If Apple had the option, would they replace their store employees with programmable drones, flash-baked with spunk, knowledge, and an insatiable desire to help patrons find the ideal Apple product(s) for them? Perhaps they would succumb to the over-hyped controllability and precision afforded by robotic employees. Who could blame them? Designing a consistent user experience that hinges on human engagement can be a sticky business. Apple Store employees, like us, are flesh and blood people, with their own agendas, dreams, passions, and personal histories. Homogeneously trained, though they may be, each employee is an individual with the potential to bring as much uniqueness to the job as they wish. Loosely controllable, yet immensely valuable variables in a massive service web, these employees embody a notion I’d like to refer to as the democracy of systems design.

The idea that part of designing any successful system is to be able to let go of control and to truly embrace the power of the parts of a system that cannot be controlled – namely, the human and natural elements. To plan for collaborative shaping of systems by the people who use them, on a massive scale. So until we are all replaced with programmable drones, I propose that humans be considered as much a part of systems as online or physical touchpoints. And what better way to think about the influence of a group of people on an outcome than the democratic process?

A good democracy

Part of any good democracy is a leader who is willing to leave (at least some) major decisions up to the majority of their constituents. And even the decisions made quietly in a backroom somewhere often lead to unexpected and irrational human behavior. Presidents, CEOs, Prime Ministers, managers of fast food restaurants – all leaders in their own right; none, any more than the others, able to truly control the citizen experience within their dominion. Strive as they may for public safety, behavior change, “customer” satisfaction, there will always be uncontrollable and unexpected elements stitched into the patchwork fabric of the world. A good leader, therefore, can focus on establishing a framework within which their desired outcomes most naturally and most probably occur. A mayor cannot guarantee a 0% crime rate, for example, but he or she can facilitate the design of a better communication system for police officers and reward citizen policing with social incentives, thereby improving the chances of crime reduction.

Is it such a stretch to think of systems designers as such leaders – doing their part to build the infrastructure, dream up the various experiences associated with their products and offerings, but also embracing the unknowns involved with human employees and human users? For it is those unknowns where the democracy happens, and that can be magical. Allowing systems to grow and evolve as people use them in different ways is to allow the world around us to be crafted by those who use it the most. A constantly shifting democratic modeling of the systems that keep us fed, deliver our mail, and take out our trash, serves to improve those systems in ways that can be unimaginable to those who first created them. It is precisely the system designer’s inability to control every detailed experience within their service web that allows for it to grow and shift in mysterious and often beautiful ways.

The hacker, DIY communities know this inside and out. Constantly pushing the boundaries of design intentions, they jailbreak, reverse engineer, patch, and crowdsource their way to completely new applications. This is democratic re-shaping of products, services, and systems at it’s absolute (although often illegal) best. If you followed the drama that enveloped Microsoft’s X-Box Kinect, with it’s proprietary, locked-down systems that were eventually cracked open for all to use freely, you’ll know what I mean. Several very smart people around the world saw a potential in Microsoft’s new sensor-laden gaming platform, that the Redmond-based tech giant did not support (to put it mildly). Skipping ahead to the happily ever after part, the people won, Microsoft acquiesced and began developing public-facing API’s. In a show to cover up their initial (dare I say?) communistic control efforts, they claimed that it was their intention all along to open up their closed platform for hackers and developers to imagine future applications. Realizing only too late the inherent value in the democracy of systems design.

Perfection is unknowable

As we learned from the ending scene in Tron: Legacy the thing about perfection is that it’s unknowable, and it is often the imperfect bits that are the most interesting. While it probably doesn’t make much sense to try to convince designers to stop trying to make perfect things, perhaps they can be convinced of the perfection of the unknown, the magic of human and natural elements. As Jeffrey Zeldman puts it, “The architect creates planes and grids that facilitate the dynamic behavior of people. Having designed, the architect relinquishes control. Over time, the people who use the building bring out and add to the meaning of the architect’s design.” While we will always need the architects to design and build system frameworks, we should also embrace the democratic nature of human endeavors. More often, we ought to trust that our systems can ride safely without training wheels. That they can learn to fly, naturally, in the wild. And who knows what tricks they may develop on their own?!

This sort of thinking extends to things that are not yet systems but that may want to be. By that I am referring to “dumb” water bottles who want to communicate their owner’s hydration level back to them via sensor networks and web services. “Dumb” refrigerators who want to relay their contents to their owner before they open the door and suggest healthy meal combinations and recipes pulled from the internet. Imagine the possibilities if all of our “dumb” things had API’s, could have their software updated remotely and wirelessly, and above all – allowed themselves to mutate and evolve in step with the desires of their owners. Matt Jones, one of the thought leaders in this Internet of Things field, as it is known, arrives at several conclusions from Bruce Sterling’s seminal book on the subject, Shaping Things: “The network is as important to think about as the things. The flows and the nodes. The systems and the surface. The means and the ends.” Drawing from this, it feels as if things want to become services, to be the physical handles and textures on top of democratically designed service layers. Sterling calls these Spimes – “manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end as data. They are designed on screens, fabricated by digital means and precisely tracked through space and time throughout their earthly sojourn.” [Shaping Things, p.11] He goes on to say, “In an age of SPIMES, the object is no longer an object, but an instantiation. My consumption patterns are worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption.” [Shaping Things, p. 79]  Bingo. The beauty of spimes, and systems for that matter, lies in the ways in which people use them and how they learn and adapt to their shifting environment.

Image by: BERG Studio

Back to Microsoft and Apple again. It should be pointed out that a potential benefit to locking down key aspects of a system is a more consistent and controllable user experience. Microsoft spent a lot of time designing the ways in which users should interact with their Kinect system and so had no interest in letting people figure out other interactions that could muddy the waters. Apple is notoriously strict with apps that modify their software UIs, seeking to control the UX in as many ways as possible (the main exception, of course, being the human factors mentioned earlier). In many ways, both are wise for locking down their systems to provide only experiences that they consider ‘perfect.’ But as I’ve been arguing, and as Matt Jones references, perfection is not in seamlessness, rather in “beautiful seams.” As Jones explains, “This term was coined by the late Mark Weiser, a pioneer of ubiquitous computing and the Chief Technologist at what was at the time the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Instead of the discourse of smooth, distinction-obliterating, disempowering seamlessness which was then (and is, to a significant degree, still) dominant in discussions of ubiquitous information processing systems, Weiser wanted to offer users ways to reach into and configure the systems they encountered; ideally, such seams would afford moments of pleasure, revelation and beauty.”

By giving users the power to affect the systems they are a part of, designers and leaders allow for a more democratic, and I argue, interesting and potentially magical world of possibility. John Thackara, in his book In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World explains it this way:

“…the challenges and opportunities that face us will not be solved by designers acting on our behalf. On the contrary: As we suffuse the world with complex technical systems – on top of the natural and social systems already here – old-style top-down, outside-in design simply won’t work. The days of the celebrity solo designer are over. Complex systems are shaped by all the people who use them, and in this new era of collaborative innovation, designers are having to evolve from being the individual authors of objects, or buildings, to being the facilitators of change among large groups of people.” [In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, p.7]

Let us not forget that with good leadership, guided stewardship, and a network of engaged users, systems can blossom and mutate, becoming unimaginably awesome.

What would the world look like if your brain was wired to perceive the world as if through a graphic design lens? That’s what I would like to find out. Let’s explore.

I am not a graphic designer. At least that’s not on my business card. What I am is somebody whose way of looking at the world is easily augmented by extreme focus on a particular visual schema. To be more specific, once, after a 20+ hour stint of 3D modeling in Solidworks, I began to think of the trash can at my desk as merely an extruded circle and my desk itself as the top plane. In fact, for days afterward, I couldn’t help but think about the entire world around me as if I had modeled it in Solidworks using some kind of augmented reality world builder tool. Chalk it up to the plasticity of the brain enhanced by lack of sleep, but its a sensation I’ve never been able to forget. And I have always been curious if people in other design fields have experienced a similar feeling. Graphic designers perhaps, begin to see everything around them for the fonts, the colors, the composition, the negative space. The following is a bit of history, mixed with a dash of fantasy, and a splash of theory for good measure, about what it would be like if your brain was wired to perceive the world as if through graphic design goggles. If you or anyone you know has ever experienced anything like what is described here, please don’t panic. Instead, calmly ask them to come forward and share their experiences in the comments section below.

