CoDesign

International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts

ISSN: 1571-0882 (Print) 1745-3755 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ncdn20

Being awake to Ma: designing in between-ness as

a way of becoming with

Yoko Akama

To cite this article: Yoko Akama (2015) Being awake to Ma: designing in between-ness as a way
of becoming with, CoDesign, 11:3-4, 262-274, DOI: 10.1080/15710882.2015.1081243

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081243

Published online: 29 Oct 2015.

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 CoDesign, 2015
Vol. 11, Nos. 3–4, 262–274, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2015.1081243

Being awake to Ma: designing in between-ness as a way of becoming

with
Yoko Akama

School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

(Received 14 September 2014; accepted 30 July 2015)
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Co-designing is an activity based on emergence where constituents are mutually

changing towards purposeful outcomes. Here, I draw on the Japanese philosophy of
Ma as ‘between-ness’ to explore how we are transforming and becoming together
among this heterogeneity. Yet, if emergence of potentiality is hard to articulate, it is
even harder to understand. As we design, we are embedded within and inscripted by
conditions that we cannot quite touch or see visibly, yet manifests through its evolu-
tion. Awakening to this in-between presence is a necessary start because
co-designing is performed and emerges from relational sensitivity. Here, I entangle
Ma with actor-network theory (ANT) to orient our senses towards that which have
yet assembled or actioned. Latour describes these as empty spaces of a network, void
and ‘plasma’ that also has agency. If ANT primarily helps us see the flow of actions
among being and non-beings, Ma as between-ness can re-situate us in emergence and
contingency. Seen this way, co-designing can be ways to bring others along on this
journey of uncertainty in a pursuit to create ‘empty’ in-betweens within and among
ourselves as we mutually become together through inter-relatedness.
Keywords: between-ness; Japanese philosophy; Ma; co-designing; ANT; becoming
with

1. Introduction
When actor-network theory (ANT) traces momentary, fluid associations as networks,
most critically, it also reveals that which remains unconnected. Here, Latour (2005,
242) asks, ‘what is in between the meshes of such a circuitry? … Is not a net made up,
first and foremost, of empty spaces?’ (original emphasis). In this paper, I take up this
question and explore ‘between-ness’ through a Japanese philosophy called Ma (間).
More specifically, this paper situates designing in between-ness to embrace how it is
creating, transforming and becoming together among heterogeneity – among beings
and non-beings, systems and power, and among places and atmospheres – by immers-
ing in emergence and chance. By reflecting on my own co-designing practice, I begin
attuning into slippery, un-namable tones and expressions that can only be sensed
through our feelings and bodily encounters in relation to other people, materials and
entities. These are significant undercurrents when co-designing and shared here as writ-
ten ‘fragments’.
As a Japanese design researcher, this inquiry began with a curiosity in the role of
silence and its misinterpretation in places where have I lived, studied and worked (see

*Email: yoko.akama@rmit.edu.au

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 CoDesign 263

Akama 2014). Cultural context plays a significant role in communication, and in some
situations, it can often privilege outward expressions as voice over inward contempla-
tion or ambiguous qualities of moods or tones, even though the latter still powerfully
shapes the course of a conversation, understanding and experience. Silence has been
discussed as an important framework in conversational analysis (see Poland and
Pederson 1998), and in participatory design (PD), Stuedahl (2010, 7) examined its
political role as ‘the invisible and silent character of design negotiation’ that enacts
power relations and reinstate social structure. These include hesitancies, deliberate or
accidental interruptions, indecipherable babble and exchanges that only partly overlap.
Moving beyond silence, my paper attempts to situate designing in between-ness.
The Japanese philosophy of Ma has captivated many scholars globally in the arts,
theology, philosophy and cultural studies for many decades. The highly celebrated
1978 exhibition in Paris and New York, Ma: Space-Time in Japan (Takahashi and
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Kimura 2000) showcased works of various artists, including the Japanese architect
Arata Isozaki. He has been exploring the richness of Ma throughout his professional
life, and is often credited in bringing Ma into the design discourse. Ma is a strong pres-
ence in Japanese culture, for example, manifesting in spaces that are reconfigurable by
sliding, semi-opaque screens in traditional houses. Corridors and entrances link inside
and outside, blurring such boundaries. From this, we see that Ma as between-ness is a
merging of distinctions – a greyness in-between black and white – and implies a rela-
tional sensitivity. Isozaki explains that Ma is the attention given to those invisible
things and ‘denies the position of a fixed subject’ (in Davidson 1991, 66). An approxi-
mate translation of Ma in English is ‘in-between’ or ‘between-ness’, depending on its
context as an adjective or a noun. Many scholars of Ma use these interchangeably.
Others, like Derrida, are adamant that ‘Ma as the place for translation is untranslatable’
(Davidson 1991, 90). Yet within such limitations, I propose Ma as a way to further
reinforce why being in-between is central for co-designing to emphasise becoming with,
not product. The paper seeks to demonstrate the richness that occurs across, in-between
and beyond and suggests that Ma can help transcend paradigms that separate self/other,
subject/object, designer/user and human/non-human, as prefigured boundaries. What
will it mean if between-ness, and not individual subjects/objects, is the ground for
being and becoming with?
As a way to further articulate Ma’s contribution to design, I entangle Ma with ANT
to further augment ways to awaken to emergence and change in co-designing. ANT’s
contribution, particularly through Latour, has been significant in design discourse in
order to grapple with plurality and heterogeneity (Bannon and Ehn 2013). Contemporary
understandings of a design process can no longer be neatly delineated with a start and
finish. This is most acutely felt in PD, or emerging fields like service design. Systems
often remain invisible and impact beyond organisational and geographical boundaries,
facilitated by globalisation and digital technology. Here, Latour (2010, 2) points out that
some incidents, like disasters, can often provoke an awakening to their assemblages. He
takes the Columbia shuttle disaster as a ‘critical incident’ that made visible an object in
the sky that required NASA and all its people, systems, knowledge and technology
behind it to make it fly out and back to earth. ‘The action of flying a technical object
has been redistributed throughout a highly composite network where bureaucratic routi-
nes are just as important as equations and material resistance … [and] has been made
visible by the deployment of networks’.
However, I am interested in the assembling actions as much as those yet to assem-
ble or noticed as having assembled. This resonates with Latour’s (2010, 8) intrigue
 264 Y. Akama

