Notes
1 Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales for Children (Everleigh Nash, 1907); Dr. Seuss, Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (Random House, 1958).
2 Superstudio, “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas,” Architectural Design, no. 12 (December 1971): 737–742.
3 Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Live in a Flat (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015).
4 Robinson and Browne, How to Live in a Flat, 135.
5 Heath Robinson, Wonderful Contraptions and Extraordinary Inventions (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2015), 4.
6 Bruce Heydt, “The Art of English Cartoonist and Illustrator William Heath Robinson,” British Heritage Travel, accessed May 05, 2021, https://britishheritage.com/art-culture/art-william-heath-robinson
7 Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to be a Motorist (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2015); Heath Robinson and K.R.G. Browne, How to Make a Garden Grow (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2016).
8 Note that Heath Robinson resorted to a different stripped-down version of his original drawing style with much cleaner lines and lots of white space within the “How to” series. As such, one does not find the usual one Robinson image that gives an overview of the entire system, but instead micro-events detailed out as drawings and spun into the textual narrative.
9 Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4(2) (1973): 160–167.
10 Rittel and Webber, “Dilemmas”: 160.
11 Horst W.J. Rittel, “Second-generation Design Methods,” in Developments in Design Methodology, Nigel Cross, ed. (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 317–27, 325.
12 Robinson and Browne, How to Live in a Flat, 76–78.
13 Robinson and Browne, How to Live in a Flat, 124–125.
14 Donald A. Schön and Martin Rein, Frame Reflection: Toward the Resolution of Intractable Policy Controversies (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), 23.
15 Fabbula TV, “Donna Haraway / Speculative Fabulation,” May 24, 2016, YouTube video, 4:44, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFGXTQnJETg&t=27s.
16 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Engineering Consent” in Inventing the Future: Post Capitalism and a World without Work (London: Verso, 2015), 132–137.
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Dulmini Perera
Dr. Dulmini Perera is an architect and architectural historian with a research interest in architecture’s encounters with scientific practices and technologies that have contributed to the emergence of various techno-social models of framing the environment. At present, she explores the connection between design methods and mess (or wicked problems) in its many forms. Her current teaching studios at the Bauhaus University Weimar are focused on developing systemic tools that aid designers in dealing with these messy situations.