“Design is a way of life, a point of view.” – Paul Rand

It should come as no surprise that graphic design, in one sense or another, spans the history of humankind. From cave paintings to roman carvings to freeway billboards to iPhone apps, people have been enhancing the transfer of knowledge for centuries. But the concept of graphic design as a way of life is a relatively modern vision. For most designers, design is a way of life and a way of thinking about things, not just a job. For me, every problem I set my mind to can be broken down into distinct parts of pieces of a design process. I am of the opinion that everything on earth can be designed, even nature, as frightening a thought as that may be. As I explore the world around me, I consciously (or subconsciously) take note of products, services, or interactions that work better than others, or that completely fail. If I could afford it, I would only surround myself with things that I consider to be perfectly designed. I also happen to have a design job which occupies much of my daily thought process. So if those anecdotes can be taken as a microcosm of what its like to live your life as an industrial designer, what is the graphic design antithesis?

Graphic design as a way of life

I am intrigued by a notion of graphic design as a way of life. Not working as a graphic designer per se (although that may often be the case), but applying a graphic design lens on all aspects of life. From how people keep track of their friends, to how they organize their silverware, individual lives are visually graphic places and there are often overlooked moments where they are beautifully designed.

To loosely borrow an idea from Daniel Miller’s The Comfort of Things, the things one owns and the relationships one cultivates, together, form a sort of personal aesthetic that defines who we are. Taken altogether, the parts and pieces of ones life form a multifaceted patchwork of memories, experiences, possessions, friendships, accomplishments. While this patchwork is a blend of visual and emotional parts, for the sake of this conversation, it can be imagined as a purely visual representation of a person.

the things one owns and the relationships one cultivates, together, form a sort of personal aesthetic that defines who we are

If you drill down just the right path you can find beautifully designed graphic moments in just about anybody’s life. If you’re having a hard time imagining how your grandma’s living room could possibly be an example of beautiful graphic design: consider the emotional value of the family heirlooms distributed around the room, the memories captured in all the photos, the system of organization that ensures she can find what she is looking for. All of these disparate elements fuse together into a graphic masterpiece when looked at through the right lens.

But just in case you don’t have one of these lenses handy, here are a few examples of everyday moments that bleed brilliant graphic design sensibilities.

Symmetry from Everynone on Vimeo.

DanseDance from Julien Vallée on Vimeo.

Charles Schiller Domestic Kitchen Planning, 2010

Imagine…

Ok, time for some fantasy. I want you to imagine you are a super hero. No, not that kind of super hero. You are Super Graphic Designer and the world relies on you to transform mundane and poorly designed graphics into design gold. Your only weakness? Being too obsessed with your job. You live and breathe graphic design. When you look at a poster, you can instantly identify the fonts, the character spacing, the colors, stroke thicknesses, the composition style, what works and what doesn’t. You instantly sketch an improved version in your head but have more important tasks to address. As you go about your day, improving websites, diagrams, billboards, street signs, posters you adeptly utilize your graphic design goggles that overlay Adobe InDesign tools onto your field of vision. Just as Batman uses his body armor and grappling hooks to fight crime, you use your design goggles to fight bad graphic design. But, although your goggles provide guides, x-heights, color pickers, and type identifiers, you don’t rely on them alone. Your brain is uniquely wired to solve complex graphic design problems. In fact, its virtually impossible for you to do much else, which becomes problematic in social situations. But never mind that. Your goggles have an Insta-Icon-maker tool that lets you look at an object and tap a button on the goggles to initiate an algorithmically generated vector icon. Alright, that’s quite enough of that.

this line of thought that interests me the most is how graphic design could be a really interesting framework to place around the rules we live by

Now back to some (somewhat) serious discussion. The aspect of this line of thought that interests me the most is how graphic design could be a really interesting framework to place around the rules we live by. What would life be like if we had to live our lives according to graphic design principles? A sort of moral code dictated by the visual laws of graphic design but translated into behavioural requirements. What if physics, biology, chemistry, psychology were all turned upside down and rethought according to graphic design principles? What if democratically chosen laws and governments at large were redesigned according to graphic design principles? Here are a few possibilities:

• The Pixel Grid: In graphic design, the grid reigns. Dictating the placement of elements to ensure a balanced, consistent, and usable composition, the grid must be obeyed. Grids exist outside of graphic realms of pixels of course, in the design of cities, in the layout of homes in a housing community, in the construction of our buildings, in the organizing of our closets, in the patterns of our clothes, in the weave of our fabrics. What then, would the rule of the Pixel Grid be like if it was applied to life? Perhaps everything in the physical world had to fit into a massive invisible grid, such that when you put an object down it would shift to its proper position within the grid, as if pulled by a gravitational force.

• Color Contrast: The difference between two colors, contrast is what makes it possible for you to be reading these words on this screen right now. When it comes to text on a background, the more different the text color is from the background color the more legible the text becomes – hence the popularity of black text on a white background. In terms of the color wheel, the further away the colors are from each other, the higher the color contrast. Incidentally, this also creates complementary pairs of color. Now, what if we lived in a world in which our closest and most compatible relationships were with people who lived the furthest away from us geographically? Or if the strength of our bonds to others was based solely on how different they were to us?

• Legibility: In addition to color contrast, legibility is critical in order to read words on a screen, in a scroll, or on a sign. While there are a number of steadfast universal rules that ensure proper legibility, it can be more subjective than the others. Some people may be more adept at reading characters carved in stone that others would deem illegible. What then, would the rule of legibility be like if it was applied to life? A low hanging idea is if all of humanity were born with the ability to write with perfect handwriting in every language on earth, and the ability to read them all, guaranteeing 100% worldwide legibility.

• Negative/Positive Space: Positive space refers to places where visual information is, and negative space refers to where it isn’t. It is common, and often desirable, to end up with a design that contains more negative space than positive space. Balance can still be achieved if the positive elements are properly “grounded” and not freely floating in a sea of negative space. Speaking of balance, what if your emotional balance tweaked the way you perceived the world such that when you are in a good mood, you see the world for it’s positive space and vice versa when you’re in a bad mood.

• The Wrong Theory: Slightly more esoteric than the previous rules, the Wrong Theory involves designing everything perfectly then purposefully messing something up for visual excitement and intrigue. Perhaps, in this graphic design-driven society it is the norm to genetically engineer humans to all be perfect and beautiful and then it is up to them to figure out how to become unique by messing up one aspect of their visual perfection? The error becomes the beauty; the flaw is seen as the prize.

• Wabi Sabi: Similar in many ways to the Wrong Theory, Wabi Sabi is a key philosophy of Japanese beauty. Something that is Wabi Sabi is “imperfect, impermanent and incomplete”… nurtur[ing] all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: Nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.” In this radical, graphic design-driven world, everything, from architecture to relationships, to personal tastes might be ephemeral and constantly transforming. In this way, nothing would ever be allowed to achieve completeness, let alone perfecting. As frustrating as this may sound, I think it could be beautiful in many ways.

Paul Rand says, “To design is much more than simply to assemble, to order, or even to edit; it is to add value and meaning, to illuminate, to simplify, to clarify, to modify, to dignify, to dramatize, to persuade, and perhaps even to amuse.” So put on your graphic design goggles and look around. You just might see the world a bit differently.

How could we be so wrong about the future all of the time?
Over and over again, throughout history, we have predicted futures that missed the mark. With the exception of a few celebrated cases, futurists have had a dismal track record when it comes to the history of predicting the future. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about premonition, fortune telling, or extra sensory perception. Predicting the future, in this context refers mostly to technological development as it relates to topics such as transportation (flying cars, personal jet packs, teleportation, intergalactic space travel, hover boards), medicine (medicinal near-immortality, designer babies), entertainment (invisibility cloaks, virtual reality) education (instant learning), architecture (underwater cities, self-cleaning houses), food (food in a pill), and communication (automatic dog translation, telepathy). Basically everything you remember loving about The Jetsons, and then some. “Predictions, failed or successful, tell us as much about the time they were made as they do about the future,” says Finlo Rohrer in his essay for BBC magazine. What will our predictions in 2011 tell the citizens of 3011 about our culture, our fears, our expectations, our passions? Wouldn’t you like to know. As a jumping off point for this article, consider these two terms invented by Bruce McCall, prolific illustrator for The New Yorker:

• Techno-archeology = digging back and finding past miracles that never happened.
• Faux-nostalgia = achingly sentimental yearning for times that never happened.

McCall’s illustration titled Fully Loaded for The New York Times.

Why is predicting the future so hard?