with the network metaphor of ANT because ‘a net is made first of all of empty space’
and ‘composed mainly of voids’. The significance of Ma is to see that these empty
holes are also important, like the in-betweens of spokes of a wheel that gives its
strength and utility.1 Connections are as valuable as the gaps in-between. Between-ness
does not seek to define borders or delineate separate entities, and like the empty holes
of a net, help situate our senses towards a potentiality that often falls out of our mental
conditioning. ‘Emptiness’ has agency when seen through the world of Ma, like silence,
atmosphere or reading between the lines. Emptiness is potentiality according to a
Japanese design philosopher, Hara (2011, 28): ‘A creative mind … does not see an
empty bowl as valueless, but perceives it as existing in a transitional state, waiting for
the content that will eventually fill it; and this creative perspective instills power in the
emptiness’. Seen this way, emptiness is a state or a chance of becoming.
There are many ways to awaken our senses to this empty, in-between. Latour
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sketches this idea as ‘plasma’ – everything that remains unconnected – towards the end
of his introductory book on ANT, Reassembling the Social (2005). Plasma is ‘that which
is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet socialized, not yet engaged in metrologi-
cal chains, and not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized, or subjectified. … It’s in between
and not made of social stuff. It is not hidden, simply unknown’ (Reassembling the Social
[2005, 254, original emphasis]). Indeed, there is a vast amount in the ‘social’ that is still
not accounted for, and he is particularly puzzled by our lack of knowledge constructs to
know how sudden change occurs. ‘Why do fierce armies disappear in week? Why do
whole empires like the Soviet one vanish in a few months? … Why is it that quiet citi-
zens turn into revolutionary crowds or that grim mass rallies break down into a joyous
crowd of free citizens?’ (Reassembling the Social [2005]). He attributes such agency for
change to ‘plasma’. I find this concept intriguing, yet difficult in understanding change –
so central to designing – as it seems to be an epistemological concept rather than an
ontological one. This epistemic convention in science and technology is also seen in the
detached way the Colombia shuttle disaster is described (Latour 2010). Roots of assem-
blages and action are traced but it is not oriented towards the emergence of futures. If
ANT cannot fully articulate what it’s like to be immersed in the moments of change and
how this is constantly evolving and becoming, I argue that entangling ANT with Ma can
orientate us towards the intimate, helping us feel what it means to primarily reside in
the between-ness and how co-designing is creating, transforming and becoming among
all these influences we cannot ‘format’.
Ma is kindred with ANT in other ways, in developing a sensibility that makes the
everyday life unfamiliar and manifest what may be invisible (Michael 2012). Law (2009,
148) explains that ANT’s importance lies in seeing the world as non-foundational; ‘nothing
is sacred and nothing is necessarily fixed’. And like Tim Ingold, Donna Harraway, and
Karen Barad who have contributed to ANT’s discourse by nesting it among STS,
phenomenology and feminist theory, I incorporate their perspectives here because Ma is
pursued through tacit, immersive encounters of becoming. As such, I ask the reader to not
make the notion of Ma exotic, and thereby distance and alienate it, but to seek its resonance
with related ideas of their own as we embark on a sense-making endeavour together.
In this journey, I share how I developed a gradual attuning to Ma’s relational sensi-
tivity by drawing upon co-designing moments. The fragments demonstrate how I begin
attuning in and immersing within, to catalyse a sensing of between-ness. As such, the
discussion here may come across as abstract, but it is firmly grounded in my own phe-
nomenological experience. Like a lofty Zen-quote, Ma by its nature can be ambiguous
and obscure, so it makes little sense unless it emerges from practice and returns to
 CoDesign 265

