Thing-Shapes

Definition

Thing-shapes is Edmund Husserl's term — from The Origin of Geometry — for the pure bodies of the world: "spatiotemporal shapes [with] 'material' qualities… related to them." In a world of "things," including "the human beings themselves as subjects of this world… all things necessarily [have] to have a bodily character" (quoted p. 98). What distinguishes thing-shapes in their relation to the human body is their surfaces — "more or less 'smooth,' more or less perfect" — registrations that "strive for gradual perfection": thing-shapes are formations "developed out of praxis and thought of in terms of [gradual] perfection," never geometric ideals but factual forms whose essential structure "becomes recognisable through a method of variation" (Husserl, quoted p. 98).

In Winka Dubbeldam's essay, the term becomes a design programme. She reads Husserl's "phoronomic shapes" — formations "developed out of praxis" out of which "similarly named new constructions grow" — as the figure of a generative architecture: "In this network economy, architecture has to become generative – not unlike phoronomic shapes as discussed by Husserl which imply the existence of generative structures out of which new similarly named constructions grow" (p. 97). The spatial construct is produced "not as a static device but as a set of inventions; not as literally moving objects but as surface registrations of force fields, smart systems and programmatic mappings" (p. 97). Husserl's "horizon-exposition" — "the activity of free variation run[ning] through the conceivable possibilities of the life-world, giving rise to a general set of elements that go through all the variants of spatiotemporal shapes" — supplies the generative method (p. 97). The programme's terminus: "Bodies are seen not as objects in themselves but as integral parts of a system of thing-shapes with layered smooth surfaces, generating and regenerating space" (p. 100).

The concept is thus a hinge between two registers of "thing" language in this wiki: the ontological (see thing-ontology — Heidegger's object/thing distinction, Ingarden's intentional mode of being) and the technological (see interactive-architecture — the responsive, intelligent surface). Dubbeldam's thing-shapes are the Husserlian genealogy of the second: things defined not by what they are (object vs. thing) but by how their surfaces register — force fields, smart systems, programmatic mappings, and, prospectively, memory: "materials currently have the ability to trace memories through their surface" will become "mnemonic interactive surfaces" (editors' headnote, p. 96). The interior's smoothness "registers a relationship to the human body so that they are part of a system of 'thing-shapes'" (p. 96).

Key Thinkers

• Edmund Husserl — the source of the term in The Origin of Geometry (1989 trans.): the bodily character of all things; spatiotemporal shapes with "material" qualities; surfaces "more or less 'smooth'"; the variation method ("proceeding from the factual, an essential form becomes recognisable through a method of variation") and "horizon-exposition."
• Winka Dubbeldam — the design deployment: thing-shapes as the system in which smart layers, bodies, and space generate and regenerate each other; the collapse of subject–object and interior–exterior dichotomies as the condition of the system; the Aida Hair Salon (2000) as built instance.
• Bernard Cache — the adjacent object-philosophy Dubbeldam cites for the body's definition ("that part of substance that is caught in the sack of our skin," Earth Moves, 1995, quoted p. 98); the body as bounded substance whose "sack" the smart layers renegotiate. Not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Thing-Ontology — the wiki's ontological treatment of ordinary things (Heidegger, Ingarden, Bucchioni, Spuybroek, Norman); thing-shapes adds a third, Husserlian lineage: things defined by bodily character and surface registration rather than by ontological mode.
• Crease — the thing-shape system's boundary condition: the malleable, hard-soft in-between where layering negotiates the urban and the individual.
• Interactive Architecture — the paradigm thing-shapes prefigure: "surface registrations of force fields, smart systems and programmatic mappings" (2002) as the 2002 prehistory of the responsive environment.
• Life-World — the horizon within which Husserl's free variation runs; Dubbeldam converts the life-world's conceivable possibilities into a generative design method.
• Embodiment — the bodily character of things: the smart layer that "negotiates… the shell's hardness and the biological frailty of the body."
• Boundaries — boundaries dissolved into interactive creases: "no longer barriers but… interactive."
• Inside/Outside Dialectic — the dichotomy Dubbeldam declares collapsed: interiors and exteriors "constantly retooling and optimising each other."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — the source that names and deploys the concept: Husserl's Origin of Geometry quotes (pp. 96, 98), the generative-programme claims (pp. 97–98), the helmet thought experiment (p. 98), the Aida Hair Salon (p. 100), and the closing "system of thing-shapes" thesis (p. 100).
• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the paradigm thing-shapes prefigure: responsive surfaces as "a complex adaptive robotic system of interacting installations"; Dubbeldam's 2002 essay is the Intimus-canonized anticipation of Taylor's 2018 dynamic interior.

Open Questions

• Is Dubbeldam's generative reading of Husserl faithful? The Origin of Geometry's variation method discovers essential forms "with apodictic certainty" — a deduction of invariant structures — while Dubbeldam's design use runs variation forward to generate new constructions. Is this a legitimate extension of horizon-exposition or a category inversion (necessity read as possibility)?
• Husserl's thing-shapes "strive for gradual perfection" — a factual, never-achieved ideal. Can a design programme aim at gradual perfection, or does design always terminate in a built artifact whose perfection is fixed?
• If bodies are "not objects in themselves but… integral parts of a system of thing-shapes," what becomes of the subject? Dubbeldam's collapse of the subject–object dichotomy risks dissolving the inhabitant into the system — is the "animated body" a person, or the system's third layer?
• Does "mnemonic interactive surface" describe the smart surfaces we actually got (data-collecting, system-owned memory) or an alternative that was never built — and can the distinction be designed for?