We of the 21st century developed world are inundated with wondrous technologies and futuristic advantages, the likes of which would have been impossible to predict a century ago. Understandably so. You see, predicting the future is hard work! To succeed at it, one’s radical idea for a product or lifestyle must become routine, even mundane in the future. Those who have succeeded at it have often been treated as heretics or, at best, insane geniuses, mad scientists. Far ahead of their time, their predictions sometimes become their obsession and take over their life’s work, rarely bringing about any of the change they hoped to see in their generation. But boy would they be proud today. Or would they? Perhaps our manifestation of their vision or our dangerous and immoral misuse of their brain-child would cause dismay and disappointment. Maybe they would just be sad to learn how long it took for the world to accept their radical dream, a notion that they so clearly envisioned for the near future. Which leads me to my big question: why is predicting the future so hard, anyway? Well, I’d like to lay out a few reasons, although I cannot claim that these are by any means conclusive.

Risk

Big industries move slowly. This has started changing a bit lately with the emergence of tech giants who are somehow able to maintain the agility of a small shop despite their enormity (I’m looking at you Google). But for the most part, the bigger the industry or company, the slower the change. Marty Neumeier uses the scissors, rock, paper metaphor to show that small companies are like scissors, sharp in focus, but quickly transition into the expanded focus and momentum of rock companies, who in turn become smothering paper companies whose huge size, vast resources, and wide focus give it a competitive advantage, despite losing its scissor-like precision and agility.

The way I see it, it’s fairly simple – change is risky. Why do things differently when what’s working now is good enough? The danger of failure outweighs the potential for success. Hence, the future never materializes. The present is allowed to continue its course. Despite the availability of often magical and potentially profitable visions of futurists within big industry, the risk of trying something so different is too great. Nobody wants to accept this sad truth so the future keeps on being predicted by those who see how big industries could change if they took the risk, and futurists continuously become wrong year after year, as their future is tossed aside by the present.

Adam Greenfield speaks towards this in his recent essay about his experience working at Nokia. He describes how, “rather than acting as the incubator/force multiplier/accelerator it ought to have, Nokia’s corporate culture served as a brake on all kinds of innovative thought.” Frustrating as this can be to observe from the outside, it may be offset by a minority of companies so wealthy they can afford a few million here and there to support the fledgling R&D dreams of some of its employees, without affecting the bottom line. Not surprisingly this kind of development has led to some fantastic innovations that often take over or at least become a large part of their parent company’s original businesses.

Funding

The future is expensive. Small start-ups, ripe with predictions of how their new products and services will shape the future, often wither before they’re able to acquire adequate funding to grow. It’s challenging to convince investors that they should fund something they don’t understand or cant visualize. The deep future can be murky and most investors prefer to put their money in ventures they can grasp. But, if the seed of the idea is good, it doesn’t get buried with the lack of funding or even the failed startup. The dream is passed on to other, more financially savvy hands who keep it alive, even if by a thread.

With the future, the business model for new products and services that nobody’s heard of or knows why they need, can be a sticking point. How do you convince people that they should buy an electric car when there’s no infrastructure to keep it charged? How do you maximize the return on investment with space tourism as your offering? Fortunately for the predictors of an electrically powered automotive future in which we fly into space for summer holiday, both of these blossoming industries, and others like them, have figured out ways to survive so far. And their future is hopeful. But with your predictions in the hands of shaky business models struggling to find future-forward investment dollars, its understandable why they so rarely become true.

Communication

Where the 1960’s futurecasters made beautiful hand-crafted models and illustrations of their visions, today’s future experts struggle to communicate their dreams outside the realm of scientific papers and frankenstein prototypes. And communication is a supremely important bottleneck, frustratingly keeping our future dreams at bay. Of course, we can get our future fix at the movies, where we are awed by the meticulously rendered futures on the big (and often 3D) screen. But these technologies that visualize glossy futures for entertainment are rarely utilized in the board rooms where discussions about where to focus R&D dollars are held.

Let’s say a future-thinking motorcycle company is interested in developing the Light Cycle motorcycle featured in the recent movie Tron — a vehicle that starts off as an inconspicuous hand-held rod but quickly transforms into a glorious cycle that leaves trails of light lasers in its midst. In this case, the company is fortunate to have the movie and its accompanying sketches and storyboards as visual references for the design. So there’s your “what?”, but the real communication trouble starts when someone raises the big question, “How?”. And when “how” is unanswerable because the materials and processes required to create the Light Cycle have not yet been invented, you can see how communication becomes the breaking point. Its infinitely easier to communicate to the marketing team that the design plan for next year’s smartphone is to make the same thing but increase the screen size and slim it down than it is to suggest that it be embedded in a flexible wristband or that in the near future humans will have developed telepathic skills and will no longer need smartphones at all. We can’t make the future if we can’t communicate how it works and how it can be fabricated.

Sketches of the LightCycle for the Tron:Legacy film. Designers pretended they were making a real vehicle. More here

But communication as a barrier to the future goes beyond expressing how to make it. There are certain “metaphysical ideas that cannot be expressed in words,” explains a post from ad agency Weiden+Kennedy’s new Platform site. The business and technology incubator whose current participants are focusing on “articulating research, testing the future, visualizing data and facilitating events and experiences that enable people to ‘explore their own tomorrow’” references a crucial player in the predicting the future game – design fiction. I wrote about design fiction here in April 2010, but for a refresher, here is Platform’s description of the concept:

Design fiction has emerged as a pre-eminent tool for designing, challenging and understanding speculative future realities. However, design fiction aims to make the extraordinary ordinary. It merges the elastic creativity of science fiction with everyday matter of fact reality. Furthermore, in using current media conventions as a way to express ideas about the future, design fiction is able to twist reality and trick us into accepting the fantastic as possibility.

Platform goes on to say that “design fiction is effectively expressed in a medium of experience. It is expressed as a combined series of moments designed to create a new actuality or at least new assumptions.” It seems that as the world becomes more complex, networked, intangible, and immaterial, the future, in turn, becomes infinitely harder to communicate.

Practicality

Several of the most endearing Space Age predictions such as jet packs and flying cars have suffered, not from a lack of technological ingenuity, but from a void in consumer practicality. As Syd Mead, the legendary visual futurist, puts it in BMW’s Activate The Future miniseries, in reference to flying car prototypes, “…the wings came off and you store them in your garage. Trust that to your local guy down the street to put his wings on right…it’s a nightmare.” So in this case, our technological capabilities have out-sprinted our infrastructure and cultural readiness to adopt future products that we so badly want. “We have fun imagining the future but we have trouble predicting it, because the future we usually get is the one we least expect” says the narrator in the BMW film. And that may have something to do with the unpredictability of consumers and cultural adoption, but I think it has more to do with the notion that imagining impractical, ludicrous, silly inventions is way more fun.

I created this visual formula for the future in order to analyze various aspects of predicting it.

Ok, so predicting the future is really hard.

Despite the challenges, predicting the future remains as crucial and exciting as ever. And it’s not just plain fun, it’s big business too. Google is investing in a web-app that uses a data-based, scientific approach to prediction, and creative consultancies all over the world are being hired to trend forecast and to design the future. Not to mention the defense department’s ultra top secret futurology lab, DARPA whose slogan is “creating and preventing strategic surprise.” Popular Science and other publications look into cutting edge sciences to reveal where the future may be heading. Organizations like The World Future Society and the Institute for the Future have made “future consulting” a service offering. Ray Kurtzweil has made a career out of it.

Ray Kurtzweil, inventor, educator, author of The Singularity Is Near, and subject of the documentary The Transcendent Man, is perhaps the figurehead for modern day future casting.

You have to wonder though, how could something with such a low success rate be so everlasting, so fun, a successful business model? Why do we enjoy predicting the future even though we are fully aware of the dismal odds our envisioned futures have of materializing? Why has so much money been spent on technologies that someone promised would be the way of the future, even though we most likely knew in our hearts it wouldn’t? After centuries of making (mostly) wrong predictions, how is it that a collective discouragement doesn’t inhibit new dreams? Imagining the future is spellbinding. The very nature of mapping out the future has a courageous, wild west feel to it. And of course, it allows for the possibility of a better life, mediated by glossy technologies and laziness inducing conveniences. I propose that it also has something to do with our penchant for optimistic escapism, our fanatical love for mental diversions by way of entertainment or recreation. When we are allowed to mentally replace the unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life in the year 2011 with visions of 3011, or even 2020, we feel a sense of hope. The future must be better (faster, easier, more autonomous, sexier, smarter) than this! Not all possible futures are so optimistic of course – that would leave out all of our dismal apocalyptic visions of death and destruction. But even futures where AI robot servants hijack our flying cars and zap everybody with their ray guns provide us with a temporary escape from the present, where something that “cool” would never happen.

