Production-Oriented Practices (POPs)

Definition

Production-oriented practices (POPs) are Clay Odom's name for "spatial design practices, methods, processes, and pedagogies whose intention is to generate multiplicities of outcomes," extending "through and between academic and professional practice" — speculative, interiors-focused practices for which "traditional concepts of form generation, formal planning, and arrangement have become secondary considerations in their fundamental agency to produce spatial effects and atmosphere." The category deliberately spans "interior design, architecture, and installation art to hybrid art/interior architecture" without disciplinary boundaries, and is defined by six properties (note 2, the chapter's most systematic passage):

1. POPs maximize productions (of effects of form, surface, space, experience, atmosphere, and programmatic potential) by leveraging processes.
2. POPs are projective and open — "not focused primarily on the view that design is a discreet 'problem-solving' exercise."
3. POPs are affiliative — "the processes and the productions seek and generate relationships."
4. POPs are collaborative — "they seek transdisciplinary connections and understand potentials of linking diverse ranges of connection."
5. POPs are extensive — "they seek conditions to test processes that may fall outside of traditional disciplinary boundaries."
6. POPs may generate more normative professional practices or projects, "but that is not their fundamental goal."

Structurally, POPs are "not form-centric": they are "built upon developing process-driven, systemized, and iterative relationships between material, technological, and spatial effects; they develop a new type of rigor," tuned "to subjective conditions; the role of people and experience in design becomes primary." Their genealogy is double: contemporary cultural conditions ("a post-9/11, globalized, market-driven, urbanizing and interiorizing world") plus the 1960s radical continuum ("from Reyner Banham to Superstudio… dealing with form, atmosphere, and technology") — Archigram and Superstudio "still exciting when viewed through this lens" because their "world of perpetual becoming" (Sadler) prefigures POPs' potentials. Schumacher's avant-garde bifurcation ("those who go mainstream together with the innovations they contributed to, and those who stay within the domain of the avant-garde") positions POPs on the staying-avant-garde side; Sterling's technoculture layering gives their development its medium theory. Odom's own studioMODO Tesseract series is the practice's built instance.

Key Thinkers

• Clay Odom — the category's author and its practitioner: POPs named and defined (note 2), demonstrated in the Tesseract series, and pedagogically extended in the UT Austin seminar Patterning: Diagrams, Sequences and Systems.
• Patrik Schumacher — the bifurcation that positions POPs: "Arguing for Elegance" ("innovation involves more than radical newness. Mutation is to be followed by selection, recombination, and refinement") — POPs as the avant-garde pole (see schumacher-patrik-rogner-christian, parametricism).
• Jeff Kipnis — the theoretical framework: "The Cunning of Cosmetics" (1997) and the "elusive qualities" definition of performance (not yet paged — see log).
• Simon Sadler — the genealogist: Archigram's "super-modernist aesthetic and its avant-garde ethic: to promote a world of perpetual becoming" as the 1960s continuum's statement (not yet paged — see log).
• Bruce Sterling — the medium theorist: "new capacities are layered onto older ones" — technoculture layering as POPs' development model (not yet paged — see log).
• Graham Harman & Gernot Böhme — the theoretical breach: POPs "positioned in the breach between contemporary theoretical references from the work of Gernot Bohme (Atmospheres) and Graham Harman (object-oriented ontology)."
• Gernot Böhme — the atmospheric pole of the dialectic (author page; see atmosphere).

Related Concepts

• productions — what POPs produce: "productions become the conditions through which new projects are conceptualized and generated."
• patterning — the POP method: diagrammatic, software-agnostic transformational logics.
• installation — the typology of POP work: "the proliferation of installations as a typology of work where advanced spatial practices can be tested, evaluated, deployed, sampled, and redeployed."
• emergence — "the emergent conditions" as a POP system component; the emergent-effect lineage (caustics).
• ephemeral-interior — the temporality of POP output: "ongoing spatial effects" against "discrete, temporally frozen responses."
• interdisciplinarity — POPs' transdisciplinarity: "collaborative; they seek transdisciplinary connections" — interdisciplinarity as practice property, not anthology strategy.
• critical-vs-projective — the debate POPs enter from the projective side ("projective and open").
• systems-theory — the system as POP frame: "the system includes material technical components and the organization of these components: the installation, the generated effects, the emergent conditions, and the human experiences combined into one."
• digital-architecture — the enabling condition: digital tools, low-cost hardware, and Carpo's "second digital turn" gave the object-to-space trajectory its "escape velocity."
• multiple-interiorities — POPs' interiority-product: "multivalent systems" and serial production ("one in a series of iterative projects completed across of range of sites and times").

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — the concept's source: the six-point definition (note 2); the effects-turn thesis; the 1960s genealogy (Banham, Archigram, Superstudio); the Schumacher bifurcation; the Kipnis framework; the Böhme/Harman positioning; the Blur Building, Cloud Gate, On Space Time Foam, and Feelings Are Facts precedents; and the seriality thesis.
• source-notes/marinic-2018-why-this-why-now
• source-notes/solomon-2018-public-spheres-hong-kong

Open Questions

• Is POP a description or a manifesto? The six points are evaluative ideals — what practice would fail them, and can the category do critical work if any process-driven practice qualifies?
• Note 2 says POPs extend "through and between academic and professional practice" and are pedagogies as well as practices — is POP a studio pedagogy, a practice genre, or both at once (the Tesseract series being both research and commissioned work)?
• POPs are "projective and open" and positioned in the avant-garde pole of Schumacher's bifurcation — but POPs also borrow from the market ("a post-9/11, globalized, market-driven" context; "even contemporary investigations of glamour"). Can a practice be avant-garde and market-driven at once (see critical-vs-projective, spectacle)?
• POPs "ultimately may generate more normative professional practices or projects, but that is not their fundamental goal" — what, then, is the relation between POP production and the normative interior profession the Reader's other chapters describe? Is the POP a parasite, a laboratory, or a future-normal?