LIKE AN ORACLE, PAOLA ANTONELLI SPREADS CLUES BEFORE US. She curates rich, complex museum experiences that encourage participants to themselves construct the present and future of design. Because her exhibitions tend to delve into the current moment, they intersect sharply with technology. The Museum of Modern Art in New York hired the Italian-born Antonelli as a curator in 1994. From the beginning she acted on her instincts. Understanding the communicative power of the Internet, she designed MoMA’s first website for her 1995 show Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design. Using $300 provided by the museum, she took HTML classes at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) so she could code it herself. Since then she has fearlessly plowed through the snobbery of the art world to seize upon the definitive artifacts and interactions of our time. In 2011 she acquired key video games for the collection: not just the consumer faces of the games, but, when possible, the code itself. Later she challenged the nature of acquisition by bringing to the collection public domain items, including the “@” symbol and Google’s pin icon.1 In 2012 she added to her role as senior curator by founding the museum’s Research and Development department, giving formal structure to the think-tank mentality that fuels her endeavors. Rapid manufacturing, mapping, tagging, networked objects, and biodesign are just some of the subjects she tackles; we engage with her exhibition content to better understand the time we live in, a time in which Antonelli finds “designers on top.”2

DESIGN AND THE ELASTIC MIND

PAOLA ANTONELLI | 2008

DESIGN 1:1

Today, many designers have turned several late-twentieth-century infatuations on their heads, for instance with speed, dematerialization, miniaturization, and a romantic and exaggerated formal expression of complexity. After all, there is a limit beyond which micro-keyboards are too small for a person’s fingers and complexity simply becomes too overwhelming. Examples abound in all fields of people’s desire to return to what is perceived as a human dimension, including gastronomy (the Slow Food movement), agriculture (organic produce), travel (ecotourism), production of energy (distributed generation), economic aid (microinvestment), and politics (the town hall meeting), to name just a few.3 These all revolve around the idea that global issues should be tackled bottom up and that an individual or local spark can start a powerful chain reaction with global implications.

The most contemporary of design theory is devoted to the quest for an environment, whether virtual or physical, built in human proportion—much the way in architecture a hypothetical one-to-one model would represent buildings as life-size. Designers who believe in this preach simplicity, and they labor to give objects souls and personality and to ease their communication with people and with other objects.4 They apply the same bottom-up methodology to spawn innovations that are organically attuned to human nature and to the world, and they rework priorities so that human beings always come before any celebration of progress, as in the project One Laptop per Child or in Jonathan Harris’s moving Internet interface We Feel Fine. These designers domesticate innovation and make sure that objects will deliver value and meaning and therefore justify their presence in people’s lives, as with Mathieu Lehanneur’s delicately high-tech Elements. And out of consideration for people’s well-being, they help us incorporate healthy behaviors within our frenetic habits, as seen in Marie-Virginie Berbet’s Narco office capsule.

The idea of human scale has changed since Charles and Ray Eames’s famous 1968 film Powers of Ten because human perception has been expanded and augmented by technology. Distance is not what it used to be, and neither is time: not only does it range from the attosecond (10^–18 seconds, or the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms) to the Long Now, the concept that inspired Danny Hillis to establish a foundation whose goal is to promote thinking for the next ten thousand years, but some professionals’ routine commute is a twice-a-month Tokyo–New York round trip, while others work across several time zones without a need to state their position at any time.5 Indeed, where and when have become hard to pin down on any who.6There is a standoff between the two ancient Greek notions of time: chronos, the shared convention of sequential time marked by the sundial, and kairos, the subjective moment that allows an individual to adapt and evolve with circumstances. While no one would argue that we are beholden to the former, the shift toward the latter is seen in the urge to record and share personal, life-defining moments that is at the source of the proliferation of Weblogs and other tagged and mapped metadiaries. This obsessive chronicling of personal information online—from pets’ names to breakfast preferences, the phenomenon of oversharing is frequent and is the subject of several etiquette-themed discussions—points to people’s attempts to share their epiphanies and impose their own individual experiences of time, memory, and life over the global network that runs on conventional time. Counting on extraordinary advances in data storage capacity and on new, easy-to-use software, we can finally sit back and remember everything.7 From the revelation that women do not need to have menstrual periods to studies whose goal is to dramatically reduce the amount of sleep needed in order to be perfectly functional and even the debate on human lifespan—which some say soon could be stretched at least half again as long as current expectations—the focus now is on ways to break the temporal rhythms imposed by society in order to customize and personalize them.