Covers and images from Popular Science & Popular Mechanics magazines from over 50 years ago. More here

Historical Predicting

During the Great Depression Era of the 1930’s, Americans became obsessed with the future. Suddenly thrown into a lifetime low, it became easy to spend unemployed hours imagining a future where technology made everybody’s lives better. This was the dawn of the personal robot servant, the flying car, the ray gun, instant food. The World’s Fair set a stage to talk about and share these dreams and talk we did. But the Depression was only the beginning. It occurred to me that some people may have found it depressing or belittling to think of themselves as inferior when compared to future societies. Arthur C. Clarke, celebrated science fiction writer and illustrious futurologist attempted to curb any such feelings in a presentation he made for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, saying, we should “consider it a privilege to be stepping stones to higher things.”

Arthur C Clarke, one of the most legendary futurists of all time, can be seen here doling out his predictions for a future that, as of now, is still deep in the future.

Decades of ferocious futurecasting were to follow as wartime technological advances gave way to Space Age futurism. Hope, possibility, and optimism reigned supreme in this era of exploration and can-do spirit. “I wasn’t around during that time,” says Julian Bleecker of Near Future Laboratory, “but in my nostalgic view and from the lens of the man who grew up from the boy who wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut or a jet fighter pilot — [there was a] sense of possibility of transcending the surely bonds of earth. And that can translate to going beyond one’s sense of the limits of possibility. The power of the “northstar” way of working toward a goal that seems far beyond what one should be able to do.”

But then a strange thing seems to have happened. For reasons unknown, we stopped predicting with the same tenacity. Its as if Americans said, “wow we really came up with some great ideas for the future, let’s stop here and work on those.” And what’s worse, most of these classic predictions remain predictions today, oftentimes feeling as far off as they may have felt 50 years ago. In fact, we’re still working on actualizing most of what they predicted would be commonplace by the year 2000, and we’re a long way off with many of the ideas. Wired Magazine’s recent article featuring Will Ferrel outlines in-depth “Why the marvels we were promised haven’t materialized.”

We know there are plenty of good reasons these things never made it to the mainstream. But what caused the slowing down of the collective future creation machine that was the imaginations and dreams of the American Space Age? Bleecker says,

It could be that our expectations about the future are intensely compressed by the pace of new gizmos, which I think largely define what we consider the future — what’s coming out in the next 6 month product cycle. You have networks of rumor management about all sorts of things. From MacRumors.com to things that are of interest to photographphiles, like NikonRumors.com. It’s always about what is just around the corner. I don’t get a sense that there are big dreams about — even getting a car that runs on something renewable seems to be the biggest we’re able to dream. But that’s just gizmos. Things like a future where people are mindful of difference and accepting of opinions and points of view that differ from their own and still able to live peacefully — those are more the Space Age future dreams we’ve lost hold of. It’s still such a contentious view and no iGizmo is going to mitigate that.

Let’s Just Make It Up

From what I can see, it’s not that people today aren’t dreaming about the future anymore. It’s just that figuring out what the future can and should be is really, really hard, and has gotten progressively harder over the past few decades. In a technological climate where things change as rapidly as the weather in New England, future forecasting has reigned in its sights from what used to be 50 years or so, to more like 3-5 years or less. “We live in the age of much more complex, more turbulent futures, that approach us with ever increasing speed,” says SUMM( )N, a Dutch agency that helps its clients imagine, visualize, and work towards their possible futures.

Thinking about the future has never been an easy task, but the new, exponentially complex human conditions require us to re-think the way we deal with the future possibilities. Instead of colonizing the future with our old ideas and practices we need to learn to quickly explore and probe possible futures. Therefore instead of ‘predicting the future’, instead of prophesying yet another set of ‘future trends’ we help our clients to imagine and co-create new possible futures…

Another trend in contemporary futurecasting replaces the old practice of tossing out half-baked answers with a more refined questioning process. Rather than declaring that people will live in glass domes in the future just because it looks futuristic, designers, thinkers, and futurists today are asking provocative questions about modern living and how it will shift in the future. You may be thinking, asking questions can’t be nearly as fun as Clarke’s Worlds’ Fair mock-up of the future, but believe me, there’s still plenty of fun to be had. Just look at the RCA’s Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, whose projects and courses explore zany and provocative possible futures. Dunne and Raby are pioneers of the notion that critical and speculative design have the “ability to make abstract issues tangible” and are a valuable addition to “public debates about the social, cultural and ethical impact on everyday life of emerging and future technologies.” Another prime example is Art Center’s recent graduate Media Design Program exhibit Made Up: Design Fictions. The show

presents the work of major and emerging international practices that forecast, hypothesize, muse, skylark, role-play, put-on-airs, freak-out or otherwise fake-it to produce work that is relevant to our increasingly confusing and accelerated world. MADE UP is a new type of exhibition — a self-recording, 1:1 map of questions and propositions: dreams as program; science fiction as precedent; cults of commerce; objects as ideas; strange-ified banality; truth-revealing jokes; false histories; and elaborated scenarios.

What’s great about shows like this one is that the work has an utter disregard for incremental steps toward the future. They couldn’t care less about making batteries that last longer, cars that are slightly more fuel efficient, data storage with more storage. Clarke said that if your predictions of the future sound reasonable, they won’t come true, whereas if they sound completely unrealistic and insane, they will most likely become true. So why not just make it all up? That sounds way more fun anyway. If you’re worried about being wrong about the future, don’t be. It turns out that “there’s no great, complex explanation for why people who get one big thing right get most everything else wrong,” argues Oxford economist Jerker Denrell . “It’s simple: Those who correctly predict extreme events tend to have a greater tendency to make extreme predictions; and those who make extreme predictions tend to spend most of the time being wrong — on account of most of their predictions being, well, pretty extreme.”

But I would suggest that being wrong can be even more successful than being right. Historically, we have attempted to wrap up the future in tight, neatly explained packages. I propose we let go of those controlling urges. Drop the hubris act. Forget about having any authority over the future. If we are able to embrace the ambiguity of the future, break through current structures, think beyond contemporary logic, and work outside of predictable contexts, the future has a real chance – not just of providing us with faster, smaller, sexier gizmos, but of actually being a better place than today.

Well, although cognitive scientists probably wouldn’t use the term “mind control”, they wouldn’t disagree that while we interact with physical elements of our environment, our brains are performing what’s known as embodied cognition, a sneaky sort of intuition that drives how we feel and behave and is breaking down century-old mind/body link claims with a vengeance. It may seem incredible to imagine that the boring coffee mug you held this morning while chatting with your kids, or the clipboard you held while filling out that interview this afternoon, were actively priming your behavior and emotions. How could these static, boring objects change the way you feel and act towards others? Well, fortunately there is a wealth of new research to back up these bizarre claims. While uncovering this research, I couldn’t help but think about how the design of everything from consumer products to education, could be transformed by the notion of embodied cognition. And so I dove into the ever-overlapping worlds of design and cognitive science once more, this time to unearth more about what it could mean to design with embodied cognition in mind, at the very least subconsciously.

The Research

Yale University’s John Bargh is among a small but international group leading the charge to understand embodied cognition and its behavioral priming capabilities. Bargh recently co-authored a paperfor the journal Science documenting the dramatic power of the sense of touch, when paired with the brain’s abilities to affect how the world is viewed. Bargh’s team found over a series of two studies that subjects:

• who read a passage about an interaction between two people were more likely to characterize it as adversarial if they had first handled rough jigsaw puzzle pieces, compared to smooth ones.
• sitting in hard, cushionless chairs were less willing to compromise in price negotiations than people who sat in soft, comfortable chairs.
• judge other people to be more generous and caring after they had briefly held a warm cup of coffee, rather than a cold drink.
• holding a heavy clipboard while interviewing job applicants took their work more seriously than their interviewing counterparts holding light clipboards.

