I saw a great presentation at the “Design Science: Nature’s Problem Solving Method” Symposium  today. “Design Science” was coined by Buckminster Fuller for an ambitious process where individuals or teams can “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”  This Synergetics Collaborative symposium was held at RISD this weekend in collaboration with The Edna Lawrence Nature Lab.

The Keynote presentation that struck me was by Zann Gill, called “Design Science as Anticipatory Sustainability via Worldgaming.” Another presentation of Zann Gill’s can be found here:  

Zann Gill thinks that Design has something to teach Science and specifically Evolutionary theory. Some evolution theorists see evolution as a random set of gene permutations that periodically shift because of mutations or a change of environment; but others understand it as also being a collaborative convergent process, where in gene pools "conspire" in taking advantage and surviving.  Zann Gill, a designer in her own right, who studied architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, worked for Buckminster Fuller, built tensegrity structures (those structures composed of perfectly balanced opposing forces of tension and compression),worked at NASA, was a student of Evolutionary Biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, studied briefly at RISD, understands the “organic nature” of the creative process. There are many forces at work in navigating the creative process that drives it more than a random set of processes occasionally shaped by  a context of circumstance:” human will, desire, sensibility, intuition, an uncanny anticipatory sense to form associations and connections,  to name a few. But the creative process is also not completely deliberate, not a result of achieving a pre-defined goal where intention precedes process. This understanding distinguishes her observations and work from the creationist’s movement, called, “Intelligent Design.”  Intelligent Design is not only a mis-representation of science, but a mis-representation of design. It presumes a designer that sits in a higher authority “above and outside the system He designs.” At RISD, we understand how thought and action are one, how function follows form as frequently as form follows function, how ideas emerge through making, and how intentions can grow out of the creative process.

Her life’s experiences have brought a deeper, salient and timely return to Bucky Fuller’s idea of The World Game Theory.  Gill believes that the self organizational nature (not from a top down superior being) of design can play a key role in the next stage of Game Theory. The unique approaches of many individuals spread across the globe can be networked in forming a “group mind” of a kind in playing a collaborative role, (instead of only being a competitive one) in our own evolution.  Her perspective can offer a portal for our work at RISD in addressing the BIG problems that our world is facing today.

At the beginning of 2010, two of Zann Gill’s books will come out: What Daedalis told Darwin: Darwin’s Dilemma & Designing Intelligence and If Microbes Begat Mind: Origins of Life & Emergence of Intelligence. span>  http://zanngill.com/home.html

 I couldn't help thinking that artists, designers, academics, students, all of us could have something to do or say about this. Impromptu industrial design? A record or memory of this city before eviction in a few weeks? A follow-up (where will they go)? The summer dampens our ability to react, but it seems so poignant to me that this tent city--involving so many issues of space, society, culture, design--would be right here so close to our campus, and yet in a way so far removed. Or not?

I've been reading about Monsanto and other companies suing farmers whose crops have incorporated genetic signatures from patented soy and corn, although the farmers themselves never adopted the GM crops--they just blew in with the pollen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser

I was wondering if, this being genetics and all, it might be possible to turn that on its head in much the same way as the open source software movement put out a license that required that any software incorporating anything from the open source software itself be made to be open source.

In other words, it might be possible to derive a variant of soy, for example, patent it, and release it under GPL (in hedgerows and backyards) where its genetic material could incorporate itself into Monsanto or ADM soy fields and render it unsellable from a patent-law point of view. To overturn the law and allow the soy to be sellable would also, QED, allow the farmers who are getting sued for planting next years' crop from the seeds of this years' without paying more to have a serious legal defense.

Open source genetics is going to happen, as long there is patentable genetics and publicly available genetic modification tools. Both of those exist. I think it would be worthwhile considering the foundation of an ethical open-source genetics foundation ASAP. Any of you know of such a thing?

Evan Murphy (Furniture 2011) sent around a link to Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry's Sixth Sense presentation at TED:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

This seems a case of research meeting demand.  Our fingers are already pressing surfaces expecting them to respond.  I'm not talking about sex, though our negotiation of digital environments, in terms of touch and exploration, seems to borrow from models of sexuality, female rather than phallic.  I'm talking about information.  For anyone who spends substantial parts of the day in digital environments, the real world can seem full of cul-de-sacs and dead ends.  It just seems to stop suddenly.  Either you have to physically go somewhere to continue.  Or the trajectory disintegrates.  You want to find something in the book you're holding?  Well, good luck!  Everything seems like so much work, with so little possibility of success.  I have to search through every page to find that word I half-remember?  Suddenly time, so fluid online, becomes weighty again.