practice, anchored in action. The co-designing moments are called fragments because
they are anecdotal and recalled that way, given that they were never formally
documented. They were developed from notes and reflective thoughts combined with
recollections, as a way of creating accounts for entry points into experience. In the
Discipline of Noticing (2002, 57), John Mason describes the value of brief-but-vivid
narrative ‘by omitting details which divert attention away from the main issue’. Like-
wise, there is a fictocritical quality to the fragments in order to accentuate moments and
my perception that can never be captured in a video or a transcript. The fragments
demonstrate how Ma could be practised in writing, resonating with Latour’s (2008)
lament for conventional scientific writing on ‘matters of fact’ and the need to achieve
realism on ‘matters of concern’. As such, I have stayed away from descriptions of
methodology and providing evidence, which are ‘matters of fact’, and instead, used a
style of writing that is in first person and reflexive. These fragments are aimed to bring
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attention to the liminal, ambiguous in-betweens of designing – things that are often left
out in the reporting, but can be just as profound in our understanding. If ANT helps us
to see the inter-relatedness of our actions among being and non-beings, Ma as between-
ness can re-situate us in this inter-relatedness; living, designing and transforming
amongst it all.

2. Ma as between-ness
Many scholars agree that Ma is an ambiguous concept to define since its colloquial use
in Japanese is so varied. Yet, it is precisely this plurality of meaning, expressions and
everyday embodiment that gives it openness and potency. The most literal way Ma can
be described is ‘in-between space’, but its meaning range in considerable scale. One end
is more objective, literal and tangible, like Ma as a space contained by structure (e.g. a
room/volume), an interstice (e.g. gap/slit/opening), or a rest in music (e.g. interval/break).
Similarly, a pause when delivering a punch line has a dramatic quality. Pilgrim (1986), a
scholar of art and religion in Japan, refers to this Ma as ‘pregnant nothingness’, which
include deliberative silence in a performance or white space used in visual composition.
The other end of the spectrum is tacit, subjective and ambiguous, applying to who and
how we are with others – affinity, intimacy, animosity or strangeness – in other words,
how social relations are experienced or created fluidly and dynamically (Kimura 2005).
The Japanese word for ‘human being’ (人間) is composed of person (人) and Ma (間).
This implies a ‘between-person’, situating humans as a relational being (Watsuji 1996).
In Japanese, someone who has ‘lost Ma’ or has ‘poor Ma’ means they are poor in con-
sidering others, in reading between the lines or do or say socially awkward things.
Ma emerges from a Japanese philosophy that takes ‘non-being or nothingness as its
ground’ (Nishida in Dilworth, Vigielmo, and Zavala 1998, 21). Ma has deep roots in
Taoism, Shinto and Zen Buddhism, however the notion of ‘nothingness’ is too complex
to discuss in depth here (see Pilgrim 1986),2 though a related concept of ‘emptiness’ is
used in this paper to foreground absent-centred awareness. Imagine for a moment, how
a few, black, inky brushstrokes on a white background can evoke a forest in a misty
landscape. The absent marks are as important as the present ones. Ma can be expressed
by the very absence of colour, sound or movement, accentuating awareness of totality
and this requires a shift in consciousness from being subject-centred to absence-centred.
In conversation with Derrida, Isozaki describes Ma as a ‘way of seeing’ and it is ‘dee-
ply related to the sense of balance in daily life and it’s a key idea for decoding those
aspect’. He continues to say that Ma ‘denies the position of a fixed subject and drives
 266 Y. Akama

