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The polygenetic designer - Final V3-FG-FINAL
Abstract
In Metamodernism: The Future of Theory, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm (2021) structures a new timeframe to understand better the 20th century; the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern, which gives way to the metamodern. Metamodernism is a way of viewing the world that emphasises a kind of integrated pluralism. Given the latest development in design during the late 19th century and 20th century, this framework may assist to understand the evolution of its practice. Following this framework, the evolution of design practice may be structured in four fundamental periods; pre-modern embodied by the craftsman, modern embodied by the industrial designer (Papanek's “Like It Is”), post-modern embodied by the innovator (Papanek's “How It Could Be”; Papanek, 1972) and an emerging metamodern paradigm embodied by what I will describe in this chapter as the Polygenetic designer (Figure 5.1). In what follows, I will review the evolution of design practice from a historical perspective to understand the current intersection between design and biology. This position will lead a case for the Polygenetic designer and a potential operational framework.
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This year on the seminar programme of the MA Environmental Architecture, we approached our usual study material in a more speculative mode, through a series of world-building and worlding fictions workshops. We imagined worlds more or less similar to our own (and researched our own planet's biology, geology, meterology, cultures, environmental disputes, land forms, systems, etc as the basis for our fictions.) Although many of these worlds were superficially very different from our own, all inevitably resonated with it. Some worlds appeared to maintain relatively stable homeostatic 'plateaux'. Others were undergoing systemic changes. One narrated the final months and weeks of an Earth, as it was slowly ejected from its orbit in the solar system. We coined 'Geopoiesis' as a heuristic research concept, to map and discuss both our own work, and a wider field of related 'world-building' and 'worlding' practices. We conceived of 'world-building' in relation to collective political imaginaries, and 'worlding' in relation to the construction and performance of political subjectivities. A quick survey of the geopoietic field might include, in no particular order: science fiction, fantasy and counter-factual fictions, IPCC reports, Green New Deal proposals, Gregory Bateson/Felix Guattari's Three Ecologies, Benjamin Bratton/Strelka's Terraforming programme, Arturo Escobar's pluriversal politics, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's 'bringing forth of worlds', Donna Haraway's multi-species worldings, and the Zapatista call, recently repeated by the Red Nation, for 'a world in which many worlds fit'. Some of our references are poetic and nebulous. Others synthesise the peer-reviewed work of innumerable contributors. For example, the future scenario planning and world-building models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), contain significant quantitative data analysis, combined with all kinds of qualitative evidence and interpretation, in for example both its SSPs: Shared SocioEconomic Pathways (which build a series of five scenarios based upon an increasingly diverse range of voices and disciplines), and also its RCPs: Representative Concentration Pathways (which describe four scenarios based on estimated increases in radiative forcing by the year 2100 (compared to pre-industrial levels) ranging from 2.6 to 8.5 W/sqm). The IPCC world-building exercises are significant artefacts. Still problematic? Yes, of course, but nonetheless incredibly impressive pieces of trans-and multidisciplinary thinking, managing with relative transparency and clarity a manifold of methodological, epistemological and practical difficulties of staggering complexity. Importantly, the work of the IPCC is increasingly resonant with the demands and framing of the Just Transition/Global Green New Deal movement. Indeed, this MA EA Geopoiesis project here springs out of our work on Green New Deal in recent years, which asked : What kinds of world-building imaginaries might we need to develop, if we are to grow a Global GND Dialogue that can mediate the future scenario models that we have from the IPCC, through the needs of situated social movements that are increasingly engaging in local environmental disputes that have systemic planetary implications, and are simultaneously imagining alternative socio-ecological futures around the planet?
As design thinking evolves we are beginning to develop a clearer idea of its relationship to other domains of thinking and in particular its specific ontological nature. Here we consider design’s special relationship to the future and how concepts of anticipation, probabilism and prospectivity underpin a new understanding of design’s relationship to cross-domain collaboration potential. In effect we discuss how design cares for the future of transformation in an era where rapidly advancing technologies via exponential technological developments are challenging human-machine interactions. Probabilistic knowledge emerges as an ontological reality for addressing the intrinsically abductive nature of future design research. Ultimately this approach implies a different form of knowing and aims to position design research as the discipline better prepared for addressing the future.
In this paper, the authors propose prospective design as a future-led mixed-methodology to address unintended consequences. It combines systems analysis with extrapolations and constructivist perspectives to reconcile confronted models of design future(s). In the results presented, the authors suggest a need to include ethical frameworks in design to involve students in ethical issues to address the main task of design in the digital and exponential technological age within which we are living including; preparedness, readiness, and appropriateness.
Today there is a very wide consensus on the idea that embryonic development is the result of a genetic programme and of epigenetic processes. Many models have been proposed in this theoretical framework to account for the various aspects of development, and virtually all of them have one thing in common: they do not acknowledge the presence of organic codes (codes between organic molecules) in ontogenesis. Here it is argued instead that embryonic development is a convergent increase in complexity that necessarily requires organic codes and organic memories, and a few examples of such codes are described. This is the code theory of development, a theory that was originally inspired by an algorithm that is capable of reconstructing structures from incomplete information, an algorithm that here is briefly summarized because it makes it intuitively appealing how a convergent increase in complexity can be achieved. The main thesis of the new theory is that the presence of organic codes in ontogenesis is not only a theoretical necessity but, first and foremost, an idea that can be tested and that has already been found to be in agreement with the evidence.