I can see the attraction of Maes and Mistry's Sixth Sense.  My fingertips and mind want it already.  I have questions.  When any surface yields programmed information to the soliciting touch what will work mean?  What will space mean?  How will this affect time?  These concepts are already in flux, thinly anchored by hardware or workstation to traditional understanding.  Skin itself becomes less boundary than intelligent organ (which is what boundaries in general are becoming).

When surfaces respond in programmed ways to our touch will our interaction with our environment be more or less physical?  Our physical experience on earth gives rise to our metaphors and conceptual understanding.  What conceptual shifts will crucial shifts in physical experience produce?  When the outside comes in, physically and on an informational scale never before approached, i.e., the chip in the brain, inside and outside lose valence as concepts in relation to the body, their most basic seat.

And a lesser question: Poetry has had great fun gamboling with every technology thrown up.  Instead of experimenting at the exhilarating fringes of new technology will poetry, or art, ever become again the repository of the heart, i.e., raw, gristly human values?  And another lesser question: Teaching can no longer be concerned with the transmission of information which students can access themselves.  Teaching, to some extent, may be concerned with selecting or recommending information, i.e., it has an editing function.  But this generation of teachers is being brutally challenged because neither the what nor the how, as we learned it, can be reasonably passed on. 

Students are our teachers, in so many fields.  At RISD, the teaching of demonstrable skills, or the time to learn and practice them, has continued validity.  In addition to skills, there must be a range of meta-areas morphing into relevance as the definition of the disciplines weakens.  Some of them might be quite old-fashioned: conversation, discourse itself, rudimentary politics, ethics.  If we really thought about a visionary curriculum for artists and designers for these opening decades of the 21st century, what surprises could we ignite?

Laurence Sterne, whose Tristram Shandy 41 students and myself are currently reading in class, makes great use of aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure where the sentence suddenly breaks.  Sterne piles a carnival of devices into that break—dashes, asterisks, even the sudden snapping of a tobacco pipe.  His characters have too much to say and rarely a handy way of saying it. There’s always a mismatch between thought and word, or sense and word, or image and word, or intention and word, or even desire and word.  Laced through the nine volumes of Tristram Shandy—which my students think is already more than enough—there are further volumes, only the entry points of which are marked.

Aposiopesis implies more than breaking-off: there is a freight of energy in that dash. 

When a speaker or writer suddenly breaks off in aposiopesis, the air or the line vibrates with the unsaid—or unsayable.  

I suppose it’s like ejaculation, an overflowing of bounds, with exquisite energy attached.  Silence breaking the bounds of text. 

Aposiopesis can also be the loss of desire to speak.  The sentence implodes, all the blinds come down.

Auscultation is another interesting word: the conscious act of listening.  In the act of auscultation, we position ourselves to listen, coiling the noise of our own bodies into quietness to build an auditorium.

Aposiopesis and auscultation seem to meet at their edges: the jagged edge of aposiopesis and the curve of auscultation; the emdash, and the stilled breath.

You can balance on that long emdash, surfing on charged silence. 
You can unfold, larval, into the moment of full attention.

Aposiopesis: a javelin of silence slicing through noise.
Auscultation: a listening so meaty it is dimensional.

A speaker, or writer, can ride the emdash right out of language, abandoning the realm of the social.  A speaker, or writer, can consume the listening of those listening, feeding it out into talk.

In the act of online writing, there is both aposiopesis and auscultation.  The chain of command is gone.   The circles of editor, subeditor, peer reviewer, art editor, are gone.  You jump off the cliff.

It is almost like speaking to yourself.  But you are listening.

There still is the moment of the dive, when we are poised in silence, ready to send.

Kenneth Goldsmith (RISD BFA Sculpture ’84) said: “If every word spoken during one day in New York were a snowflake, there would be a blizzard.”  What is the density of the online word? 

Both aposiopesis and auscultation occupy infinitely small points in time.  They are moments of balance outside the communicative norm.

My third A is audience: the living space between the finger of Adam and the finger of God.

In class, we are also reading Henri Bergson’s “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic”—“For the comic spirit has a logic of its own, even in its wildest eccentricities.” 

Poetry has its own economy too.  There is no market and it never crashes.

It is almost always true that the reader of poetry is the writer of poetry.  Online environments are like that: the reader is almost certainly the writer. Not that they are one and the same.  But each has the capacity of both and is likely to exercise it.

There are other As of course—argument, adjudication, authority.  These are defaults.  We have here a space of fragrant possibility.  George Lakoff has spent a lifetime demonstrating how our metaphorical systems derive from our bodily experience.  We communicate now in a culture of finger-tips. 

Our active creative audience is right here.