Creating Affective Social Design: An ethical and ontological discussion.

The ethics of designing has often been organised according to moral imperatives, and social design not only aligns with such moralities, but perpetuates them without providing a clear critique of the systems to which they adhere. To rid itself of such reactive ideologies, and so to create other conditions for the possibility of its creativity, social design might occupy itself with a different account of ethics altogether. This paper will seek to elucidate such a different ethics along the lines Baruch Spinoza proposed and Gilles Deleuze championed. That is, it will therefore call for an affective designing that operates by creating ethical ontologies. This article will bring an affective, ethical, ontological design to bear on a social entity that emerges from the relations affectivity requires insofar as it is one that is designed.

The ethics of designing has often been organised according to moral imperatives, and social design not only aligns with such moralities, but perpetuates them without providing a clear critique of the systems to which they adhere.
To rid itself of such reactive ideologies, and so to create other conditions for the possibility of its creativity, social design might occupy itself with a different account of ethics altogether. This paper will seek to elucidate such a different ethics along the lines Baruch Spinoza proposed and Gilles Deleuze championed. That is, it will therefore call for an affective designing that operates by creating ethical ontologies. This article will bring an affective, ethical, ontological design to bear on a social entity that emerges from the relations affectivity requires insofar as it is one that is designed.

Opening remarks
Recent times have seen the discourses around the social function, social responsibility, and social responsiveness of design and innovation flourish. 1 For social design/innovation theorists and practitioners Lorraine Gamman and Adam Thorpe (2011b), for example, the designation responsiveness is preferred to responsibility, as for them it encompasses a more robust call to action in concert with the many stakeholders, shareholders, and other actors involved in any act of social design and innovation. While their overall mission seems valid and even laudable, it is the concept of responsiveness that I would like to focus on at the outset of this piece, in order to provide the germ -or, rather, the irritantfrom which this essay will emerge. With responsiveness, then, we have connotations of reaction, an action taken as an effect of something else happening, a response; active rather than passive, yes, but an act that places the stimulus for itself somewhere else. Gilles Deleuze begins the chapter of Nietzsche et la philosophie (1962) that deals with Friederich Nietzsche's concepts of active and reactive forces, by discussing Baruch Spinoza's conception of the body. I will return to Spinoza, Deleuze, and the body below, but the way in which Deleuze characterises active and reactive in these terms is helpful now. He writes: "In a body, the superior or dominant forces are called active and the inferior or dominated ones reactive. Active and reactive are precisely the original qualities that express the relationships between forces" (Deleuze, 1962, 45;my translation). More than 20 years after writing this, and in relation to the work of his friend Michel Foucault,  discusses the same kinds of relations between forces in terms of "power", which is important now because I question socially responsive design's responses to power. If the reactive stance is one that determines, and is determined by, one's position of inferiority in relation to power as Deleuze and Foucault both show, it leaves dubious a design that calls itself responsive while seeking to make positive social impact. While I may not necessarily deny the impetus that moves design away from activities of exploitation (e.g. Julier, 2017) towards less parasitical acts in the name of the social, I wonder whether proponents of socially responsive design could articulate their activities in ways that do not demand, at worst, acceptance of, or at best, reaction to, dominating discourses of power and the imbalance of forces that power requires. 2 In what follows, I will offer a way to think about social design that begins to reconstruct it in terms of active agents in affective relations; that is not to react, but to set the conditions according to which social design action can take place.
As Deleuze recognises (1962Deleuze recognises ( & 1986, any philosophical intervention in concerns of power, agency, their relationships as networks, and the creative forces that combine to produce all of this, must be considered both ethically and ontologically. Both of which converge, especially in the work of Spinoza. In the article that follows, I will philosophically examine these concepts and bring them to bear upon the theories and practices that form social design. This examination will, therefore, present two main areas. First, it will deal with affect, as it is for rethinking ethics that Spinoza mobilises this concept. I note that this would, ideally, also encounter politics-the preceding mention of power highlights this perfectly. I will defer such an investigation to another time, for brevity's sake, but ask that the ways in which such connections might be made are not forgotten. 3 Secondly, this piece will examine these concepts through a particular example: the Well-being of Future Generations Act (Wales) 2015, presented as an instance of social design. The lesson for social design in all this, is that an engagement with affective existence will offer new ways for creating ethical ontologies, in differently constituted social groups, not simply responding to hegemonies of power and control as they are currently constructed.