This review focuses on critical milestones in the development path for the use of bees, mainly honey bees and bumble bees, as sentinels and biosensors. These keystone species comprise the most abundant pollinators of agro-ecosystems. Pollinating 70%-80% of flowering terrestrial plants, bees and other insects propel the reproduction and survival of plants and themselves, as well as improve the quantity and quality of seeds, nuts, and fruits that feed birds, wildlife, and us. Flowers provide insects with energy, nutrients, and shelter, while pollinators are essential to global ecosystem productivity and stability. A rich and diverse milieu of chemical signals establishes and maintains this intimate partnership. Observations of bee odor search behavior extend back to Aristotle. In the past two decades great strides have been made in methods and instrumentation for the study and exploitation of bee search behavior and for examining intra-organismal chemical communication signals. In particular, bees can be trained to search for and localize sources for a variety of chemicals, which when coupled with emerging tracking and mapping technologies create novel potential for research, as well as bee and crop management.
Modern design practice is a fluid, conceptual and discipline-breaking activity. This unpredictable creative practice regularly traverses, transcends and transfigures conventional disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. As the fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative
practice from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based,” we present the argument that the undisciplined and irresponsible researcher/practitioner, who purposely blurs distinctions and has exchanged “discipline-based” methods for “issue-
or project-based” ones, will be best placed to make connections that generate new ways to identify “other” dimensions of design activity and thought that are needed for the complex, interdependent issues we now face. We present the case that reliance on the exhausted historic
disciplines as the boundaries of our understanding has been superseded by a boundless space/time that we call “alterplinarity.” The digital has modified the models of design thought and action, and as a result research and practice should transform from a convention domesticated
by the academy to a reaction to globalization that is undisciplined.
Contemporary design is typified by fluid, evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, transcend and transfigure historical disciplinary and conceptual boundaries. This mutability means that design research, education, and practice is constantly shifting, creating, contesting and negotiating new terrains of opportunities and re-shaping the boundaries of the discipline. This paper proposes that this is because globalisation and the proliferation of the digital has resulted in connections that are no longer “amid”, cannot be measured “across”, nor encompass a “whole” system, which has generated an “other” dimension (Bourriaud, 2009), an “alternative disciplinarity” - an “alterplinarity”. As the fragmentation of distinct disciplines has shifted creative practice from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based” (Heppell, 2006), we present the argument that the researcher, who purposely blurs distinctions and has dumped methods from being “discipline-based” to “issue- or project-based”, will be best placed to make connections that generate new ways to identify “other” dimensions of design research, activity and thought that is needed for the complex, interdependent issues we now face. We present the case that reliance on the historic disciplines of design as the boundaries of our understanding has been superseded by a boundless space/time that we call “alterplinarity”. The digital has modified the models of design thought and action, and as a result research and practice should transform from a convention domesticated by the academy to a reaction to globalisation that is yet to be disciplined.
The contextual field of this research is the history of ideas in design, 'ideas' being understood as ideologies, dogmas, treatises, theories or philosophies (i.e. both descriptive and normative items), and 'design' including all practices related to our built environment with some aesthetic concern (graphic, product, architectural, urban, landscape design). Our corpus is constituted from written and published texts mainly but not exclusively from the second half of the last century. The objective of the research was to find out if some Gestalt or model (evolutionary, structural, thematic or else) emerged from this historical corpus and the purpose was essentially pedagogical and didactic. The research yielded the following interesting features: (1) the material object or product has long been the main focus of the theories, all the way up to the middle of the twentieth century; (2) the object tends to disappear from the concerns of the theoreticians after the Second World War, both upstream and downstream of the design process, i.e. on the side of the designers and on the side of the users - design theories mainly focus upstream on the design process and downstream on the functions of the product; (3) much more recently another shift took place away from the product in the preoccupations of the theoreticians, both upstream and downstream again. Theoretical models are now interested in either the actors of the design process or the experiences of the user as a 'whole' human being.These shifts correspond to a displacement of the centre of the interest respectively from the aesthetic to the logical, to the ethical fields of philosophy. This 'eclipse of the object' has important consequences for the theory and practice of design.
Political history tells us that the world order is remained in transformation since its inception. Various collective norms and shared preferences frame structures of system (order) and with the passage of time it replaced or upgraded by another one. As Palmer and Perkin (2003) aptly said, that in international relations the 'world community is in transition.' It seems an appealing argument and true in a sense, when we delve back into the pages of history, we observe that world politics is in transition, and change is a constant phenomenon either at system/ structural level or within the system. Waltz believes, changes with system occur all the time, how change of structure or whole system takes a while. Whether, it’s a multipolar world order, Bipolar or unipolar, we witness all the transitory phases that culminate to frame today’s unipolar settings of world politics.
In this paper, the origins of second-order Cybernetics are sketched, and are particularly identified with circularity: a quality that was at the basis of the studies that lead to the creation of the field of Cybernetics. The implications of the new analysis that second-order Cybernetics (Cybernetics treated cybernetically: that is, Cybernetics when circularity is taken seriously) gives rise to are considered in terms of the two qualities that Wiener gave to Cybernetics in his eponymous book – control and communication. Finally, the analysis is applied to that other proto-cybernetic concept, purpose. It is shown that (and in consequence how) the notion of goal and purpose must be radically reconsidered in second-order Cybernetic systems.
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