If design is to help enable us to live to the fullest while taking advantage of all the possibilities provided by contemporary technology, designers need to make both people and objects perfectly elastic. It will entail some imaginative thinking—not simply following a straight line from A to C passing through B. Several design principles can be used to accomplish this. One recurrent theme in design today is a stronger involvement of the senses to both enhance and integrate the delivery of high-tech functions, as in James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau’s and Susana Soares’s scent-based projects or in the synesthesia-inspired work of Eyal Burstein and Michele Gauler—both of which demonstrate technology’s ability to deepen our sensorial awareness and spectrum.8…

Design schools like the Academy of Art and Design in Eindhoven, The Netherlands (offering, for instance, postgraduate courses in Humanitarian Design and Sustainable Style and Interior, Industrial, and Identity Design), or the Royal College of Art, London, focus their courses on senses and sensuality, identity, memory, and on other staples of human life that are as old as humankind—birth, death, love, safety, and curiosity—yet are rendered urgent by the speed with which technology is moving. These principles differ from the so-called human-centered design that functionalist industrial designers of the past fifty years have employed to shift their attention from the object to the “user”; they are reminders of the great responsibility that comes with design’s new great power of giving form and meaning to the degrees of freedom opened by the progress of technology.9 Such a holistic approach calls for the development of well-honed analytical and critical muscles and for a new, self-assured theory of design. At the Royal College of Art, for instance, Anthony Dunne, head of the Design Interactions Department, preaches the importance of “critical design,” which he defines as “a way of using design as a medium to challenge narrow assumptions, preconceptions, and givens about the role products play in everyday life.”10 “Design for debate,” as this new type of practice is also called, does not always immediately lead to “useful” objects but rather to servings of exotic food for thought whose usefulness is revealed by their capacity to help us ponder how we really want our things to fit into our lives. Noam Toran’s Accessories for Lonely Men and IDEO’s Social Mobiles comment on, respectively, solitude and the need for a new etiquette in the age of wireless communication. And we certainly need such meditation more than we need another mobile phone design.

Indeed, even as technology offers us more and more options, many agree that we in fact require fewer—not more—objects in our lives. This very simple belief unites the diverse and yet similarly idealistic efforts of many designers worldwide who are trying to inform our lives with the same economy of energy and materials as found in nature. In addition to balancing our lives with the imperatives of new technology, designers today must also consider the impact of their creations on the environment. Organic design has had many different connotations in history, but in its most contemporary meaning it encompasses not only the enthusiastic exploration of natural forms and structures but also interpretations of nature’s economical frameworks and systems. It emerges from the rapidly growing realization that we need to learn to use less matter and energy and to be more efficient. Several factors make contemporary organic design radically different from its past expressions. Towering among these is the computer, whose capacity to master complexity has, perhaps surprisingly, allowed a closeness to the forms and structures of nature never achieved before. Moreover, the urgent need to manage nature’s resources more thoughtfully and economically has provoked a sense of responsibility that is felt—or at least worn as a badge—by contemporary thinkers and doers. This trend can be seen in the pervasive use of the term DNA and the suffix “-scape” to describe any kind of organically integrated context (e.g., “home-scape”) and of biologically inspired attributes, such as “cellular,” to describe the organic skeleton of such entities as the organization of new religious sects, lighting systems, and buildings. Even “viral” has taken on a positive meaning by indicating successful infectious and self-replicating design and communication phenomena.