I have positioned this paper so far in terms of a critique of socially responsive design seen as reactive. Before I move on, it is worth highlighting the wealth of work engaging with activist opportunities for and of design (e.g. Fuad-Luke, 2009;Julier, 2013aJulier, & 2013bHroch, 2015) and in distinction to the reactive characteristic of socially responsive design innovation as discussed. Guy Julier notes, for example, the ways in which his concept of "design culture" (2013c) spawns the pragmatics of "design activism," not only as a response to the politics of neoliberalism, but also as design activism's production is exacerbated by neoliberalism's crises (Julier, 2013b). He highlights four themes of such a design activism, as follows:  (Julier, 2013b, 227) Julier's themes here emphasise some interesting concepts, many of which resonate with some of my own work on philosophy, design, and innovation (Brassett, 2013;, and others who draw upon some of the philosophers we will encounter below (see, for example : Grierson et al, 2015;O'Reilly, 2015;Marenko, 2015). While a more fulsome argument with these concepts will have to wait, I would like now to highlight Julier's "temporality" and "territorialisation." His focus is upon mapping ways in which design might practise as more resolutely activist, but the philosophically creative and pragmatic approach I will take here encounters similar concepts, and with similar urges. The creation of radical and oppositional temporalities will reappear below in terms of the speeds and slowness of a thing's constituent particles, with ethical relations expressing the values of the impacts they have on each other. Julier scales the spatiality inherent in considerations of speed and slowness, giving the resultant complex a strongly ethical flavour (with the term "responsibility"). Taken together, all four of Julier's themes chart a space and time for a creative intervention that accesses modes of action across social, political, and ethical potentialities, that has as much to offer social innovation as it does design activism-as I hope to articulate in what follows.
The section that follows will focus upon Spinoza's concept of the body, especially in terms of affect; before examining the example of the 'Well-being of Future Generations Act (Wales) 2015. The final section will draw out the ethical characteristics that both he and Deleuze highlight therein, with attention to providing an initial sketch for a different, more ontologically inflected, and therefore affective and active, social design.

Affect and design
Writing of the ways in which matter is endowed with its own energy, its own vibrancy, and which it uses to form itself, political scientist Jane Bennett (2010, xii) aligns herself with what she calls a "Spinozist notion of affect, which refers broadly to the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness." In one way, we can see an alignment of Spinoza's affective body with a concept of responsiveness, which has already been critiqued above. Maybe this will offer a possibility to agree with Gamman and Thorpe (2011b) that social responsiveness is "good enough?" But Bennett shows that responsiveness, a capacity for being affected and openness to the acts of others, is only part of the equation, and we might infer that to ignore "action" is certainly not good enough.
While Bennett quotes from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus (1988), it is in Spinoza's work that she recognises the concept of affect to be grounded. 4 Similarly, Gregory Siegworth and Melissa Gregg, in the introductory essay to their collection The Affect Theory Reader (Gregg and Siegworth, 2010, 3), describe as "one of the most oft-cited quotations concerning affect," the following from Spinoza's The Ethics (1996, 71;IIP2): "no one has yet determined what the Body can do." There is much in this quotation; hence its characteristic as "oft-cited." I have brought Spinoza's account of the body into design discussions for some years (Brassett, 2006), and have done so because it provides an account of a spatially constituted entity (Brassett, 1991(Brassett, & 1994 that deviates from the norms of design, especially as these are defined according to the relation of form and function to each other. 5 We shall see that form and function become relegated in importance in Spinoza's body, with important ramifications for design. In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza Deleuze writes (1990, 218): This passage highlights two points from Spinoza's definition of the body that interested Deleuze so much -its relational composition and its action -and does so in ways that seem to chime with a traditional understanding of design: constructedness and function. In the Ethics Spinoza writes (1996, 41; IIL1 & IIL2), "Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance"; and later, "A body which moves or is at rest must be determined to motion or rest by another body, which has also been determined to motion or rest by another, and that again by another, and so on, to infinity." These will be the co-ordinates we will use in our encounter with Spinoza's body. 6 Deleuze explains this further (1988,123), relating the first as kinetic, and second as dynamic (as we will see in a moment): "Thus, the kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of slowness and speed between particles. That is, it is not defined by a form or by functions [. . .] One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms." The body is not alone but multiple; made up of a multitude of particles that are accelerating, decelerating, constant, or at rest; with each of these particles making and breaking connections with other particles, other bodies. Without its elementary particles swerving and colliding, causing ricochets, accelerating and coming to a halt (Brassett & O'Reilly,20), without all of this a body is nothing. It is neither the aim of all this commotion, nor is it contained in these things undergoing different processes. The body is more than the sum of these particles, and exceeds the local organisation into organs that coalesce throughout the body. The body's organisation is multiple, multiply differentiated, and always excessive of any particular format it engenders for itself. As such, the body, a body, bodies, are always in the middle of the fields of potential, which they both situate and create. 7 The structure of a body, then, is kinetic, relational, and multiplicitous and so crossed by, and folded-over, with many other things, both organic and nonorganic, that it is often difficult to see where one thing begins and another ends (Bennett, 2010). Small design consultancies characterise this well. Often with no permanent members of staff save the founder, these operate within a cloud of part-time, freelance, or sessional workers that are able to connect to different client organisations and their particular needs/desires in an instant. Further, if their offer is particular or specific, they can provide services to other small or even medium-sized consultancies. 8 This type of ecosystem of creative practice blurs the boundaries between terms such as collaborator and competitor, or inside and outside, in ways that exemplify the types of complex or chaotic organisation that are championed by management scholars Haridimos Tsoukas and Robert Chia (see : Tsoukas, 1998;Chia, 1999;Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). 9 Which brings us to the "dynamic" proposition. Deleuze explains (1988, 123): "The second proposition concerning bodies refers us to the capacity for affecting or being affected.
