting them die in the compost pile, she picked out the larger beings—the tadpole, predaceous diving beetles, etc. But she knew well enough that that was just the tip of the iceberg; there were other beings hanging from that tangle of living matter that she could not pragmatically care for. So, she asked: where do we stop? If we are all related, if everything is connected, where is the edge of our responsibility?

* Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 2013, p.90

Herbs are cut differently depending on how they are going to be consumed in Iran. A different amount of stem attached to the leaf is deemed “leaf enough” to be acceptable for different recipes. This distinction, like all others, is a pragmatic one, prior to which all we have is a leaf-stem-root continuum.

On the third floor of the Malmö City Library in Sweden, there is a free-to-use dispenser of menstrual pads and tampons, which is now empty, with a note next to it that reads: “Do you need a sanitary pad? Ask the staff at the information desk.” If public bathrooms of our time and context are places where the needs of menstruators are met as the red cabinet seems to suggest, is the library information desk now within the boundary of that public bathroom?

Sara Ahmed* shares her experiences of academic institutions through the figure of their doors. She understands openness not as a quality of a door but a relation between a door and whoever comes towards it. Institutions are never simply open. They are open-to.

* Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, 2023, p.165

I once enjoyed watching someone from Britain unsuccessfully try to wrap their head around the idea of pouring tea into saucers and drinking it from that, supposedly the way cats do! In the West Asian context, saucers are usually deep and thus more than coasters or simply another way to hold the cup. They are the materialization of a different temporality of drinking warm beverages. They allow tea to be drunk even when just poured from the steaming pot. So rather than waiting for the entire cup to arrive at a suitable temperature, you can enjoy your tea sequentially.

How we relate to saucers can determine how we relate to each other over them. As the material stuff of social life, saucers determine its tempo.

4-legged chairs can be knocked down, especially if leaned back on two of their legs. One way to read Benoit Malta’s 2014 2-legged chair is the way it redraws the boundary of responsibility for stable sitting.

By asking its users to actively participate in maintaining the stability of the chair-human hybrid, the 2-legged chair reminds us that qualities like stability do not reside within the supposed bounds of an object but in the relations they take part in.

In 2002 someone gave the NYC Direct Action Network a car. David Graeber, who was part of the network, recounts their struggle in making use of the car in accordance with their anarchist way of organizing. He concluded that “open-ended networks of activists cannot legally own cars”*, just like other large physical objects, regulations regarding which are effectively enforced through threat of force by the police and other government bodies. What a car is does not solely reside within the metal bounds of the car itself but the relationships in which it gathers meaning and consequence: A car is where it can and cannot be driven, parked, and when, for how long, at what cost, who and what can be recognized as its owner and what version of human possibilities it reinforces.

* David Graeber, Direct Action, 2009, p.283

Tehran. An all-girls’ middle school science class.

The teacher is talking about the hardness of different materials and how it is comparatively determined by observing which leaves a mark on the other in an encounter; rock on clay, diamond on metal, pencil graphite on paper… And a hand goes up. “Miss, isn’t it the paper that actually marks the pencil, as the graphite gets visibly eroded in use?” “Right,” she said. “Well done!” Science of the kind I grew up learning was determined to redirect observation like that into a linear mode of explanation: encounters in which one party touches the other without being touched.

Benoit Mandelbrot who gave us “fractal geometries” was fond of asking people how long the coastline of Britain was. As answers to which he rarely got a number, mostly “I don’t know but I can look it up in an encyclopedia”s, and never “it depends”. He argued that every coastline is infinitely long, and your answer depends on the length of your ruler:

“an observer trying to estimate the length of Britain’s coastline from a satellite will make a smaller guess than an observer trying to walk its coves and beaches, who will make a smaller guess in turn than a snail negotiating every pebble.”

—James Gleick, Chaos, 1987, p.89

Mark Twain, in the supposedly nonfictional account of his youth working on a steamboat on the Mississippi river, recalls coming across a man named Ed who believed in the wholesomeness of the river’s muddy water:

“if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to threequarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river … what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up, and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be.”

—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883

How much mud can reasonably be called the Mississippi? Where does the soil end and the river begin?