When it comes to design, however, a badge is not enough: According to an annual review by Britain’s Design Council, 80 percent of the environmental impact of the products, services, and infrastructures around us is determined at the design stage.11 Design needs to engage directly and develop further some of the tools it is currently experimenting with, such as biomimicry algorithms and other forms of computational design, and nanotechnology.12 Nanotechnology, in particular, offers the promise of the principle of self-assembly and self-organization that one can find in cells, molecules, and galaxies; the idea that you would need only to give the components of an object a little push for the object to come together and reorganize in different configurations could have profound implications for the environment, including energy and material savings. “In nanotechnology, new materials and structures can be built atom by atom or molecule by molecule,” explains the introduction to the course “Nano and Design” taught by engineer extraordinaire Cecil Balmond at the University of Pennsylvania, while algorithms are described by architects Chris Lasch and Benjamin Aranda as “a macro, a series of steps, a recipe for making bread.” In the blog that complements his book Soft Machines, Richard Jones extols the potential of nanotechnology in several areas, among them medicine, and talks about “persuading…cells to differentiate, to take up the specialized form of a particular organ,” listing several reasons why nanotechnology would be beneficial to a sustainable energy economy.13

All these tools are about giving objects basic yet precise instructions and letting them fully develop and connect in networks and systems, and this is where one of the most powerful new directions for design lies. While traditional design is often about cutting existing materials to shape or, in the best cases, taming and adapting them, computational design and nanodesign are about generating objects, as can be seen in embryonic and conceptual examples such as Christopher Woebken’s New Sensual Interfaces, and also about seeing them adapt to different circumstances, as in Chuck Hoberman’s Emergent Surface responsive architecture.

As they advocate and obtain roles that are more and more integral to the evolution of society, designers find themselves at the center of an extraordinary wave of cross-pollination. Design-centered interdisciplinary conferences have existed for decades, traditionally initiated by designers.14 Only recently have other communities started to seek designers’ contributions, but this is only the beginning. To adapt and master new technologies and directions, design has branched out into dozens of specialized applications, from communication to interaction and from product design to biomimicry. On the other hand, in order to be truly effective, designers should dabble in economics, anthropology, bioengineering, religion, and cognitive sciences, to mention just a few of the subjects they need today in order to be well-rounded agents of change. Because of their role as intermediaries between research and production, they often act as the main interpreters in interdisciplinary teams, called upon not only to conceive objects, but also to devise scenarios and strategies. To cope with this responsibility, designers should set the foundations for a strong theory of design—something that is today still missing—and become astute generalists. At that point, they will be in a unique position to become the repositories of contemporary culture’s need for analysis and synthesis, society’s new pragmatic intellectuals.

1 To learn more about these acquisitions, see “Why I Brought Pac-Man to MoMA,” TED, May 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/paola_antonelli_why_i_brought_pacman_to_moma.

2 See Paola Antonelli, “Designers on Top,” Eyeo (lecture, Minneapolis, June 5, 2012), https://vimeo.com/44467955.

3 The Slow Food movement was launched in Italy in 1986 to restore the pleasure of “real” food. It was so successful that it contributed to the “slow” concept now spreading to all dimensions of life, from cities to schools and even to money.

4 Graphic designer and computer scientist John Maeda, who is also associate director of research at the MIT Media Lab, has translated his commitment to the ease of communication between people and objects into a full-fledged platform based on simplicity that involves the Media Lab as well as corporations like the Dutch electronics giant Philips. In this same vein, James Surowiecki’s May 28, 2007, article in the New Yorker, titled “Feature Presentation,” discusses the decline in popularity of objects encumbered by too many features, a phenomenon called “feature creep.”

5 According to its website, “The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to…become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.…*The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates; the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.”