Considering that none of the subjects in any of the experiments were told they would be tested on how they react to their physical environment, it’s all the more amazing that while their conscious focus was on a very specific task, their subconscious was deciding how they should feel towards literally everything around them, based on literally everything they were interacting with at a given moment, including the jigsaw puzzle pieces, the chairs, the cup of coffee, and the clipboards. An independent Dutch study titled “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance” dives even deeper into the notion of physical characteristics affecting abstract psychological concepts. Focusing on one concept, weight, the study found that people deal with the abstract concept of weight in an analogue way to how they deal with the physical characteristic of weight; they invest more effort. The study showed that weight, the abstract conceptleads to:

• greater elaboration of thought
• greater polarization between judgments of strong versus weak arguments
• greater confidence in one’s opinion

while weight, the physical characteristic, as in physical objects:

• require higher energetic costs to move or pick up
• have a greater impact on people’s bodies
• require more effort, in terms of physical strength and cognitive planning
• cause people carrying weight to judge distances to be greater and hills to be steeper (than those who do not carry the weight or who carry less weight)

A Linguistic Perspective

As groundbreaking (and awesome!) as this research is, it’s worth providing a bit of background in similar thinking, albeit purely linguistic as opposed to physical. In 1980 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, a seminal work that suggests that metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting but that they actually structure our perceptions and understanding of the world around us:

“The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor. But our conceptual system is not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious. One way to find out is by looking at language. Since communication is based on the same conceptual system that we use in thinking and acting, language is an important source of evidence for what that system is like.”

Lakoff and Johnson proposed a new recognition of how profoundly metaphors not only shape our view of life in the present but set up the expectations that determine what life well be for us in the future. While they may have limited their research to the notions of using physical embodiments as metaphorical communication tools, Lackoff and Johnson’s link to current day embodied cognition research is undeniable. In fact, the Dutch study notes that weight is a metaphor for importance in many languages, including English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese, and that people:

• ‘weigh’ the value of different options before making a decision
• ‘add weight’ to place emphasis on important ideas
• judge opinions as ‘carrying weight’ if the source is considered knowledgeable or influential

Lakoff and Johnson discovered that we use embodied metaphors, such as weight, to tie abstract concepts and emotions to physical objects and environments, they just didn’t realize that these very same physical objects and environments are actually driving human perceptions, emotions, and behaviors. Lawrence Williams, who helped design the warm coffee cup experiment with John Bargh says “it’s no coincidence that we use the same word — warmth — to describe both a physical and an emotional experience. Somewhere in the brain, those two sensations are linked,” he says. Williams and the Dutch study both allude to the idea that embodied cognition could be developed early on in life – either starting in the womb (where the child would find love, comfort, and physical warmth), or at least in early childhood development.

A McLuhan Perspective

The notion of a designed thing performing a kind of hypnosis on its user would be nothing new to Marshall McLuhan, writer of the ever poignant if too often quoted “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Author of the 1964 ground-breaking manifesto, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McLuhan was a purveyor of radical media theory such as the subliminal effects of what he refers to as “the medium”. Advocating that by by too narrowly focusing on the content, we are blinded to the actual character of “the medium” including its psychic and social effects. Bringing this into the realm of designing with embodied cognition in mind, take the electric light bulb as a classically referenced example. Upon initial consideration, the light bulb might be thought of as a product as opposed to a medium, however McLuhan would propose that the light bulb provides light, which greatly affects the perceptions and emotions of the people for whom the light bulb provides the light. Therefore, McLuhan gives us a new lens through which to look at designed products and interactions, not as cold, static things that we act onto, but as active participants in our perceptual and emotional world.

An Anatomical Perspective

There is no denying the volatility of McLuhan’s theories, but some neuroscientists, linguists, and philosophers, emblazoned with the new research on embodied cognition, are giving him a run for his bold money. These thought leaders claim that “human characteristics like empathy, or concepts like time and space, or even the deep structure of language and some of the most profound principles of mathematics, can ultimately be traced to the idiosyncrasies of the human body.” If we didn’t walk with two legs, grasp with opposable thumbs, or communicate with modern language, they argue, we would understand these concepts in completely different ways. Put simply, the experience of being human, of having a body, specifically our own body, is intimately paired with our intelligence. And since the experience of having a body is inherently tied to the objects and environmental factors the body uses to interact with the world, I would assert that the current suite of things and interactions available to people is really what frames the current state of human thinking.

Montessori Spindle Box — combining abstract concepts with embodied ones

Embodying Cognition

I think what makes embodied cognition so fascinating is how it deals with social responses to environmental factors. The fact that those people holding warm coffee cups perceived other people to be more generous and caring, and those people sitting in soft chairs were more willing to compromise makes me think three very interesting thoughts: that we never think in a vacuum, that we never, ever, stop thinking, and that designers, some of whom may have considered metaphor as a tool to deliver an experience that users can relate to another positive experience, now have so much more to consider when designing. As for the notion of a thought vacuum, I think its incredible to consider that no matter how bleak an environment you may find yourself in, or how dull an object you may find yourself holding, these things are always influencing how you think and feel about the people and places around you. Industrial and interaction designers are perhaps more aware than most, of how many unpleasant objects exist in the world, waiting to be held or touched, poised to take over our emotions and make us judge people. Granted, in order to keep costs down and ensure that the masses can afford to buy new things, high design and quality materials are often overlooked or kicked by the wayside. But high design is not what we’re talking about here. A warm coffee mug is not better designed than a cold one; same goes for the heavier clipboard – the opposite may be true in that case, in fact. So how can the design process be informed by the notion of embodied cognition? Is it possible to design better things through a deep understanding of the human mind’s disposition for connecting abstract emotional concepts with concrete physical things? For starters, we know that the sense of touch is an essential aspect of being human – physical concepts such as roughness, hardness, warmth, and weight being amongst the first that infants develop. And if we cross reference that with the design process, which often deals with materials selection, we can start to imagine how designers could use embodied cognition as a tool, even helping young children and adults develop abstract concepts about people and relationships. At the very least, I think it’s worth experimenting to see if designing products and interactions for specific embodied cognition applications can work. Wouldn’t it be cool if, while designing a new thing, we could test for embodied cognition affects in potential users? Want to know if your new laptop inspires greater confidence (with the opposite sex, let’s say) in potential owners? Slip it into one of John Bargh’s studies, give half the test group your new computer and the other half the competition’s machine, have them chat online with a blind date and collect data. Imagine what you could learn about users’ reactions to the physical characteristics of the laptop – the feeling of the keyboard, the weight of the metal body, the glossiness of the screen, the auditory feedback when you click. Testing for these things using embodied cognition experiments could become a new product development research standard. But what if using embodied cognition as a tool in the design process could extend beyond testing for emotional and behavioral responses to new products and services? What if designers could create interactions and products that enhance the ability to learn and memorize? Well, it turns out this may be possible. New embodied cognition research, aimed at identifying the value of physicality in education revealed that:

• children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking.
• stage actors remember their lines better when they are moving.
• subjects asked to move their eyes in a specific pattern while puzzling through a brainteaser were twice as likely to solve it.

Imagine using embodied cognition principles to transform education, shifting the focus from static reading, writing, and reciting to movement and simulation. Imagine if rehabilitative medicine specialists could use their understanding of their patients’ embodied cognitive abilities to help them recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. This research proves that designers can use a knowledge of embodied cognition to re-investigate and invent new, more successful physical tools and interactions for a variety of applications. Designers could perhaps think beyond traditional ergonomics in the sense that we design things that fit the human form, that feel good to hold, to consider “cognitive ergonomics”, designing things that fit the human mind, that feel good to think about, or that make us think “nice” thoughts. Armed with a greater understanding for human inclination to embody emotion with physical metaphor and the ability of physical things to affect human perception and emotion, designers could take on the challenge of cognitive ergonomics. To figure out how to design for the mind, not just the body. After all, as Bargh points out, “The old concepts of mind-body dualism are turning out not to be true at all”. Altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors. Our brains are intrinsically linked to our bodies and the relationship is an organic one. We think with our bodies and our brains. So let’s design things that embrace that link, that feel good to think about, that take the cognitive rough edges off, hone them down, and smooth them out. Let’s redesign our physical world with embodied cognition in mind.

Additional References:

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy NPR: Study Links Warm Hands and Warm Heart Boston Globe’s Report on Embodied Learning Touch and Gender Stereotypes (Psych Central) —— Coffee image CC by cogdog, Montessori Spindle Box CC  by 54mama,

How do YOU design nature? Whether we like it or not, nature evolves, following its own path towards the future. But is it really its own path? It’s probably fair to say that most people agree that Darwinian evolution is still happening today – natural evolution, survival of the fittest, species evolving to best fit their ever-changing environments. But what about the kind of evolution that some may consider, not so “natural”? Man-made species, genetically modified organisms, test-tube body parts, and creatures that have been forever tweaked by human interference.

