Wabi Tek Sabi(tomodashi.com)

wabi tek sabi is way of seeing and living with human craft and
technology. like the japanese idea of wabi sabi it has much to do with
aesthetics and pleasure, but it is mainly a way to look at, work with, and live
with, technology.

wabi sabi is a japanese worldview that accepts the world as in constant
change, one where beauty is intimately interwoven with imperfection and
transience. in wabi sabi nothing is ever complete; life begins in chaos and
ends in decay. in wabi sabi all beauty is "flawed" (in a western sense); not
diminished by imperfection but beautiful because of it.

wabi sabi is a way to see beauty in an imperfect and inconstant world. the
words wabi and sabi are difficult to translate to english, and have somewhat
vague meanings in japanese. from "a provisional
definition":

wabi sabi began, centuries ago, as a reaction of japanese monied classes'
desire for more enhanced, exclusive and rarefied aesthetic pleasures, and
therefore has a substantial and rarely discussed class component, expanded on
elsewhere here.

wabi sabi is at best, and in this document, a way of intentionally seeing
(finding or creating) beauty in the everyday, the mundane, the imperfect; of
seeing things as dynamic situations rather than static, fixed ‘objects’.

it is easiest to talk about wabi sabi objects, and since wabi sabi developed
around japanese tea ceremonies, a brief look at that may illuminate.

wabi sabi objects are often seen as "rustic" because it is how they first
appear; unsophisticated, rough, simple. given that monied classes most obvious
attribute is sophistication, refined and complex, interest in things wabi sabi
would at first appear to be contradictory. but monied classes already had
access to things of the highest quality, similar to today’s "high end" consumer
perfection. it is the very paradox of this juxtaposition that embodies, or
creates, the beauty of wabi sabi. (this seeming paradox is loosely analogous to
buying expensively pre-ripped jeans, but traditional wabi sabi is far more
concerned with issues of authenticity and the human processes that created the
wabi sabi object.)

traditional wabi sabi does not welcome flaw nor imperfection into what might
be called ‘functional’ life; there is no pleasure in a leaking roof or broken
plumbing. wabi sabi is very selective of what it borrows from more rustic
living. wabi sabi involves very carefully selected aspects of the underlying
ideas associated with zen buddhism, ascetism and self-imposed austerity. actual
poverty is nowhere to be found within wabi sabi.

flaws and imperfections provide a contrast to intentional elements of an
object’s construction; for example lumps and rough texture in a clay cup, or
variations in the color of the glaze ensure each item is unique.

it is generally argued that wabi sabi cannot be intentionally created; that
it is a complex, subtle, irreversible side effect of use and age, and that
attempts to create wabi sabi will fail.

wabi tek sabi is way of seeing and living with human craft and technology in
the world. like wabi sabi it certainly has much to do with aesthetics and
pleasure, but it is mainly a way to look at, work with, and live with
technology.

we all have our favorite objects; comfortably worn-out shoes we can’t bear
to part with; we watch the holes grow larger as we wear them year in and year
out. a new tool patinas; that patina eventually becomes objectionable wear. a
shiny new object may stand out from others like it, until it too achieves the
warm dull patina of use and becomes part of a household. mundane things become
personalized. objects treated in this way are ongoing, long-term
situations, relationships between people and objects, that is not simply
about money and is not necessarily fully rational; they give us pleasure and
usefulness both.

it is the combination of object and human attention that creates the
situation of wabi tek sabi. these situations are the very essence of wabi tek
sabi. where wabi sabi finds beauty in objects subjected to various (generally
unacknowledged or unseen) processes of wear and use; wabi tek sabi embraces the
processes and situations themselves that lead to to the creation of an object’s
dynamic situation.

this is necessarily a crude and simplistic comparison, but it may highlight
some of the major characteristics of the three systems of thought:

comparisons between wabi sabi, wabi tek sabi, modernism

where japanese wabi sabi was "top down", ruling classes borrowing culture
from lower classes, wabi tek sabi similarly comes from a culture-of-excess, and
most usefully to those of us living in a post-culture-of-excess.