There is an Iranian dish called Ghormeh-sabzi, which depending on where your version of it comes from, requires a different combo and ratio of between 3-10 types of herbs to make. Despite this irreducible diversity, Ghormeh-sabzi is coherent enough to be passed on and shared. Both its diversity and its coherence are inseparable from the singular skill of herb vendors—who hear how much herbs is wanted and of which types, usually accompanied by qualifiers such as “more of chives than spinach but not as much as parsley,” and calculate how much of each to wrap in a bundle. In a way, all vendors know there is no single Ghormeh-sabzi; not materially, not discursively. Every time somebody asks for it, it is determined on the spot, and it is the cumulative enactment of this loosely bound thing at the vendors’ counter that gives it coherence across time and space.

Ponderosa pines in the Eastern Cascade of North America were a source of amazement for the white colonizers in the 19th century. Anna Tsing recalls in her book, the colonizers’ awe at these grand trees that stood in parklike forests, “forest floor is often as clean as if it had been cleared”*. It didn’t take them long to log out the trees and their efforts at restoration continually failed as the ponderosa pines were reproduced and maintained by periodic fires that the Klamath people had developed over centuries. Those fire practices span across the nature-society divide that the colonizers imposed on an otherwise relational way of life that saw no such lines.

* Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015, p.195

A jig is what you make when what you really want to make is not makeable within the existing regime of tools. At times for simple reasons, like a size or angle that is inefficient to support by tools that reasonably cater to the “mean”. At others, for imaginative designs that require hitherto unthought modes of dis/assembling materials.

Where does the tool end and the tooled begin? The jig complicates this binary beautifully; a relational figure, always on the verge of being accommodated into the order of tools but never quite there.

Italo Calvino* wrote of the fictional city of Zaira, whose being would be lost if he tried to tell it by isolated facts about its parts:

“I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.”

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974

Vinciane Despret tells the story of Hans, a remarkable horse who in the 1900s made the newspapers in Germany as he correctly answered every question put to him by tapping the number with his foot. Hans didn’t read minds or understand spoken language. But he did read bodies. The slightest involuntarily bend in the questioner’s head and trunk to see the tapping foot, which knowing the answer would relax exactly at the moment the right number had been tapped, gave Hans his cue to stop. Because we are predisposed to see the human and the horse separated, bounded as individuals, we miss what flows between them—how our bodies constantly reach beyond their supposed boundaries to connect in remarkable ways.

* Vinciane Despret, The Body We Care For, 2004

Ultrasound makes fetuses.

To Karen Barad, ultrasound technology does not peer innocently at a pre-existing, bounded and propertied entity. Rather without the technology that determines its separation from the “context” that sustains it, i.e. the pregnant person, the fetus is an indeterminacy. The fetus only comes into being in its constitutive relationship with the technology that frames it.

* Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 2007

How do certain structures get embedded in the ways of a practice to such an extent that they become unremarkable, even undistinguishable? Hannah Higgins* asked this question of grids. How could we begin to separate or even recognize the influence of a single construct that has so pervasively shaped art, design and planning, this familiar backdrop to our tools we no longer even see? Grids are everywhere, and because they are, they reproduce themselves through our designs which wish to fit those existing grids.

* Hannah Higgins, The Grid Book, 2009

Grains, Beans, Seeds and similar foodstuff, purchased mainly in bulk to this day in Iran, require unwanted items to be sorted out of them—like bits of peel, dust, small rocks, etc. This is usually done in a large round dish, which in skilled hands, becomes a sorting technology. Simply by twists of the wrist, rice that is spread out in the dish is tossed up in the air and caught back again. And in the process, items that are ontologically different from the rice fall separate from them in the dish.

Determination of difference is thus transferred from the more labor-intensive dimension of vision to that of weight and air resistance.

“We recognize the relationality of state and individual violence and thus frame our resistance accordingly … We mobilize in outrage against the rape of another woman and reject increased policing as the response.”

—Davis, et al., Abolition Feminism Now, 2021, p.3

Abolition Feminists recognize that it is through specific framing that this relationality is obscured, and blame confined within certain objects, bodies and communities.

What complex web of relations does the body of a gun enfold and how do we go about retrieving them?

window blindWinding the string of a window blind around a pole, or rope around bits on a boat, or yarn around a knitting finger, creates stability processually. It is not any single loop that does it, but the aggregation of the loops on top of each other that gradually builds a resistance that at some point (which is difficult to delineate) surpasses the force it is meant to secure.

A boundary is drawn, yes, but one that does not allow presumptuousness about where exactly it is.