6 When going to Dubai, make sure you bring not only your bathing suit but also your favorite ski goggles, because chances are you will visit the Snow Dome for a quick downhill race on the perfect powdery slope in order to escape the 110-degree temperature outside; and when ordering at a McDonald’s drive-thru, don’t be fooled into thinking that your interlocutor is in the booth—she might be in Mumbai. The outsourcing of call centers and customer service centers has greatly contributed to the establishment of our new time-space proportion.

7 In the May 28, 2007, issue of the New Yorker, an article by Alec Wilkinson titled “Remember This? A Project to Record Everything We Do in Life” reported that the great computer scientist Gordon Bell had in 1998 set out to digitize and archive his whole life, from childhood pictures and health records to coffee mugs. The project is still in process.

8 Amazing things are happening in the realm of the senses. Scientists and technologists are focusing on hearing, for instance, and on its untapped potential. Several researchers are experimenting on sonocytology, a way to diagnose cancer by listening to cells—or better, by reading sonograms. Professor James K. Gimzewski and Andrew E. Pelling at the UCLA Department of Chemistry first made the discovery that yeast cells oscillate at the nanoscale in 2002. Amplifying this oscillation results in a sound that lies within the human audible range. As far as olfaction is concerned, one study has explored how certain dogs can sniff cancer in a person’s breath (Michael McCulloch, Tadeusz Jezierski, Michael Broffman, Alan Hubbard, Kirk Turner, and Teresa Janecki, “Diagnostic Accuracy of Canine Scent Detection in Early-and Late-Stage Lung and Breast Cancers,” Integrative Cancer Therapies 3 [March 2006]: 30–39).

9 The champion of this attitude is renowned design critic Don Norman, whose work is directly aimed at product designers.

10 Anthony Dunne, interview in Domus 889 (February 2006): 55. Moreover, the webpage introducing the college’s Design Interactions Department reads: “Designers often refer to people as ‘users,’ or sometimes as ‘consumers.’ In Design Interactions, we prefer to think of both users and designers as, first and foremost, people. That is, we see ourselves as complex individuals moving through an equally complex, technologically mediated, consumer landscape. Interaction may be our medium in this department, but people are our primary subject, and people cannot be neatly defined and labeled. We are contradictory, volatile, and always surprising. To remember this is to engage fully with the complexities and challenges of both people and the field of interaction design.”

11 Design Council, Annual Review 2002 (London: 2002): 19.

12 As the Biomimicry.net website reads, “Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a design discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.” The Biomimicry Institute and its president, Janine M. Benyus, author of the 1997 book Biomimicry (New York: William Morrow), which popularized this field of study, is a resource for designers and companies interested in learning to observe nature and apply the same type of economical wisdom to issues ranging from mundane to existential, such as how to reduce our erosion of the world’s resources.

13 Engineer Cecil Balmond (of Arup), assisted by Jenny Sabin, teaches in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, in the Department of Architecture. The quotation was taken from a description of the course for the spring 2007 semester. It continues, “The nano prefix means one-billionth, so a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Just as antibiotics, the silicon transistor, and plastics…nanotechnology is expected to have profound influences in the twenty-first century, ranging from nanoscopic machines that could for instance be injected in the body to fix problems and the creation of artificial organs and prosthetics, all the way to self-assembling electronic components that behave like organic structures and better materials that perform in novel ways.” Chris Lasch and Benjamin Aranda, in a conversation with the author on March 14, 2007, talked about the role of algorithms in architecture, also well explained in their incisive volume Tooling (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). Richard A. L. Jones’s blog (www.softmachines.org) is a precious resource for all those who want more information on the potential practical applications of nanotechnology in our future.

14 A few of my personal favorites: the historical International Design Conference in Aspen, now defunct, the ongoing TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design, founded by Richard Saul Wurman and now run by Chris Anderson), and Doors of Perception (founded and still run by John Thackara).