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it is familiar. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of
p. 35). Moreover, other communication process may go out of sight in names of
function, purpose, or utility, which conceals and derives the communication process
from the design. Sometimes scientific, technological, economic, or political terms
govern the communication to the point that it excludes other forms.
We may regard a social system to survive as long as social communications
continue. Social communications based on high technology aim to speed up the
presence and re-presence of messages. However, if social communications have an
iterable structure, those communications convey alterity and they may be delayed
or not reach anyone; they may not communicate. A design has, at its core, a
structure of iterability; so do social communications. Therefore, for example,
risk communications can also have iterability, and a design based on risk commu-
nication can logically fail to control for certain risks. As a result, when designing
something, we also must design its capacity for social communication. And
if social communication implies iterability, what we can do is to respond to
multiplied communications in different contexts that we can never foresee or
control, and design social communication that takes into account the impossibility
of full control.
Responsibility means considering the possibility of how to respond to others.
Responses do not always occur consciously (i.e., a response includes not only a
subjective self-decision, but also a passive response). Does my responsibility end
when and where the identical person, I, die or others die? Does it survive my death?
According to Kant, the condition of morality presumes three elements: free will,
immortality of soul and God. Without free will, there is no responsibility. Of
course, we design something with free will. In addition, our response to design
and communication survive our death as writing, which includes the conception of
design: it survives after the designer's death as heritage or successive social
communication. Then, it may correspond to immortality of soul. God, as the
absolute other to others and us, relates us beyond time and space. This relationship
corresponds to social communication through design, for communication relates us
to others beyond not only contemporary communities or nations, but also in the
future or in the past. Therefore, design lets us to response all others. In other words,
the design has a performative force to build a social communication in which we
have responsibility.
3.7 A Grammatology of Design
The sign cannot be taken as a homogeneous unit bridging an origin (referent) and an end
(meaning), as 'semiology,' the study of signs, would have it. The sign must be studied
'under erasure,' always already inhabited by the trace of another sign which never appears
preface. p. xl)
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