You will not define a body (or mind) by its form, nor by its organs or functions, and neither will you define it as a substance or a subject." The determination of the "affective capacity" of a body comes from the disruption of its ordinary connections within social, scientific, natural, and cultural schema and allow many different properties to be re-connected in other creative ways. It is dynamic because it is kinetic. If the body's elements are multiple and moving at different rates, and these are colliding and ricocheting in different directions, then the forces that these swerves and collisions express are the affective capacities. This has important consequences for design, reliant -as it has been for the last 100 years or so -on being defined in accordance with the relative importance of form and function. While it is difficult for design companies, or sections of companies, to divorce themselves from the discourses of form and function, there are some for whom the network in which they operate -and so the relative impacts upon each element in the network -is important. 10 Crucial to an affective, dynamic approach to designing is, for example: a desire not to control situations; and, to be open to ideas coming from outside that might challenge one's beliefs (see also : Brassett & O'Reilly, 2018).
If bodies are kinetically described-if we take account the speeds and slowness of the rhythms of their connections to other bodies and thingsthen they cannot help but affect other bodies. The critique of power relations that a consideration of affective capacities necessitates, leads to the realisation that any set of relationships can be articulated differently, even if they are between the same things in the same space at different times, or the same things across different spaces at the same time. This is one of the attributes for this way of thinking that Bennett (2010), for example, finds positively influential as a political scientist. An ethics of bodies in affective relationships -that do not necessarily only express themselves according to identity, form or function -provides a dynamic approach to the complexity of the world that is, in her words, "both vibrant and materially active." This points also to an utterly complex view of designing. If bodies are to be reconstructed according to the speeds and slowness of their particles and the ways in which they affect each other, and not in relation to form, function, and substance, then this should impact all bodies in space; especially designed ones, ones that have depended upon notions of form, function, and material to ground both their own ontologies, and the power over those entangled in such ontologies.

An Example from Wales
The Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 is a law that requires Welsh public bodies to consider the "long term [impacts] of the decisions we make" (Welsh Government, 2015, 4). 11 With a long-term foresight that is often lacking in politics, this act provides a statutory basis for taking into account the living standards of future generations in any public sector action; an act that environmental law expert Haydn Davis (2016, 41) regards as a "ground-breaking piece of legislation creating legal responsibilities which fall on the current generation, to safeguard the interests of future generations." 12 Davis explains further (2016, 43): "The fundamental idea is that all these bodies should 'carry out sustainable development' through the medium of well-being objectives designed to achieve centrally defined well-being goals for the whole of Wales. These objectives must be set by the bodies themselves and all reasonable steps must be taken to meet them." Encompassing seven "well-being" goals -community cohesiveness, global responsibility, prosperity, resilience, health, equality, and cultural vibrancy (Welsh Government, 2015) -this act brings under one rubric agendas that often are dealt with separtely, and if they are brought together it is in terms of sustainable development only. This act takes sustainable development further in its ontological positioning of future well-being now, rather than the projected future state of current states of being. It is important to add that Davis (2016, 44-50) emphasises that though the act does not require the achievement of specific well-being objectives, any of the public bodies regulated by the act should be able to show that they have taken reasonable measures to account for the well-being of future generations in any of their processes. Davis's focus is the legal status of this, which is important, of course; for us, we will focus upon the ontological concerns. 13 And while this act places as a core concern the ontologies of future residents of Wales, it does this in terms of the ethical responsibilities that current residents have towards them. 14 There is a sense here, that any account of a contemporary social -and its sustainable development; that is, to ensure its future resilience -must include an encounter with ontology and ethics.