it into a state of flickering … One can say that its function is infinitely close to
Derrida’s espacement = becoming space’ (in Davidson 1991, 66). In other words,
Isozaki sees Ma as between-ness and becoming as inseparable as two sides of the same
coin. Among Ma’s varied meanings, I find Isozaki’s discussion most useful as a way of
seeing, sensing and becoming, which has a relational sensitivity. These threads are
central throughout the paper.
Ideas of between-ness and becoming are rich concepts for co-designing because it is a
relational methodology. The co-designing I practice and refer to here is strongly
influenced by PD where distinctions between ‘designers’, ‘researchers’ and ‘users’ are
deliberately questioned. Instead, contemporary discourse in PD views how ‘socio-material
collectives of humans and non-humans’ are assembled through ‘matters of concern’
(Bannon and Ehn 2013, 57) evoking a Latourian orientation. Akama and Prendiville
(2013, 32) describe that the addition of the two letters, ‘co’ in co-designing, is a signifi-
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cant shift in design, ‘signaling an openness to embrace the influence, interventions, dis-
ruptions, tensions and uncertainties brought to bear by other things and people’. I further
add that embracing and enacting ‘co’ is also an epistemological and ontological shift. This
no longer sees the self or subject as the epicentre of knowledge and locates it in the
between-ness that emerges among heterogeneity – among designers and users, among the
material and the social – all becoming together. The co-ontology means that the singular
‘I’ does not precede the relation of ‘we’ (Nancy 2000) and we become among relational
ecologies of being and non-beings (Watsuji 1996).
The plurality of between-ness also includes the presence and absence of atmo-
sphere. These are often left out because they evade categorisation; what Beck (2002)
named the things that ‘doesn’t fit’ in research. Atmosphere is an ambiguous in-between
status with regard to the subject/object, singular/general and definite/indefinite state
(Anderson 2009). Haptic and visceral senses like encountering a frosty reception or
feeling a tension in the room are ways in which we intuit atmosphere. We can sense a
shift in energy from nervousness to enthusiasm. The affect has intensity. Designing is
alive in these felt moments but between-ness, like atmosphere evades capture in a tran-
script or a video recording, whilst altering design’s trajectory and experience. If these
are prone to become lost in translation, we must turn to ways in which we, at least,
can build an awareness of it. The fragments in this paper are ways of this sensing.

3. Ma ‘lost in translation’
Designing with people brings to bear many dimensions as part of contingency. Light
and Akama (2012) share their observations on facilitating community-centred workshops
where contingency is rife and personal relations are strongly influential. Designing in
this space reveals the high degree of arbitrariness and emotions that shape the trajectory
and outcome. ‘A chance word may bring in or redirect an uncertain participant, chang-
ing the group, the interaction and the outcome in unpremedidated ways … These small
moments impact on the design that emerges and help decide it’ (69). They argue that
such inter-subjective nuances are lost in the descriptions of designing over tangible and
defined methodology, and that facilitation is centrally immersed within, and emerge
from, very complex relational dynamics. What they describe as small moments lost in
description is similar to how I see Ma’s relational sensitivity – visceral, intuited, inti-
mate, felt – emerging among between-ness. However, researchers are often inclined to
tidy up the messier aspects of their processes to demonstrate clarity in approach and out-
come; what Law (2004) calls ‘methodological hygiene’. This also points to the politics
 CoDesign 267

of academic reporting in design, as well as the ethical responsibility we have beyond

data validity and methodological replicability when sharing and publishing our accounts.
Others like Storni (2012) question a reductionist trend in design. He illustrates the
evolution of a piece of jewellery that accounts for serendipity, emergence, frustrations
and unexpected discoveries – things that were never planned but encountered through
designing. Intuition and improvisations are a major part of a designer’s trade
(Goodman, Stolterman, and Wakkary 2011) and by extension, their dexterity in turning
chance into an opportunity. In other words, designing by its nature has a great deal to
do with being ready to act within an unknown, and for Schön (1983, 56), design
‘hinges on the experience of surprise’. If conditions of designing are often characterised
by unknown and surprise, then, it is no wonder that designers struggle in articulating
such conditions, and perhaps, even attribute too much emphasis on design interventions
alone in enabling change and opportunity. We must see this as a limitation of design,
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also critiqued by the anthropologist Suchman (2011, 1), who argued for design’s need
to ‘acknowledge the specificities of its place, to locate itself as one (albeit multiple)
figure and practice of transformation’. Her call to question the ‘situations that frame
design’ (2011, 6) equally motivates this paper.
Another seminal anthropologist, Ingold (2010), is critical of the emphasis on mate-
rial agency that reduces the inhabited world into objects. Ingold explains how the
French translation of ‘acteur réseau’ as ANT gave it a significance that was not
intended in its Anglophone usage. The translation became inflected with notions of
innovation in communication and technology, hence, the defining attribute of a network
was seen as connectivity among distributed actors and elements. He argues the critical
distinction of seeing network (réseau) akin to lines of flow of meshwork: ‘réseau can
refer as well to netting as to network … the web of the spider … spun from materials
exuded from the spider’s body and are laid down as it moves about … They are the
lines along which it lives, and conduct its perception and action in the world’ (12–13).
Movements like lines and walking feature strongly in Ingold’s work. His metaphor of a
spider that exudes a web as it moves around evokes a powerful image of the embodied
and evolving nature of becoming.
Seeing acteur réseau as becoming usefully frames ANT in emergence, away from
the detached tendency that I dislike. Latour’s (2010) description of the Colombian
Shuttle disaster, described earlier, still takes a perspective of no-where and everywhere,
a presumed innocence and neutrality, even though this has been pointed out by
Haraway (1991) decades before. Ingold’s re-translation breathes life into acteur réseau
like a pulse that animates the heterogeneous entanglements. When we, as designers,
enter here, acteur réseau’s way of becoming changes again to question – what differ-
ence can we make, and what do we become together to make such changes? When we
are co-designing, we are amongst the flux and flow, implicated and embedded within,
part of the whole of ever-changing moments of between-ness. There is a double move-
ment here whereby the things we ‘make’ (objects, relations, atmospheres, etc.) and do
together ‘simultaneously forming things and being formed by them’ (Nishida in
Dilworth, Vigielmo, and Zavala 1998, 71). This is akin to a hermeneutic circle: the
world we make in turn makes us, inscribing how we are being and becoming with
others. In this way, co-designing can be seen as a ‘becoming space’ among between-
ness, similar to how Isozaki describes Ma.
The next section illustrates moments, written as fragments, gathered from various
encounters and experiences. It shares the ways in which my way of noticing and
attuning constitutes a relational sensitivity, by illuminating the inseparability of
 268 Y. Akama

