Keeping it Real, Thoughts on a True Cyborgian Design
The growing use of big data, married to ever-more sophisticated algorithms, offers enormously seductive inputs for designers of all sorts. The ability to marshal and parse trends—at scale—is unprecedented. So too, the opportunity—albeit less well-developed—to model market, adoption, and environmental conditions. The result is an emerging vision of what a cyborgian design might look like.
There are some significant bugs, nonetheless, that we need to address if we’re to harness the best of the machine as well as the best of the human. In other words, to have a cyborgian design that is at least as much human as it is machine. (And it is probably obvious, but always bears repeating, this is not the usual way in our technophilic world.)
Perhaps the most important of these bugs is ahistoricity, that is the tendency to regard things unmoored (and frequently, distinct) from their history. The challenge in this case is ensuring that the results of a cyborgian design process are rooted in the human experience. That is, that they embody the richness of our collective and individual pasts, and appropriately embed those that contribute most powerfully to design as both a good, and as a catalyst to a better life.
Obviously, all design, all trends, all everything that gets vacuumed-up into the slavering maws of our global databases, is the result of millennia of human experience. How could it be otherwise (and will assuredly remain so until we really do have a design-interested (!?) general AI)? The problem is, it has—in all that time, and through the relentless mutations and machinations of the market—been watered-down and dissipated, and in the process has lost much of its puissance.
A true cyborgian design—that is, one that honors appropriately both the human and the machine—needs to ensure that the datasets sitting at the heart of the work (churning in the silicon hearts of the machine) are well-tuned. One way to do this is to create a repository of deep culture—one that is accessible to the algorithms that are crunching all this data, and spitting out all this seductive stuff.
An obvious question—and an obviously good one—is, so which data should this repository contain? For this to work as it should, all the contents should be:
as close to primary sources as possible, not merely derivative (there are, after all, plenty of extant derivatives available elsewhere);
broadly representative—geographically, temporally, creatively—incorporating a diversity of media, approaches, eras, and places;
tagged and cataloged in a way that allows for their incorporation and manipulation by the same algorithms working with the contemporary data;
and, finally, these data should be weighted so that in any algorithmic discernment, the Repository of the Deep has, at least, parity with the other datasets.
I say, ‘at least,’ because while designers will constantly tune and refine their favorite algorithms to get the sort of aesthetic results they and their clients desire, incorporating the Repository adds both considerable depth, and an underlying resonance, that enhances as well as reinforces design selections. More practically—of course—adding additional weight to Repository data will help gifted designers explore profoundly new expressions of human creativity, experience, and possibility.
Human/machine collaborations will (re)define the next few decades of creative production. (Until, they too, like all before it, become just the way of doing things.) Experimentation, with its concomitant mad successes and great failures, will shape how we see the world, express our desires, comfort our souls, and face the future.
The near universal trend towards embracing and even encouraging an ahistorical present concerned only with what is and what will be, offers us a too thin, and too meager sort of existence. Conscious, intentional, and dedicated efforts to remember, to excavate, and to incorporate what’s come before, is what has inspired our transition from pseudo-bipedal apes to creatures that play with space and time. There is no reason that it can’t also power how we build our spaces, our products, and the world (and maybe worlds) we inhabit.
—Peter