These “things”, neither purely natural nor artificial, represent a new frontier – prototypes of future nature. Glimpses at what the future holds for natural organisms. A sort of engendered snapshot of a prediction of evolution, and in some cases, even a seemingly forced evolutionary process. It should come as no surprise that designers have taken an interest in this burgeoning arena of change. Proposing innovative lenses through which to view our inevitably prototype nature-filled future, designers shape this very future in their own way. Adopting the languages and materials of science, designers are beginning to understand the role “of design in a world in which humans have surpassed their Enlightenment roles as neutral observers and have become actors on the very forces of nature.” The merging of science and design is depicted heroically in Paola Antonelli’s 2008 MOMA exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind and in the accompanying book. In the book’s preface, Barry Bergdoll says, “While the show’s viewpoint is largely optimistic, embracing science and design as agents of progress, there is also a clear undertone of urgency. Together, design and science must deal with the consequences of our ability to engineer natural phenomena.” In a future where it is difficult to differentiate between natural and unnatural, these prototypes of future nature, culled from the merging worlds of science and design, may be what people look to as the source.

Future Evolution, by Amelia Altavena (1986-). Digital illustration, 2010.

An important takeaway from Antonelli’s MOMA show

is that it “is not concerned only with designers who have an interest in the latest scientific achievements, but also with scientists who are (unconsciously or otherwise) engaged in the act of design.” It’s hard to imagine a more striking example of this kind of science/design blend than Craig Venter’s project, partially funded by the US Department of Energy, to design new microbes. The idea of man-made species is not a new one, however, it would seem that the idea is now a reality. Venter’s heavily funded experiments are “part of an effort to create designer bugs to manufacture hydrogen and biofuels, as well as absorb carbon dioxide and other harmful greenhouse gases.” This brings us to a vital question: What will a future be like where the things that used to be nature, are instead, designed things? Where will society draw the line? I suppose to some, the possible benefits to engineering natural things to be better than they could have been naturally, outweigh the drawbacks. Microscopic bugs that create biofuel may be the beginning, or maybe genetically modified beef was the beginning years ago, (or maybe still it was the domestication of dogs centuries ago). Either way, what might the middle of this story look like? The end? Imagine if every single natural thing is now engineered to outperform its own natural abilities. One such orange tree grows more, larger, and vitamin boosted superfruits, for more months out of the year. Hypo-allergenic pet dogs are engineered to be more loving, easier to train, and live 3 times longer. And of course, humans will be different to – pick your future body from any number of science fiction movies from the past 50 years.

As you may have expected, it’s about the money.

There’s simply more money in “better” things: wine grapes modified to yield great tasting wine for more months out of the year earn their vineyard more money. Although the business case for Venter’s “designer bugs” may not be as clear-cut, it is an economically driven industry, “…a high-stakes commercial race to synthesize and privatize synthetic life forms.” Wondering where the “materials” for these synthetic organisms and printed body parts come from? Well, there’s a business for that. Emeryville, California’s BioFab “plans to churn out thousands of free standard DNA parts that academic and private biotech labs can use to create new designer microbes that can make everything from new drugs to fuel.” The mass production of such materials is expected to massively drive down costs of biotechnology work worldwide. Keeping the opensource wetware movement churning on the east coast is BioBricks, an MIT-based non-profit. According to their website, “Using BioBrick standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.” Long live garage bio-hacking.

At a recent TED talk, Craig Venter spoke about his budding abilities to create prototype nature: “…this is software that lets us design species…Changing the evolutionary tree…Speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria. We’re a ways away from improving people…Our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that.” And Venter isn’t the only scientist on the block looking to progress humanity to a point where people like you and me are benefiting from this same kind of bioengineering work to make us healthier, stronger, and live longer. While Venter’s San Diego lab is cranking out fresh organisms, just down the street, aptly named startup Organovo is showing off its 3-D “bio-printer” capable of building human blood vessels and organs. Yes, dear reader, they are printing out fully functional body parts. For designers it’s probably not hard to grasp the value of creating from scratch – livers, kidneys, and other vital organs that are usually in short supply for patients in need of organ transplants, but making the mental connection to rapid prototyping machines used in the design industry is unavoidable and downright eerie.

Modelmaker at Product Development Company A: “Let me just get this plastic product model out of the machine here, Steve, then you can go ahead and print out that live kidney you were working on…”

It would seem that scientists now have the ability to “grow” almost every part of a human body in the lab. How far away can we be from growing superior versions of these parts and selling them as commodities? Dr. Anthony Atala, one of the pioneers of human bio-engineering and director of the Wake Forrest Institute for Regenerative Medicine proposes a deep future scenario: “I don’t know how long it will take, but I do foresee a future when organs will be available off-the-shelf, ready to “plug in” and replace injured or diseased organs. I believe we’ll have a boutique of technologies that will include tissue engineering and cell therapies and doctors will select the ideal treatment based on the patient’s needs.”

Concerned about the scarring involved with getting cut open to swap in a pair of lungs that will give you 10 times the breathing power? Don’t worry, old-fashioned surgery involving cutting people open won’t be around forever. A team of scientists at the University of Michigan “plans to recreate jaw bones within the human body itself. It will create its bone scaffolding based on a printer laser system and CT scan, and then fill the scaffolding with cells taken from the patient who requires the bone replacement. Once implanted, the scaffolding would get absorbed by the body.”

Horrifying or terrifyingly appealing? Regardless of your moral stance, this work is happening. Scientists are orchestrating a massive shift in our understanding of nature; engaging in acts of design on the natural world and on the human body itself. Designers who imagine this future alongside them have a unique opportunity to apply much needed design thinking to the future of nature.

In the design process, there can often be an element of surprise,

an unexpected result, or even a total accident leading to an interesting outcome. The same applies in nature. Not every case of prototype future nature is as intentional as using software to design new species or growing body parts in the lab. Nature constantly generates things that could be perceived as “accidents” all on its own. That said, there is no doubt that humans have had a profound (and in most cases, damaging effect) on Earth. We have made certain decisions that have forever changed the evolutionary path of almost every other species we have come into contact with. To be more specific, animals that live near our nuclear power plants have a tendency to mutate far more often than their non-nuclear neighborhood inhabiting brothers and sisters. “Scientific illustrator (and coiner of the term “prototypes of a future nature”) Cornelia Hesse-Honegger details these minute mutations in the so-called “true bugs” she collects near nuclear facilities and areas of chemical contamination. True bugs don’t travel far, and they suck the liquid from the plants they live on,” she says. “So if the plant is contaminated, they take a lot of radioactivity into their bodies.’” She “discovered mutations — curtailed feelers, misshapen legs, asymmetrical wings — in as many as 30 percent of the bugs she gathered.” Her illustrations are a beautiful artistic representation of these creatures that are forever changed by human technology, for better or for worse.

Scorpion fly from Reuenthal, Switzerland by Cornelia Hesse-Honegger (1944-). Watercolor, Zürich 1988.

Illustration and science have long been intertwined,

as have design and engineering. Practically since the Enlightenment, scientists have relied on artists to visually depict their discoveries, experiments, and theories. Not until much later though, did artists and designers look to science for visual, physical, and conceptual inspiration.

Christopher Dresser, widely regarded as one of the grandfathers of industrial design was an expert in botany, and his plant studies not only revealed crucial scientific knowledge but also directly inspired his product designs.

Diagram illustrating Lectures on Botany at Marlborough House, by Christopher Dresser (1834-1904). Watercolour on paper, laid on canvas. London, 1854-55. Victoria and Albert Museum

Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, was the first artist to look at nature under water with microscopes and recorded a massive array of forms that influenced every designer living at the time. His book, Art Forms in Nature consists of over a hundred semi-fictional illustrations of the ocean creatures he discovered. As with Dresser’s plant illustrations, Haekel’s fantastical forms influenced almost every designer working at the time. Art Nouveau from the ocean depths to your table top.

Diagram illustrating species of Siphonophorae, by Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Lithograph 1898. Art Forms in Nature

You know you’re respected by the scientific community when they name a molecule after you. Such is the case with the prolific architect, designer, inventor, and futurist, Buckminster Fuller, after whom fullerenes were named for their resemblance to his best-known invention, the geodesic dome. But Fuller wasn’t just a designer who scientists respected; he used scientific methods to arrive at his groundbreaking designs. Having decided to focus on the problem of shelter, he resolutely looked to technology to provide the solution. “To Fuller, a great technology had already been at work for millions of years – Nature. To look at the way ‘she’ designs the universe was to unlock the most useful direction one could take in designing the artifacts that would make the world work for humanity. Nature’s design was fluid, ephemeral, beautifully patterned. Nature’s technology was dynamic, lightweight, and driven by a functional imperative – optimum efficiency.” Fuller borrowed from nature for his projects because he believed it was perfectly designed and could guide him towards a better solution.