the main aesthetic elements of wabi sabi are side effects of use and wear
and therefore generally of working and lower classes; removed from their
original contexts, accumulated wear on objects can be viewed as beautiful
patina, and not painful effort, wear, and deterioration; the causal human
effort expended to make it so is conveniently removed from the equation. the
distancing inherent in class stratification allows the 'consumption' of class
effort created and 'stored' within wabi sabi objects. wabi tek sabi however
differs here; in our post-modern situation there are simply unthinkably many
objects and uncountable numbers of people, and stratas of objects and
technologies.

our industrialized/consumer cultures have no shortage of objects, and effort
and wear leading to wabi sabi-like aesthetic conditions are not (always) so
tightly bound as to require class-remote distancing to enjoy and use. people
who create or maintain objects with wabi tek sabi often have sufficient
privilege to enjoy them.

where wabi sabi had an iemoto (the founder or current grandmaster of
a tradition or art) who acted as gatekeeper for wabi sabi-ness, and would
control who might have access to it, modern technological life analogously has
various gatekeepers to shiny new products, the artificial value of which
ensures a near endless supply of cast-off objects. objects with wabi tek sabi
are anathema to consumer culture. iemotos maintained power and
exclusivity by blocking access to an aesthetic kept obscure and inscrutable;
consumer culture does so with branding and other mechanisms; wabi tek sabi does
not directly take part in this value system; it simply steps off those
particular paths.

technology is, at least, human handicraft tied into an economic system.
currently technology is inseparable from global corporate economies.

people making things, whether simple clay pots or complex science-based
instrumentation, is craft. craft is as old as human history, and many people
consider the ability to craft matter part of the definition of being human.

making a pot or a radio-telescope becomes technology when it is embedded
within an economic system. the conversation becomes complex when one attempts
to hand-craft objects using materials and or components produced by
technological systems; materials, tools, components can and do come from nearly
any continent today.

therefore the word ‘technology’ is slippery; it is a highly ideological
word. i think of the word as containing a tangle of multiple meanings with two
‘magnetic poles’ -- at one end, technology is the use of tools and knowledge,
crafts and systems, ultimately to manipulate matter, which exists in most human
and some animal cultures; at the other pole technology means the human
industrial economic system of production -- products. a dogmatic definition is
not required to proceed here.

it is customary to think of ‘things’ as having distinct existences; it is
how we make sense of a complex world. the wabi tek sabi view however is to
accept that nothing is truly isolated or ‘stand alone’; a mirror-polished
granite monument does in fact dull, oxidize, accrete dust and acids, is etched
slowly by microorganisms and plants that corrode the surface, and more, albeit
at a glacial pace. in this sense everything is, literally if subtlely,
connected in an entirely non-metaphysical way. all things rot and corrode,
people are born, live and die.

yet in a mundane and everyday way, a polished granite monument is an
unchanging object; under most circumstances, it will persist unchanged through
our lifetime. but objects also change in meaning; while it is in fashion it is
well regarded and maintained with care, out of fashion it is relegated to dead
storage, becomes chipped and is discarded or re-used. objects also change
because we think of them differently, and in a cultural sense, a given object
is different in each situation.

therefore objects are dynamic situations, or create situations, as much as
they are unchanging static "objects". mountains always look the same; yet we
know they once did not exist, are changing now, and will continue to change
long after we are gone. they were painful impediments to travel at one time,
beautiful parts of earthly existence in another.

technology does not simply produce "objects", things with standalone,
isolated existences, but "situations", things with relationships to people and
things, things constructed of other things, all of which are entirely dependent
on systems and things both hidden and obvious. an automobile does not stand
alone; it is embedded in a vast system of roadways, petrochemical
infrastructure, legal and social environments. a modern car plunked down in
15th century England, Peru, Russia, or Easter Island, would lose all meaning
and remain utterly motionless; like a cake in the rain it would rapidly and
irretreivably decay.

wabi sabi is found easily in the modern Western world: rain-driven rust
streaks along a concrete wall, complex patterning of chipped yellow paint and
rusted steel on abandoned machinery. the thatched hut of Rikyu's time is now
stucco, shingle, concrete, aluminum and glass. all things change as they remain
the same. but this is not necessarily wabi tek sabi.

wabi tek sabi begins with a wabi sabi view of the world as experienced
through the senses, as wabi sabi does, but incorporates the forces, physical,
technological, hidden and visible, involved in the situations that lead to a
wabi sabi moment. those forces unfold over time, and will continue to do so
into the future; the present is not a static state or even a snapshot, but an
experienced moment in an ongoing situation.