‘intra-actions’ (Barad 2003) in people’s conversations, affective encounters, place-

making and sense-making.

3.1. Fragment one

[Background: Residents and emergency management practitioners were invited to a
half-day workshop on disaster preparedness. They are introduced to a method of using
objects like animals, buttons, beads, matchsticks to map risk and resources of their
locality. The intention is to share concerns and to develop a collective plan, specific to
their neighbourhood.]
The workshop was arranged with groups of three to five people on each table,
engaged in dialogue through the objects. A man in his 50s, in emergency management
uniform is sitting back in his chair, arms folded, not engaging with this activity.
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Without voicing any explicit concerns, the man’s discomfort is seen and felt by others.
Concerned with his behaviour, I went over to see what was going on. Upon being
asked, he immediately explained, politely, that he was familiar with this approach and
described a similar mapping exercise he’s done before, but one that used model fire
trucks, helicopters, trees, people and how effective that was. His expertise and authority
is alluded to in this explanation, beyond his uniform, when he describes how he has
facilitated a discussion on disaster preparedness before, implying that his discomfort
isn’t to do with the overall approach being taken here, but he is unable to explain what
lies at the root of his concern.
A woman on his table asked him whether this exercise is tricky because of the ani-
mals. He was quiet for a while, and then replied that he found this activity difficult
because the objects lacked specificity. The rapport he has with the woman is significant,
triggering a realisation that he is, indeed, troubled by not knowing how the objects per-
form or perhaps entirely agree in doing it this way.
Another woman on the same table giggled sheepishly, and said she liked this
method because the objects can mean anything, pointing to one of the animals on a
map – a shark – placed on one of the roads. To her, it didn’t matter if the dangers were
potholes or corrugation. She explained, through gestures, the way the method worked
for her in a manner that literal objects like fire trucks and helicopters may not. We
assume that she chose the shark (among a random pile of other animals provided)
because it symbolised ‘danger’ – a common interpretation – and used it to indicate
where potential hazards lay in their neighbourhood. A hazardous road is useful to know
when planning evacuation routes. But the woman’s explanation also implies that the
specifics didn’t matter – whether its potholes, corrugated surface or narrow lanes –
presumably to avoid getting caught up in arguing over details. For her, placing the
shark on the road was enough to indicate hazards and progress the dialogue forward.
The man looked at the shark for a moment and shared an incipient thought: these
animals and buttons can mean anything so people have to think more and work harder
– and that’s a good thing – as it’s more engaging. In this moment, we witness how he
is beginning to see another potential in which non-specific objects could help people
think harder about risks. He sees this effort as a way to be more engaged with the
exercise and the issue.
The woman who had previously asked him about the animals chimed in at this
point, explaining how as adults, they need a bit of a reminder to be imaginative again.
She points to the possible limitation of being provided with literal models like fire
trucks, as one can’t imagine what else it could be. Hazards could be anything – power
 CoDesign 269