R. Buckminster Fuller, by Boris Artzybasheff(1899-1965). Tempera on board 1963. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine.

The likes of Dresser, Haeckel, and Fuller no doubt led the way for today’s scientifically inclined designers, yet the vigor with which the design community has leapt into the realms of bioengineering, genetics, and other cutting edge sciences, has no precedent in history. While scientists lead the crusade towards our bioengineered future, designers pose provocative questions about the implications of that future, develop fictional scenarios of behavior, and design objects that match this imagined evolutionary curve.

Part of his “Biotypography” series, “Typosperma” is Oded Ezer’s project to create cloned sperm designed to each have unique typographical information implanted in their DNA. Ezer’s fantastical creatures literally blur the line between science and design; between Craig Venter’s species designs and the Eameses’ mid-century modernist graphic designs.

“The main purpose of the Typosperma project was to create some sort of transgenic creatures, half (human) sperm, half letter.”

Would you catch a virus for fun? Mikeal Metthey thinks future people will. In a future where all disease has been eradicated by medical technology, Metthey says, “the anxiety associated with disease will be replaced with a recreational approach to illness in which potential patients will check into a ‘counter-spa’ where they will be infected by engineered viruses designed to mimic the [physical and psychological] experience of having a particular malady.” So proposes Metthey’s 2006 thesis project at the Royal College of Art in London, “The Minutine Space”. The project is meant to emphasize the social aspects of being sick and how, in this utopian future, people will actually miss being ill.

In the larger scheme of the science/design overlap, “The Minutine Space” jumps to a fictional future where medical science has taken its course and proposes a design scenario for these future humans.

“Scientists at the University of Western Australia have coined the term ‘disembodied cuisine’ to refer to a new tissue engineering technique that makes it possible to grow edible meat in a laboratory from sample cells.” But what would this in vitro-cultured meat look like, taste like? Interaction designer, James King offers a solution with his “Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow” project: “A mobile animal MRI unit scours the countryside looking for the most beautiful examples of livestock. The selected specimen is scanned from head to toe and accurate cross-sectional images of its inner organs are generated. The most aesthetically pleasing examples of anatomy will be used as templates to create molds for the in vitro meat. We wouldn’t necessarily choose to eat the same parts that we eat today. However, we might still want to recreate a familiar shape to better remind us where the ‘artificial’ meat came from.”

Is that real animal hide you’re wearing? No way man, this is that new stuff – “Victimless Leather”. A small scale prototype of a leather jacket grown in vitro, “Victimless Leather” is a project by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA, a self-described “artistic research lab. “The grown garment confronts people with the moral implications of wearing parts of dead animals for protection, aesthetics, or expression of identity and social class.” “Victimless Leather, on the other hand, offers the possibility of wearing leather without directly killing an animal as ‘a starting point for cultural debate.’”

We are living in a time of square fruit, palm-shaped islands, snow control, and engineered microbes.

“An age in which the ‘made’ and the ‘born’ are fusing.” There can be no doubt that our relationship with nature is in flux. Disregarding any potential moral guidelines around interfering with natural things, scientists and designers are increasingly governing our notion of nature – trees, plants, animals, atoms, climate. Where technology and evolution collide, we arrive at prototypes of future nature, things that we are not yet comfortable relating to. Is this deer natural or robotic? Is my cell phone breathing? During these moments of confusion and adjustment, we may fall back on richer connections to purely industrially manufactured items; things that we can associate with an origin, a natural habitat (be it a Chinese factory or a Walmart).

The blog NextNature “explores our changing notion of nature. How nature™ has become one of the most successful products of our time, yet much of what we perceive as nature is actually a simulation: a romanticized idea of a balanced, harmonic, inherently good and threatened entity. How evolution continues nonetheless. How technology – traditionally created to protect us from the forces of nature – gives rise to a next nature, that is just as wild, cruel, unpredictable and threatening as ever. How we are playing with fire again and again. How we should be careful in doing so, yet how this is also what makes us human.”

Humans are evolution catalysts. Yet we rarely discuss the responsibilities of this job description. We understand product evolution – how one generation of iPhone evolves into the next. And we understand Darwinian evolution in the traditional sense. But is that enough? Do we not also need to dive deeper into the nature designed, prototyped, and built, by people?

If the upcoming movie Splice can serve as an answer, then it does so with a resounding YES. Enjoy:

In 1973 the renowned author and member of the so-called ‘Big Three’ of science fiction Arthur C. Clarke decided to put his opinions of successful predictive storytelling into law. Behold his third and most famous law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here and modify Clarke slightly to read “Any sufficiently designed interaction is indistinguishable from magic.”

So, what do we think?

In Clarke’s books, 2001 A Space Oddyssey for instance, his writing prowess shone when he was describing deep future technologies. It was critical to him and his contemporaries to make sure that the far out tech was somehow based on the most advanced existing tech of the time, only extrapolated a few decades or centuries. Thus “predictive storytelling”; essentially, taking what we have now, and imagining what it will be in the future, based on extensive knowledge of current research. The better the storyteller, the more magical the future seems.

“If design can be a way of creating material objects that help tell a story, what kind of stories would it tell and in what style or genre? Might it be a kind of half-way between fact and fiction? Telling stories that appear real and legible, yet that are also speculating and extrapolating, or offering some sort of reflection on how things are, and how they might become something else?”
- Julian Bleeker of The Near Future Laboratory

Pretend for a second that you can predict the future

In fact, you have just been sent through a mental wormhole 100 years into the future. What do you see? How are people communicating? Traveling? Eating? Now bottle those visions up and bring them back to our present-day with you. Oh, what’s that, you can’t? Why not? The technologies don’t exist, you say? Hmm… Ok, how bout this – come on back and write some stories about it. Or better yet make us a ton of prototypes that each hint at some part of the future! How do you suppose an interaction designer might take on this challenge differently from say Arthur C. Clarke? This is what interests me: predictive art and design that is essentially indistinguishable from magic. I’d like to clarify my meaning of the word “magic” a bit. Historically magic has meant many things, ranging from illusionists’ glamorous stage performances to wizards and witches casting spells. The “magic” I’m referring to is more of an abstract concept I suppose – one that creates a feeling of wonderment in its audience by exhibiting some seemingly impossible or supernatural feats.

The multimedia duo SWEATSHOPPE recently delivered some magic to the streets of New York. Consisting of Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw, SWEATSHOPPE “works at the intersection of art, music, and technology” all three of which are resonant in this digital-light-painting evidence video.

More magical interactions

If we push interactions to be more and more magical, they will begin to be indistinguishable from the future and from magic itself. I have been referring to existing examples of this effort as “Fringe Design”. Fringe, as in living on the outskirts of “the ordinary”; pushing the boundaries of the imagination, the visual vernacular, and the plausible, without batting an eyelash. Fringe Design should be embraced for its foretelling abilities – not every crazy technology ridden invention predicts how we will live in the future, but it MIGHT! Julian Bleecker, co-founder of The Near Future Laboratory puts it best in his essay, Design Fiction: “Science fiction can be understood as a kind of writing that, in its stories, creates prototypes of other worlds, other experiences, other contexts for life based on the creative insights of the author. Designed objects — or designed fictions — can be understood similarly. They are assemblages of various sorts, part story, part material, part idea-articulating prop, part functional software.” Further on he states that “design fiction objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other worlds.”

Neurosonics Live from Chris Cairns recalls the decades-old dream of realistic, interactive 3D holograms.

They say good design is invisible

What we’re talking about here is the exact opposite (although it may occasionally involve invisibility cloaks or some such related thing). We’re talking about design as spectacle. Art as predictive storytelling. The practicality of this type of work may not seem immediately apparent, but I urge you to think deeper into the future, when the things that these works hinted at decades or centuries ago, are an everyday reality.

Good design is about the voyage

As always, with good design, it’s about the voyage; the process by which the idea evolved. As J.J. Abrams puts it in his article for the April 09 issue of Wired Magazine, “the buildup to a magic trick’s big flourish—is as much of a thrill as the result. There’s discovery to be made and wonder to be had on the journey that not only enrich the ending but in many ways define it.”