In "Control and Becoming" (1995, 171) Deleuze reflects upon his and Félix Guattari's characterisation of society in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) thus: "society is defined not so much by its contradictions as by its lines of flight, it flees all over the place." We have seen particles of different speeds and slowness appear in Spinoza's account of bodies. With Deleuze, these speeds and slowness lead to highly kinetic social forms. The Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 presents us with "particles" under a variety of speeds and slowness -from national museums to fire engines, health systems to public sector workers -in a set of ever changing, networked relationships. Without prescribing exactly what should be done across these very different bodies (it is clear that the roles, needs, and desires of emergency services are very different to those of art galleries, for example) the act provides the requirement for each, in its own milieu, to take into account the well being of future generations.
Spinoza's other angle on bodies -that they are characterised by their affective capacities -expresses the stuff of society as both dynamic and mutually impactful; which for Deleuze and Spinoza reinforces their ethical nature. As we saw above, the recognition that a body is composed of particles at different speeds and slowness, is one that highlights their relationalities and the pressures upon each other through these relations. At the surface of the Welsh example, the very notion of "well-being" is one that is deeply imbued with ethical ("well") and ontological ("being") concerns. With greater inspection, we can see different ethical ontologies being created. First and foremost, there is the affective connection between present actions and future lives, such that the ways of being that might be designed now (through addressing health services, for example, or reconstructing possible relations with cultural entities such as museums and galleries) must be considered in relation to future lives (through addressing health services, for example, or reconstructing possible relations with cultural entities such as museums and galleries). Next, there is the much more complex consideration that there is a future pressure upon the present, as noted especially in the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1961Whitehead ( & 1978, and discussed by Brian Massumi (2011;see also: De Boever et al., 2012). There is a sense that the affective relationship of the future to the present, reinforced through this act, provides what Massumi (2011;De Boever et al., 2012) regards as a future cause for present actions. What this act of the Welsh parliament does is to require the affective capacities of any present socius (along with the interconnected particles that constitute aspects of its ontologies at various scales) to be constituted by their plausible future scenarios (Ramírez & Selin, 2014).
There is a sense in which much design practice (not only social design) works in this way. With investigations at stages of the design process, particularly early research stages, working deep within the socio-cultural milieus of users, consumers, customers and so on (i.e., Laurel, 2003;Brassett & Booth, 2008;Julier, 2013c;Brassett & O'Reilly, 2018; and many others on user-centredness in design), most often intended design outcomes are projected to futures generated from these milieus. 15 We might see this design research, and the development undertakings that ensue from them, (or others such as projections about the value of specific design outcomes upon the future commercial success for a client company) as similar future causes. However, these more everyday occurrences in design practice do not overtly articulate themselves in ontological or ethical terms as general practice.
Lastly, in relation to the Welsh act, there is no beginning set by parameters of this act, as many of the institutions constituting its elements have been on their own social, cultural, political and historical journeys for some while. Neither is there a clearly definable end, insofar as "the future" is not precise and the ontological possibilities denoted by each of the "well-being goals" is already in motion and operate at different scales. The social and personal ontologies designed by this act, for both the present and the future, become less about particular ways of being (as the title of the act might suggest), and more about opportunities for becoming. That is, ways in which the potentials for having active existences are never exhausted in the systems, milieus, or processes in which they are activated. 16 To do this without totalising and restricting, by constantly and creatively validating the "particles" becoming external (in both space and time), is some feat. And while the scrutiny and accountability issues encompassed by the act, as it is currently expressed, are somewhat vague, even problematic (Davis, 2016), the creative construction of future-oriented ethical ontologies are astonishing, to say the least.