lines, dense vegetation, poor access, lack of mobile coverage, depending on context –
so she alludes to the need for participants engaged in this exercise to use their imagina-
tion to their fullest, and that this method can help in reminding them how.
If we approach fragment one through Ma as between-ness, it is apparent how much
is entangled in flux and flow, and that it is hard to see each as separate identifiable
entities – where does the ‘boundaries’ of intuiting the man’s concern, the shark, the
hazardous road and the group’s general awareness begin and end? Is there a need for
‘boundaries’ here, or are they just mental constructs that hinder, rather than enable? Ma
as between-ness removes such constructs, revealing fields that stretch beyond the
boundaries of this particular time and place. This conversation is simultaneously ‘here’
(workshop) but also ‘there’ (local neighbourhood). Their interactions are taking place
‘now’ but their discussion recalls the past, towards planning that imagines future sce-
narios of possible fire. Ma collapses space and time (Pilgrim 1986) and transcends the
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need to see them as distinct. Similarly, internal thoughts and emotions are intuited with-
out explicit articulating, contributing to a collective sensing of one another. Glimpsed
in this fragment is an encounter and emergence where the distinction between mental
and physical, interior and exterior landscapes and the very act of naming and distin-
guishing collapses into a ‘becoming space’. For example, when the man’s expertise is
disturbed, we see the subsequent shifts in his thinking alongside the collective becom-
ing amongst a group that is starting to see their environment in a new light. Such ways
of becoming could be described as alchemical as it is ‘characterized by mutual chang-
ing’ (Michael 2012, 170), continually coming into being and becoming together.

3.2. Fragment two

[Background: A meeting enclosure was prototyped to explore acoustic diffusion, but
many people are disappointed in its use. A workshop took place to explore the next
iteration of this space, consisting of existing users and others who haven’t seen it yet.
The facilitator and those assembled are a mix of established creative writers, from
social science or like myself, in design (see Akama, Pink, and Fergusson 2015)].
At the start of the workshop, frequent users of the meeting enclosure speak their
thoughts candidly at length; its darkness is ‘cave-like’, its preciousness makes it hard
to know if food can be taken in there. Some say it’s pompous, others ambitious and
words like curious, futuristic, homely, alien are shared. We are then asked to do a 20-
min writing exercise. Our writing reflects these impressions. We then go inside the
enclosure to continue the workshop. One woman, who apparently sits at the same seat
during meetings, realises she’s in another spot today and points out a feature she didn’t
see previously. Then another person laughs how she can imagine a creature nestling
there. A light-hearted conversation flows that imagines suspending a disco-ball or
plants from its ceiling.
We then do another 20-min writing exercise on re-imagining this space, and later
we regroup to share. The stories are wild and diverse. One person sees the enclosure as
a ‘Queen in the woodlands, overgrown with ferns, lichens and mushrooms’. Another
makes it an allegory for a nation; ‘… she is all business, all principles and purpose,
albeit not without a hint of bemusement’. Some see it as an abstract noise machine;
‘… there is this acoustic island, shielding us from our own noise,’ and evokes sensory
memories, ‘[t]he cubbies of my childhood made of blankets and pillows and the wash-
ing basket’. We are amazed by each other’s creativity, which is echoed in people’s
enthusiastic nods and smiles as the stories are read out.
 270 Y. Akama

Ma is both personal and collective because it is a sensing of between-ness. It is like

atmosphere. The meeting enclosure emanates its own atmosphere, and to its users, this
varies from being futuristic, cave-like, curious, precious or pompous. Here, we see the
participants carry ‘anticipatory affects’ with them to this place, already primed by their
experiences of the past. This is a term used by a social science researcher, Sumartojo
(2014, 61), when she describes visitors ‘freighted with individual and shared memory
or experience’ in arriving at specific sites, contributing to atmospheres in certain ways.
Whilst each brings ‘anticipatory affects’ to this workshop, the atmosphere shifts to a
collective lightness when someone imagines the nestling creature. Many things can
shape and take part in atmosphere as they are ‘perpetually forming and deforming,
appearing and disappearing as bodies enter into relation with one another’, but ‘they
are impersonal in that they belong to collective situations and yet can be felt as inten-
sely personal’ (Anderson 2009, 79–80). Anderson describes how atmosphere requires
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‘completing by the subjects that “apprehend” them’, who in turn, contributes to the
atmosphere emanating and enveloping the entire group. Ma, like atmosphere, is singu-
lar and plural, general and specific, and able to be qualified differently flowing in, out
and through inter-connected layers.
By extension, Ma as between-ness is in the group’s place-making experience. Place
is described by the philosopher Casey (1996, 44) a gathering event and ‘far from being
static sites, are themselves continually changing in accordance with their own proper
dynamism’. We see place-making here when the participants apprehend its atmosphere
as well as collectively remake it in the writing exercise. It is also ‘gathering’ together
their sensations, conversations, memories and imaginations, which become entangled.
Evoked in their stories – a Queen in the woodlands, a gendered nation, a noise
machine, a memory of childhood – is a world of between-ness. Like the first fragment,
participants are encountering and making place to become an ‘opening or emptying of
oneself into the immediacy of the ever-changing moment’ (Pilgrim 1986, 267). Pilgrim
continues to explain Ma as a ‘in between “this and that” world’ of experiential places,
‘evoke, by their very nature, a sense of reality characterized by a dynamic, active,
changing, poetic immediacy instead of being merely objective or subjective’ (266). The
creative writing ‘gathered’ a place-making event and activity where the stories reconsti-
tuted how each individual and the collective, now perceived the meeting enclosure
anew.