Science fiction is largely based on the notion of an alternative future world. Consider this futuristic present the big flourish of the magic trick and everything up until then, the buildup. Since time isn’t restricted to a fixed line in the sense that there is only now and the future, but infinite points in time in between, this journey is happening now and will continue to happen forever. It’s up to designers to consider our role in delivering magical flourishes for the alternate worlds of tomorrow. Without props, there could be no magic trick. That is certainly not to say, however, that by simply having props, you have a magic trick. The props serve as vital, tangible ingredients in the total experience of a trick, but they alone do not add up to a series of interactions that comprise an experience. Claiming such a thing would be to ignore other crucial components such as the magician, the stage and architectural context, the crowd of fellow wonderers around you, and perhaps above all, the theatrical trickery of a good magic show. This is not to say that well considered interaction design MUST employ trickery, but what if it did share more similarities with magic shows? How could we begin to think about designed objects as part of a “service and people” economy the way props are part of a magic performance? Consider the three acts of a classic magic trick (as portrayed in the movie, The Prestige):

• Act 1: The Pledge -  The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course, it probably isn’t.
• Act 2: The Turn – The magician makes his ordinary something, do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it.
• Act 3: The Prestige – This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, in which you see something shocking which you’ve never seen before.

What if designed experiences followed this pattern (minus the life-threatening bits in the third act, of course)? Perhaps designers can integrate aspects of this time tested process into the design of every things. To take users to a new depth of wonderment where anything seems possible.

Arthur C. Clarke knew that science fiction fans were seeking “immersive fantasies. They wanted warmly supportive subcultures in which they could safely abandon their cruelly limiting real-life roles, and play semi-permanent dress-up…”

as Bruce Sterling notes in his essay, Design Fiction. He knew that in order to make his fantasies truly immersive, though, he would have to stay somewhat grounded in contemporary notions of the future, reflecting upon today while extrapolating into tomorrow. To inspire readers to speculate on how things are and wonder how they might become something else. Maybe, even to motivate the designers out there to take charge of defining the steps in between today and tomorrow.

Microsoft plans to have its Project Natal available for Christmas later this year, proving that experience designers ARE working on delivering tomorrow to today’s holiday shoppers. If it works half as well as all the press videos make it look, it will be the most magical gaming system of all time.

Interacting with a thing rarely happens all at once and then is over

It tends to happen over time, or at least can be broken down into a series of interaction events. Each of these events presents an opportunity to elicit the same sense of wonder and joy of a good magic trick, or the end of a great chapter in a science fiction novel. “What will happen next?” the makers of these things want you to ask. “How will this end?” “How does it all work?” Magic and science fiction both typically do a wonderful job at this, but what about design? Why can’t our everyday experiences push our mental boundaries of what is possible today and make us wonder more often – what will tomorrow be like? What will the next century be like? I propose we follow Julian’s lead and “throw out the disciplinary constraints one assumes under the regime of fact” and allow our minds to wander. Wander to a place where robots, ray-guns, time machines, artificial intelligences, nanotechnology, and magic abound. Let us all wander, to tomorrow.

Top image: The Prestige

It’s hard to look back at 2009 and ignore the rather sudden blooming of augmented reality. What was it that made AR suddenly so popular? The rise of ‘mobile’ apps helped. But was that all there was to it? I don’t think so.You can learn so much about a culture by observing how they take in new information. It’s easier than ever to watch how the internet community responds to new things; whether it be a new president, a new episode of Fringe, the death of a pop icon, or ‘new’ technologies. When something happens you can literally watch the connected swarms absorbing the news, assimilating it into their lives, and regurgitating it in the form of comments, tweets, articles and other hip ways of communicating.

With technological innovation

This cycle of assimilation from inventor to news source and eventually the public (who then sometimes become secondary inventors) can be a frenzied and often frustrating thing to observe. Especially for user experience designers. Until the true benefit of a technology becomes its most prominent usage, it will continue to wallow in worthless gimmicky applications, and this makes me sad. If, instead of embarking on a futile development voyage, we thought about it a little bit first, we might actually be able to figure out how to make good use of a new technology in, say, under a few decades.

ARead All About It

Although the ‘news release’ of augmented reality’s invention may not have ever actually happened, the current frenzy is reminiscent of what happened when the first visions of connected personal computers starting popping up in the 60′s. That is, to put it bluntly, uninspired exhibitions of the technology with little to no regard for a particular user need or everyday application. That said, I really can’t blame people for iterating and trying to hone in on the most viable use, I just wish they could be a little more thoughtful about it, that’s all.

Parading around claims that the latest issue of your magazine is capable of telling the time, that you, the reader can control the weather, wins you no points in my book. The fact that the editor in chief says, “What you’ve seen so far is that, you can control what happens with the issue…” Excuse me, but couldn’t I already control what happens with every other issue of every other magazine I have owned? How does this augmented reality issue suddenly empower me to decide what to do with it? Does it contribute any new meaning in my life? The answer, sadly enough for Esquire’s last ditch effort to save its print embodiment, is that it doesn’t. As much as I love Robert Downey Jr.: this is a gimmick. Albeit a nicer gimmick than some of the other augmented riffraff we’ve seen of late, but it’s still a gimmick. It does not contribute to the value of your print magazine any more than a shiny coupon for a store that you don’t even have in your town.

Now I’m not saying I have all the answers

In fact, I really don’t have any answers. But if I were to think about this, I might arrive at the conclusion that instead of tacking on some fiducials that enable a computer screen-bound fashion model to shed some sweaters, Esquire maybe could have tried to enhance the reading experience of…oh I don’t know…the articles? Come on people, let’s put our heads together and figure out what to do with this goshdarn AR stuff. Why is it so hard to come up with a useful application that everyone can and wants to use?

A few months ago

I found myself optimistically answering someone else’s utterance of this same plea with specific examples of a few really cool AR applications. Just so this rant isn’t entirely ranty, here are some of my favorites:

USPS’s Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator

You gotta love the simplicity of purpose and beautiful execution of USPS’s Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator. This, to me it is an ideal example of a company identifying a user need (finding the right box size for some goods). It is answering that need with a technological solution that uses augmented reality, not because its popular, but because it allows for a really great in-home solution to their customer’s problem. Now, instead of trying to fix the user experience in every one of their thousands of store locations, USPS allows users to go to their site, print the USPS eagle image on a piece of paper, turn on their webcam, launch the simulator and hold the eagle icon up to your camera to see what size box to purchase. Voila, value added and problem solved.

Topps 3D Live trading cards

Whoever thought that cutting edge technology couldn’t be nostalgic is being proven wrong with Topps 3D Live trading cards. Talk about reincarnating a dead pastime. Not only do these new cards give sports fans a reason to go out and purchase new cards to supplement their dad’s handed-down mega collection, they also include games. Whether this concept successfully popularizes baseball card collecting or not, it’s certanly an admirable attempt at using new technology to add value (and a more complete service) to a nostalgic product.

Living Sasquatch

While this example may not be as clear cut about adding value to an exisiting product or service economy, the Living Sasquatch project proves once and for all, that Big Foot is indeed real, augmentedly at least.

BMW

It’s likely that this BMW augmented reality video was made almost entirely with video effects, however the concept behind it is a powerful one. A future in which life’s instructions are simply a layer ontop of reality (seen through hopefull less dorky glasses) is a future I’m excited to live in.

Zugara’s shopping tool

Zugara claims that this webcam-based shopping tool is the meeting point of augmented reality and utility. I’d actually have to agree. With the goal of enhancing the online retail shopping experience, the site allows users to ‘try on’ clothes in the comfort of their computer room, all without needing a keyboard or mouse. The tasty blend of motion capture and AR gives this concept a ton of style points.

Tellart 2008 Holiday Card

While there were no doubt several examples of AR holiday cards from the past couple years, I couldn’t help but insert this musical number, made by my multi-talented coworkers at Tellart.

AR Drum Kit

Continuing with the music theme, I really enjoy this drum kit demo for its ability to work with the parameters of AR and maintain the gestural feeling of drumming. It may not be a game changer just yet, but I think it’s one of the most interesting directions I’ve seen.

I really do believe that AR has a place in our world

Science fiction novels have long predicted a future in which everyone sports AR glasses, navigating the real world with varying layers of virtual. And this future is exciting; people SHOULD be excited. I just hope developers get all the useless crap out of there system soon so we can move on to the augmented future we all dream of. The key, I think, is to calm down, think about how to make game changing applications that users will crave, and facilitate the assimilation of new technologies into everyone’s lives in the most exciting and useful way possible.

Top image by: cubistcarborough