Assemblage and Anticommunication: Strategies for Systemic Approaches to Spatial Design

Systemic approaches to design provide insights into understanding the intertwined nature of activities, objects and environments, accentuating a shift in conceptualising design from dealing with objects to dealing with dynamic relations. Drawing upon the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as insights from the cyberneticians Herbert Brün and Larry Richards, this paper explores the concepts of assemblage and anticommunication as a basis for systemic design. In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, assemblage emerges as a strategic resistance against modernity’s tendency to replace genuine relations with illusions of meaning (i.e., ‘the spectacle’). By harnessing assemblage, traditional confines and structures are disrupted, echoing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of deterritorialization. Anti-communication, introduced by Herbert Brün and explored by Larry Richards as ‘composing asynchronicity’, transcends one-dimensional communicative interactions, advocating for a vibrant, multidimensional conversation that forms in deterritorialized space. It challenges system stability; stimulates the vitality, complexity, and diversity of relational domains; and thereby fosters novel conversations that can counter the homogenising effects of the media spectacle. The above-mentioned theoretical paradigms have inspired ‘The Order of Things, Rivers and Mountains,’ a public art project created for Wolong village in Yunnan, China. They assisted us in integrating intricate relationships between the local environment, a village’s history, and human interaction. Presenting approaches to design that break free from conventional constraints, weaving a fabric where relationships burgeon, enriched by systemic thinking, this paper focusses on the multidimensional nature of assemblage and anticommunication and the interactions, flows and interconnections they afford.