a moment's beauty in the grain of weathered wood in a backyard fence soon
becomes a maintenance issue when that fence needs replacing; that does not
diminish past beauty. similarly, a technological product or system, once new
and perfect (more precisely, none of it's inherent flaws yet manifest), once
removed from it's marketing reality bubble, decays. repairs may be made, and
while they restore function and sometimes the original sheen, eventually wear
takes its toll. it is in this process that the manufactured ideological magic
begins to wear off, and the object must be banished and replaced anew, the old
object made to be no longer part of local reality (situation) by being
discarded.

but wabi tek sabi means not merely rain-caused rust on a nail head in old
weathered wood, but metal accumulating stress fractures; decades of
wind-plus-sand obscuring windshield vision; soldered electrical connections
oxidizing, silicon dopants diffusing through microscopic structures. these
sorts of (generally hidden) processes not only accrue to the aesthetic of wabi
sabi (where visible), these physical processes themselves as well as their
external manifestations are of concern to wabi tek sabi.

many technological artifacts are an active part of our lives, consume
energy, require involvement and demand relationship. we are not mere passive
observers of the beauty within wabi tek sabi objects; our relationship
manifests in and upon objects as we use, wear, repair objects.

wabi tek sabi is not simply sensory pleasure consumption, however profound
or shallow one might take that to be -- it is a way for living with
technological matter. wabi tek sabi is how i personally build things and how i
maintain my automobiles. wabi tek sabi attempts to blend beauty and function;
comfort, pleasure, technical knowledge and skills applied to everyday (or
exotic) technology. where wabi sabi is passive, only observing, wabi tek sabi
is active, accepting and encouraging our participation in the tearing-down
processes we can choose to see as containing beauty. we might as well;
fundamental physical processes are unfolding within us and without us; this is
how the world works.

wabi tek sabi is a way to construct situations that incorporate carefully
selected technologies into basic human drives for desires and pleasure. wabi
tek sabi is sometimes directly at odds with commercial drives of consumption of
technological goods. wabi tek sabi is about an intimate sensual relationship
with matter.

wabi tek sabi can also be brutally functional. "failure analysis" is an
accepted industrial discipline; it is the process of collecting and analyzing
data to determine the source of a failure, with the very industrial goal of
affecting the occurrence future possible failures. it accepts that failure is
as inevitable as success; it is simply physics -- something always breaks
first. all things fail eventually, and by studying failures one can learn how
to better design things. failure analysis is very wabi tek sabi.

wabi tek sabi can be thought of as what happens when you live within your
technological means.

wabi tek sabi departs fundamentally from wabi sabi in that it acknowledges
human involvement in the unfolding of the aesthetic. further, it encourages
(requires, really) human meddling with the mechanisms that invisibly
(unaddressed and unspoken of, really) form the situations that wabi sabi
practitioners observe.

wabi tek sabi is at odds with wabi sabi in another fundamental concept: wabi
sabi generally claims that it is not possible to create wabi sabi
beauty. this may or may not be so; but wabi tek sabi does revel in meddling
with the physical world. this is a sort of arrogance, an assertion of human
control over the world. wabi tek sabi acknowledges that that human control of
the universe is wildly imperfect and flawed and the results
thereof, for better and worse, are subject to decay and... wabi sabi-ness.

wabi tek sabi explicitly considers the ‘invisible’ as well as the visible,
with the thesis that the processes of the physical world, the processes
themselves, contain beauty. this idea also contains some anti-modern and
social class implications which will be discussed later.

it is very difficult to duplicate a given wabi tek sabi situation, since it
is almost certainly a case of experiences accumulated over time and
happenstance; it would also be pointless, because what makes wabi tek sabi
interesting is the very accumulation of experience.

wabi tek sabi and wabi sabi are bluntly in opposition to some fundamental
ideas within modernism. where modernism puts forth ideas of perfection,
seamlessness, hidden infrastructure, timelessness, superficiality and
isolation, wabi tek sabi and wabi sabi both accept wear, rot, decay, time,
flaw, interdependence and change. wabi tek sabi goes further in that it
encourages meddling with innards, processes, and
looking-inside-the-machine.