4. Discussion on Ma as a continuous becoming with

Change is gradual and continuous, already in motion. Though, as glimpsed in both
fragments, it can be apprehended in ways that steer a course through people’s participa-
tion. The first fragment captured a moment of deliberative change where participants,
who anticipated or perhaps even desired change towards preparedness, transitioned
from being less aware to more aware of risks and resources; from knowing less about
their neighbours, and now knowing more about one another to ensure survival. Indeed,
this neatly demonstrates how the outcome was achieved, which was my intention as
the designer-researcher facilitating it and to claim design’s effectiveness (more on this
later). However, what I wanted to share in these fragments is the between-ness that is
beyond my own facilitation, design methods and tangible actors. It is also more than
describing it as ANT-like socio-material assemblages. In the first fragment, we saw the
method, teetering on a knife’s edge – provoking discomfort and confusion for the man,
and arousing curiosity in the women. An ‘empty’ space opened up in that moment
 CoDesign 271

where co-designing was emerging and performing among Ma. Each participant con-
tributed their thoughts and ideas by gently interrogating the method, the issue, their
environment as well as one another. In this instance, the shark helped to ‘make strange’
a somewhat mundane road in their locality, and to realise its hazardous quality in a
way that matters to them. The ‘making’ in this regard is not tangible or physical, but it
is a way of understanding one another and their shared local environment as well as
the ‘making’ of their social relations in new ways that are relevant to being collectively
prepared (Light and Akama 2014). Their understanding seemed to extend even more
when the man’s concern has led them to interrogate the objects, reflecting on its ability
to limit or catalyse their imagination, thereby leading to further reflection on their own
ability to imagine and learn new ways of seeing. In this way, between-ness in the felt,
imagined, conversed and remembered, enabled unexpected discovery in how the meth-
ods performed, and in turn, the awareness this catalysed about their environment, and
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for one another, in ways that assisted in their planning. Perhaps without those encoun-
ters, the man could have left the workshop remaining confused, or worse, inhibit the
group’s activity towards achieving preparedness.
Similarly, the second fragment also shows incremental change where the majority
of the participants, who previously had poor user-experience of the meeting enclosure,
began to embrace these shortfalls unexpectedly. In fact, this encounter turned the enclo-
sure into an oddity and bemusement. Its success as a meeting space seemed to matter
little after the experience. Letting go of their previous impressions and certainty as a
meeting room could be seen as a way of creating ‘empty’ in-between space, for new
ways of imagining. This resonates with a description by Michaels (2000, 23) as
de-inscription, ‘wherein human actors withstand, repulse or undermine the prescriptions
or proscriptions of ordering non-humans’. There is a power-dimension to his explana-
tion, which reflects people’s liberation from the design and designer’s intention to
recast the space as they each now relate to it. One participant’s insight is particularly
revealing:
I used to think of the [meeting enclosure] as a futuristic folly of a certain sort, wonderful
but somehow with an air of hubris. Is it too much a product of cool intellect? But now I
want to go there late at night, to make it coloured and to bounce music off its many
navels. I want to see the possum that lives in its western nook and to watch movies on the
projection screen that traces its impossible curves.

The story here has traces of a shared moment of imagining a nestling creature.
Manifesting from this workshop was a felt excitement among the group as to what their
collective encounters enabled, acknowledging what each – the enclosure, their con-
versations and their creative writing – contributed. As with the first fragment, this
emerged among and through Ma. It started in motion a chain reaction through a unique,
temporally and spatially circumscribed shared experience. Again, an alchemical ‘mutual
changing’ had happened from this collective evolution, with an altered perception in
discovering something they were unable to know before embarking.