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Final Remarks Design theorist Betti Marenko (2010, 136), in a piece called "Contagious Affectivity-the management of emotions in late-Capitalist design," writes that "all design has to do with intensities and affects circulating among the stakeholders: objects, designers, users, as well as contexts" [original emphasis]. With this we re-encounter the forces of design activism and reaction noted at the outset of this article, realising that the ethical and ontological forces announced by the coming together of these discussions are also political and economic ones. For Marenko it is as important for designers to remember that capitalism accesses and profits from the affective capacities of designer bodies, as the fact of design affectivity itself. A "positive" affective perspective versus a "negative" capitalist one is not Marenko's argument; neither is it that of the current article. Rather, for us now, it is that when a social design is being created it would be better to move away from a reactive, resentful urge, which still fails to challenge the hegemonies of capitalist machine, and engage instead in an active disruption of the very intensities and affective capacities upon which such a machine operates. 17 These creative conditions that generate novel possibilities for existence are not only ontological and spatial but ethological too. That is, designing novel modes of social relations not only creates the ontologies that emerge (of the individual as well as of the social, and any points in-between and beyond these) but the affective power, the ethics, of the relations themselves. This is highlighted by philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers, (2011, 325-326) in her "free and wild" conceptual "adventure" with the work of Whitehead, where she writes: For Stengers, the act of making us us, of giving us a sense of continuity in flux, over changing, heterogeneous times and spaces, is an act of design, even though she does not call it such. Life is an "exploit" of "transformation", "recomposition", variance and "mutation", "constantly forged, tinkered with, and improvised." We are in a constant process of being designed. As such, when the affective capacities of these creative networks of modes of existence are accounted for, then these acts become characterised as both social and ethical. Any work that seeks to design, redesign, disrupt or even respond to the social and political will, as a matter of fact, engage these ontological and ethical considerations.
Once designing -again all, not simply that which articulates itself as social -recognises its character as affective, then it should realise that these ontologies operate at different scales throughout such multiplicitous planes, as we have seen with the Welsh example. This approach does not privilege one particular existence over another. Collections of things, people, societies, powers, and processes are still affective and assembled, modal and existential, and ethical. A social design, then, is one that maps and mobilises the affective ontologies of its constituents and itself, deliberately and actively. It is one that recognises it is deploying ethical and ontological powers, and that by so doing it reinforces or disavows the various agential possibilities of the types of existence that emerge. This is not a reactive choice, but an important, active, and at the same time deeply committed one, which should have ramifications for all types of creative practice. This is an approach that is developing a strong account in organisation studies largely, but not only, on the work of Tsoukas and Chia (see: Tsoukas, 1998;Chia, 1999;Tsoukas & Chia, 2002;and also, Hernes, 2014). It would be worthwhile to carry this into design in all its guises, and this current article hopes to make a start in this direction.

Acknowledgements
Thanks Lucy Kimbell (University of the Arts London), Cameron Tonkinwise (University New South Wales) and Duncan Fairfax (Goldsmiths, University of London) with whom I worked on a discussion panel on "Ontologies of Social Design" at Central Saint Martins, November 2013. John O'Reilly (Central Saint Martins) is a fine philosopher and friend, providing insightful and honest critique always; Betti Marenko (Central Saint Martins) and Ida Telalbasić (Loughborough University London) both provided valuable comments on early versions of this essay; and thanks to my students on MA Innovation Management, whose critical creativity knows no bounds. Thanks also to Gerhard Bruyns and the anonymous reviewers, whose critical comments on earlier versions helped me improve this paper. Finally, thanks to my wife Joanna Brassett for allowing me to use Studio INTO's (www.studiointo.com) practice as an example in this piece.  (Kiem, 2011, p. 211).
3. The current essay has a companion piece which is still in progress, 'Creating Modes of Existence. Towards an Ethological Design' that focuses upon the work of Gilbert Simondon (1989; with it or to join with in composing a more powerful body' (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 257). Quoted by Bennett (2010, pp. xii-xiii).
5. This is attributed architect Louis Sullivan  whose phrase 'form ever follows function' (1898) has become legend in design.
6. I examine these same co-ordinates in another article on philosophy and design, with focus on speculation and technology (Brassett, 2016).
Being in the middle relates, too, to the concept of milieu 13. Both concerns are related, for sure. The works Giorgio Agamben (1998), especially, investigate ontological matters and jurisprudence together. As does Deleuze (1995) in some of his interviews-on Deleuze and jurisprudence, see Lefebvre (2005) and Mussawir (2011).

Jamie Brassett
14. There is a branch of philosophy, 'population ethics', which brings moral arguments to bear upon questions relating to the existence of future people. Notable in this are: Kavka (1982) and, most famously, Parfitt (1987);Fotion & Heller (1997); and, more recently, Roberts & Wasserman 16. My article, see fn. 3 above, that focuses upon the work of Simondon (1989Simondon ( , 2005Simondon ( & 2009 in relation to ethics, affect and modes of existence, examines the ontologies of creative potential in more detail. See also Crawford (2015) and Brassett (2016) on some of these issues in relation to design in general.
17. It would be worth consulting the following, in their foregrounding of the political concerns announced here: Agamben (2009); Bennett (2010); Connolly (2011Connolly ( , 2013. See also Brassett (2015) for an evaluation of design and innovation's place in the Capitalist Machine, in relation to the work of Deleuze and Guattari.