the pattern of rust-red nail heads in a fence may be beautiful; it also
means that the gripping force of wood fibers displaced in tension by a
hammer-driven nail is now gone, and the wall subtlely (or not) moves and creaks
in the wind. it is in need of repair; you will have to do the work; it can
still still beautiful, and understanding how wood fibers grip nails can enhance
your understanding of that beauty (and help understand where the squeaking
comes from). you can photograph the wall before repair, as a pale reminder of
it's past beauty. that is wabi tek sabi.

an intimate relationship with matter, and an understanding of the dynamic
processes that affect it's dynamic states is a form of storytelling, and
disturbs the cycle of buy/consume/discard of commercial culture. that form of
storytelling is interrupted when we live in a continuous stream of new
products.

wabi tek sabi rewards deeper understanding of physical and technological
processes (by "physical process" i mean chemical, electrical, vibratory,
abrasive, ... all of the things that cause matter and energy to interact with
each other, generally thought of as "natural" processes. "technical processes"
are those due to human re-arrangement of materials into forms
not-naturally-occurring. i do not intend to be dogmatic about these
boundaries.) that cause things we perceive to be beautiful (or ugly) to
unfold. the reward for understanding, beyond the obvious increased ability to
influence matter (more on this later) can be to see beauty where there was once
ugly decay; for many physical processes contain within them symmetries and
patterns and deeper processes that are sometimes beautiful and almost always
fascinating.

the wabi sabi idea of 'beauty in a weathered fence' is deeply classist; that
patina represents work, stress, time and materials to the person who will
eventually fix it.

as originally formulated, wabi sabi was an aesthetic of rich and powerful
people looking for ways to further enhance their lives. it brought nature and
human imperfection into a highly developed and exquisitely-managed urban
environment.

if you are poor, a worn fence is a worn fence, work that needs to be done
that is, at best, put off until some future time. if you are poor (or not), a
new fence might be a more beautiful fence than an old one, because it
represents work that no longer need be done.

wabi sabi is, at it's best, a way to see beauty in a world that is
inherently dynamic and contains "flaws", but "flaw" in this instance requires a
perfection to contrast with or react against. wabi tek sabi correspondingly
requires a modern world, filled with (alleged) perfection and seamlessness, to
contrast itself. if you do not have access to any of this modern world's
technological goods, neither wabi tek sabi nor wabi sabi have much value, and
merely highlight what it is that you do not now have.

one does not need to be poor to fear the immanent work and effort that a
squeaking, weathered fence represents; your ability and your desire to afford
or maintain the thing, that is, money or skills or time, are factors. but as
those of us with access to varying amounts of technological success know,
humbly i hope, that commercial goods come at a cost that is not always
maintainable. for those of us in various continuums between truly poor and
truly rich, wabi tek sabi is one way to live with modern technology.

when upkeep of technological systems (for example an automobile needed to
get to work daily) is a burden and contains no pleasure, it is hard to apply
wabi tek sabi to it's operation. wabi tek sabi is not a universal solvent.

wabi sabi and wabi tek sabi therefore exist only in tension with its
opposite. within as without -- nothing is stand-alone.

by energy or force i mean literally power source -- human, animal,
water, petroleum, wind, electrical, whatever -- the difference in energy
potential that when harnessed, causes technological mechanism to effect human
intent.

energy sources of many kinds are hidden behind the gloss of modern,
technological devices, and if wabi tek sabi contains a hidden component, a
concept approaching the ideological, it is energy. the equation of repairing or
replacing a thing is at base a question of energy; more specifically the
cost of the energy used to produce or repair. the world is increasingly
a closed system; there are few frontiers, and dumped trash is always in
someone's backyard.

purchasing a new technological thing involves hidden energy that often
presupposes an infinite frontier; there will always be more resources and
energy to make more things, and there is always somewhere to dump disused
things. repair or upkeep of a thing makes clear how much energy is involved in
it's original making or needed repair. improved understanding of these
processes is very wabi tek sabi.

a wooden fence weathering outdoors is subjected to sun-sourced energy of up
to 1000 watts per square meter of area. this is no small thing.

a polished granite monument begins with a chunk of rock mined from the
earth; most of what is mined is ‘flawed’ and is discarded. a chosen block of
granite is transported to an artisan who slices the block into the desired
shape, and tediously grinds matter off it's surface to obtain the desired
finish. each of these steps consumes huge amounts of energy, tremendous amounts
of water are used, chemicals and abrasives, the machinery involved in the
transport and finishing are are part of the equation of energy.

