Wonderful Copenhagen.

Through his Copenhagen Interpretation experiment of 1920, Danish physicist Neils Bohr (with Werner Heisenberg), advanced a description of quantum mechanics as a phenomenon that could only be captured, or made real, when a researcher exercised their imagination and positively determined a decision or result. Therefore, he proposed that any event or conclusion should always be considered unfixed, fluctuant or variable, and determined only by the particular frame a researcher chooses to places around the experiment.

In other words, a ‘something’ can exist in all possible states rather than just one. Completion, outcome, or ‘the something’ is summoned into existence only when we think we find it, where there are no definitive facts, only interpretations. Bohr’s theory may offer us a paradigm whereby creative experiments and discoveries are made in analogous ways by ‘design augurs.’

Here, the resolute augur might no longer look to just create conventional, customary or functional fashion garments, artefacts, spaces, experiences, or networks. Instead, they may look to cultivate and advance a particular abstracted argument, concept or manifesto, in the same way that some utopian 20th-century architecture was conceived as purely conceptual and never intended as completed buildings or developments.