5. Conclusion
Too often, the incremental details of transformation remain hidden by their very nature
of being silent, internal, layered, ephemeral and dispersed, all of which are difficult to
capture and articulate. This also includes accounts of disruptions, discomfort, impact of
chance, unexpected surprises and sensing and creating atmosphere, as evoked in the
 272 Y. Akama

fragments. In relation to ANT, these are the ‘empty’ holes in the net and the ‘plasma’
of emergence, change and agency. Serendipity that aid and enact co-designing – the
very ‘co’ that suggests between-ness – can become lost in translation, often due to
design’s desire to demonstrate its causality for tangible, perceivable, visible change.
This is further compounded by the conventions in which we capture and share our
accounts. As argued earlier, we need to be troubled by tendencies of overemphasising
the nodes and connections of the ‘network’ and omitting the ‘empty’ in-betweens
where change and potentiality can emerge.
As the old adage goes, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. So I
too must admit of writing case studies where design was imbued with instrumentalism,
isolating it from its embodied performance and reported only for its tangible (and there-
fore empirical) human and non-human interactions.3 In these accounts written to pro-
mote how co-designing enabled transformation rather than to reveal and understand the
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conditions that enabled this to emerge, I confess to having written many conventional
academic papers that manifests the very tendency that I critique here. However, instead
of this becoming a trite mea culpa, in this paper, I have attempted to demonstrate how
imperceptible dimensions of Ma that may have been previously ignored or omitted can
be re-inscribed into writings about designing. This, I feel, is even more important for
pointing out ways to share our understandings of co-designing.
However, I caution again that Ma is not a ‘better’ framework, method or descrip-
tion of reality and ambiguity for design. Being awake to Ma cannot be immediate, and
nor will it end with ‘perfecting’ its noticing. Like Zen Buddhism that mutually evolved
alongside, Ma is not a philosophy that can be understood rationally without being
enacted in practice. Similar to designing, Ma as between-ness is created and sensed in
action and practice, and cannot just be read, written or thought about. This may frus-
trate some readers who prefer to construct the world through logical and intellectual
argumentation, and conversely, intrigue those who sense the impermanence of the
everyday. Ma is inherently personal, plural and heterogeneous. Some may encounter
Ma in silence, sense Ma by being present in the moment, feel Ma as atmosphere
between a collective, and more. The Chinese character of Ma (間) is a light shining
through a gap in the shutters, and this speaks to its essence of being both objective
phenomena and subjective experience. As such, Ma is both a phenomena of this world
as much as our becoming sensitised to it. In other words, Ma is our capacity for
‘emptiness’ within us to enable a light to shine through – a potential of awakening,
perceiving, attuning and sensitising to between-ness.
Bringing these ideas back into design, Ma can be seen as an awakening to
emergence, serendipity and transience in co-designing. In my designing practice over
the last few years, I have attempted to become more attuned to Ma, embracing and sur-
rendering to the flux and flow of between-ness, and to catalyse my own changing,
whilst being changed by it. It is a circular movement I described earlier where the
things we ‘make’ and do together ‘simultaneously forming things and being formed by
them’ as we become together. In other words, embarking on this journey has led a
gradual attuning to Ma’s relational sensitivity. By reflecting, writing and sharing those
moments, I am catalysing transformation in the hope of becoming more mindful when
co-designing. This has been in itself transformative since writing those papers, and will
continue to be a path that I travel along.
When we surrender to between-ness, we can embrace that so much is by chance
rather than by design. As Ingold (1993, 164) suggests, ‘[o]ur actions do not transform
the world, they are part and parcel of the world’s transforming itself’. And as
 CoDesign 273

designers, we can learn to accept and welcome chance, building on our strengths in
agility and dexterity to be open and ready to contingency. Co-designing among the
plurality of between-ness means that we are all implicated, embedded and changing as
part of a whole of ever-changing moments. The potency of Ma is such that, after some
time, one can no longer feel part of a world of predefined boundaries that seek to dis-
tinguish and compartmentalise. Instead, one can willingly step into the ‘empty’ voids
that are not yet inscribed, not yet ‘formatted’, not yet known to pursue uncertain paths
towards open-ness and potentiality. Seen this way, co-designing is also to bring others
along on this journey of uncertainty in a pursuit to create ‘empty’ in-betweens within
and among ourselves as we mutually become together through inter-relatedness.

Disclosure statement
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. This derives from Lao Tzu (translation by Kimura 2004): ‘Thirty spokes share a hub; The
usefulness of the cart lies in the space where there is nothing. Clay is kneaded into a vessel;
The usefulness of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. A room is created by
cutting out doors and windows; The usefulness of the room lies in the space where there is
nothing’. While the material contains utility, the immaterial contains essence. As eluded to in
the paper, Taoism has influenced Ma philosophy.
2. Ma resonates with contemporary feminist theory and French philosophy (e.g. Haraway,
Barad, Deleuze, and Merleau-Ponty), but there is little room to elaborate this here. It is
important to note that Ma did not develop as an intellectual critique of Cartesian paradigms,
and in fact, predates it, having roots in Chinese and Japanese ancient philosophy of non-d-
ualism and nothingness, developed through their arts, language and spirituality. I footnote
this to ensure Ma is not subsumed under Western theory that dominates design.
3. The paper (Akama et al. 2012) was presented at a Disaster and Resilience conference to a
non-design audience, and has inadvertently accentuated and simplified the role of design.

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