therefore, wabi tek sabi implores one to seek the source and location of the
variously involved energy sources, and understanding them.

technical and scientific inquiry is integral to wabi tek sabi. inquiry is i
believe an apt word; for it is knowledge gained and applied to a real situation
that matters.

wabi tek sabi informs practice. theory -- ideal/logical preconceptions we
use to predict future or explain past behavior of a system -- can enhance
practice, but people get things done in all sorts of thought-systems, with and
without formal theory. wabi tek sabi doesn't speak much to theoretics.

if a technological object ceases to function, it's situation will
change.

electrical theory works just fine when you incorrectly assume that electrons
orbit an atom’s nucleus like planets around a sun. but the described behavior
of many things (like transistors and LEDs) make no sense without some grasp of
quantum physics. the key is to think flexibly and hop frameworks when doing so
enhances understanding and practice.

as in all practices, the ability to predict future behavior is a good
measure of a theory or of a science. science in this context is not about being
right, nor about "truth". people navigated the globe with the incorrect notion
that the sun revolved around the earth.

there are many world views and approaches to problem solving. the western
method of ‘divide and conquer’ is a very useful one, but it’s easy to forget
that it is just a mental tool. it is an excellent way to drill down into
specifics, but a poor way to view the world; causes, side effects,
interactions, history created by situations and objects are too easily missed
or worse, intentionally excluded as unimportant or unrelated.

failure analysis is an industrial discipline that collects data and analyzes
events that led up to a failure, generally with the intent of preventing future
failures by making changes to the design of a thing or system.

applied more casually, failure analysis is an excellent way to understand
processes unfolding within wabi tek sabi. the specific techniques used can be
simple observation or formal procedures; all involve putting your
attention to an object or situation that is not as desired. paying
attention to an object this way means creating a situation in which you are
open to surprises and novelty within what might otherwise be a mundane thing.

lessons learned through failure analysis often lead to insights outside the
situation at hand. the act of failure analysis, sometimes called
troubleshooting, requires (and builds) skill and can become quite involved; but
it is surprising how much can be learned without specific skills by asking
yourself probing fundamental questions: when did it stop working? did it ever
work correctly? what preceded the failure?

continuing, or beginning, a relationship or situation with a thing now of no
use to you -- a failed object -- may reveal things to you about the thing, how
you were using it, how you might avoid failure in the future, and possibly how
you might find further use of the thing at hand by repair or reuse. in other
words, take things apart to see how they work.

fixing broken things carries with it much baggage in a consumer society. in
a world of alleged plenty, re-using something broken or imperfect often carries
with it various stigmas. it calls into question class relationships too, of
poor versus comfortably monied.

i choose to side-step these issues by concentrating on my relationship to
objects in my immediate world, for my own ends and means. if a thing is meeting
my needs, both practical and aesthetic, i will continue to analyze failures (or
better yet, through attention and close relationship and knowledge, anticipate
future possible failures) and effect repairs and improvements.

repairs often lead to a change in aesthetic, as does wear, time and weather.
sometimes these changes are of substance, but sometimes they are cosmetic. all
are an evolving aspect of the object’s wabi tek sabi.

there are many instances of wear or ‘worn out’ that are socially acceptable
across class boundaries. many people recognize the value of a comfortably worn
pair of jeans, a jacket, or favorite shoes. this has always been essentially a
wabi tek sabi relationship, not just wabi sabi, as the owner of such objects is
well aware, the inevitable deterioration of fabric seams and materials not only
enhances aesthetics (increased softness, color and texture complexity) that
same change undermines usability (tears, stains). at some point in the process
changes need to be effected (sewn patches) or the object discarded and
replaced.

carried out over a long enough period, repairs or modifications to an object
evolve that object over time. sometimes repairs are simply that; to restore a
thing as close to it’s original state as possible. however other ways are
possible.

PRINCIPLE: wabi tek sabi, like wabi sabi, describes an aesthetic situation, a way to see beauty.

PRINCIPLE: wabi sabi nor wabi tek sabi cannot exist without it's opposite.

PRINCIPLE: wabi tek sabi is wabi sabi with technical rigor.

(1) Koren, Leonard (1994). Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers. Stone Bridge Press. ISBN 1-880656-12-4.

Source: https://tomodashi.com/philosophy