The suspack is an unstable assemblage that questions program, function, and construction. But to assert the suspack’s fluidity is not enough it challenges the very basis of material performance. It defies the rationalities of design as practiced in business and commerce. The suspack poses a different magnitude and order of objects than the truisms of efficiency-the finalized, user-tested, prototyped, 3D-modeled certainties-in design. But ideas like this one mean eliminating the suspack instead of thinking with it, allowing the object to insinuate different relations What if, to draw from Jane Bennett, we regarded suspacks less as fixed things and more as a matter with a vibrancy that connects different bodies in the political ecology of a city? 6 For many designers, it’s enough to propose a smartphone app that lets people report suspacks to authorities. And yet, design appears to take little notice of the suspack’s lessons-from the intricacies of material assembly to the general aesthetics of these objects. 5 To wit, while most of the United States liberally embraces the “open carry” of handguns, the nation obsessively restricts the design of insurgent objects of any sort.Ĭan design deal with the suspack? In a time of ersatz corporate startups, suspacks rise to the true definition of “disruption” (a word made so banal by Silicon Valley), changing social behavior around them. Thus, the state produces a formal knowledge of geometries and matter while retaining control over the definitions of legality and illegality. (Safety for whom?) In addition, by discursively returning to the suspack as a potential weapon, however unlikely it is to be one, and reinscribing it with a latent capacity to do damage, even if infrequent, we give away our right to get to know these everyday objects intimately we yield to the state the power to map and track these objects. In such a way, by questioning the perceived threat of suspacks, one comes to validate the authorities’ own paradigms of security, creating separate designations for suspacks that are “safe” versus “dangerous.” The point, instead, is to not reduce suspacks to a single frozen identification and thus restrict the imaginative assembly of materials to a limited menu of safety. Suspacks are an everyday occurrence.īut comparisons are inherently problematic, as if one has to disavow all violence in order to have a rational discussion about suspicion and objects. A suspack is suspicious up until the moment it isn’t that is, up until the instant its actual danger is determined. By some estimates, security forces respond to suspacks 4,000 times a year in New York City alone, feeding a cottage industry in algorithmic surveillance, testing devices, and bomb disposal robots. Police killings and gun violence take thousands of lives a year in the United States, yet proportionately receive scant government concern. This is not to dismiss the fact that sometimes individuals commit acts of violence, but only to bring attention to how infrequent these acts are. The odds of finding a harmful device among those that are identified as suspicious must be, as a figure of speech, one in a million exact figures, assuming they exist, are not made public. Suspacks are a little-understood entity-not quite a fixed category or a marketable commodity-that defies the certitudes of designed products. But sometimes (most of the time, in fact), a box is just a box and an unattended suitcase is simply luggage that was misplaced. If it were a delivery, it would belong somewhere else-on a truck en route to its destination, say. If it were poison, we would label it with warnings. If it were a bomb, we would call it a bomb. A suspack is not (yet) a bomb or weaponized debris in motion, but neither is it a plain box. In other words, the suspack is matter in semiotic flux. Suspended in a state of possibility, suspacks flood the synapses with mental triggers like few other creations can. 3 They are material things that inspire dark thoughts in urban subjects, far surpassing what can be deduced from their ordinary thingness. Suspicious packages, or “suspacks,” as we have started to refer to them, are perplexing. 1 However, the alarmist idea of the “suspicious package” may unlock a different politics of urban life, one premised on sensuous materialism rather than security theater. Objects in space must have an author or an owner who speaks for them, lest they leave interpretation up to undue speculation. People are allowed to put materials into new and unexpected configurations, as long as such arrangements do not inspire fear or dread. These are the instructions for acceptable cohabitation in the secure city.
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