»In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling exhorts us to “tear into the world of artifice… revolutionize the interplay of human and object…rip root and branch into the previous industrial base and re-invent it, re-build it.” I prefer the metaphor of clearing a thicket of thorns. There are times when we need to slash-and-burn – but more times, in the future, when we will find it apt to stand and wait.
Bruce tells us that we have to be more critically aware of objects. But we also need to give them less respect. We need to know where they came from, and how; what happens when we use them; what happens to them when they leave our space and time. But we also have to relegate them from the cultural foreground. Reframe them as infrastructure, as utility. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Self-Actualizing Man does not need an SUV.
I never worried until now about the reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. Should I? Are They covering something up? Will all electrical motors go into reverse? On all the elevators in the world, will down become up? Will MS Word become usable? I think we should be told.
Bruce writes that rapid prototyping, and the ability to make many small mistakes in a hurry, is vital. I’m worried about that. How do you test responsibly for unknowable consequences? If the metaphor of tipping points is a meaningful one, it follows that even small design actions can have huge, system-wide consequences. Prototypes can become archetypes. Think of sprawl. It’s true that there’s no turning back. I, too, believe in design. But there are limits to the command-and-control we can ever exert over our physical circumstances.
Bruce worries about things, but I worry about depopulation. Our generation is the first one in history to preside over a doubling of its numbers in its own lifetime. No sooner have we gotten wise to the devastating results of that then we’re confronted by populations getting 30% smaller. What the hell will that do to property prices? And if that smaller crowd is as post-materialist as seems likely, the market for things, generally, is going to be tiny.
In Shaping Things, Bruce offers a lovely riff about a bottle of wine. Bruce asks: “How'd it get here to me? How much carbon dioxide got spewed into my planet's air in order to ship this object into my hands?” Transparency in food production is a no-brainer: think what will happen when a radio frequency identification tags (RFID – pronounced “arphid”) are embedded in every carrot. Factory farmed carrots will be over, long live artisanal vegetables.
Bruce is absolutely right that we need tools of temporal perception: clocks, telescopes, radiocarbon daters, spectrometers for the technosociety we’ve made. But then again maybe price is better than a tag. Wine is the result of time + skill + care + place – all things you can’t reengineer or disintermediate.
We need arguments like those offered in Shaping Things, because the Neanderthals keep plugging away. A report published by an international consulting firm says India can become the “food factory of the world” in the next few years. The gruesome suits promoted the twin concepts of “efficiency” and “innovation” as the basis for Indian strategy in the $640 billion global packaged food industry. “Efficient products at extremely low cost...that's where the heartland of the Indian consumer is going to be,” the expensively-dressed consultants are quoted as saying. The likely costs to social and environmental quality of all this efficiency and innovation were not even mentioned in press coverage of the document.
I now know why chickens cross the road. I visited a sleepy hamlet an hour from Bangalore. A bunch of villagers were standing around a two-meter wide patch of ragi, the grain they use to make dark bread. They had spread the ragi thinly over the road in a neat circle. Six chickens appeared to be eating up the grain while the villagers watched. “Why do you let them do this,” I asked the villagers. It transpires that the chickens are eating tiny maggots, smaller than our eyes can see, which need to be removed from the grain before it can be stored. Neat. And so unlike the management consultants.
Genuinely radical changes in the human conception of time are not caused by philosophy, but by instrumentation. The most radical changes in our temporal outlook come from technological devices, It was through these instruments that we learned that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that the planet is 4.45 billion years old, that our species is some 200,000 years old. Compared to these mechanically assisted vistas, all previous human notions of time are parochial.
Bruce is rightly scornful of the idea that one technology ‘age’ succeeds another. They are layers in a cake, not links in a chain. And a spherical cake, at that. One of the great gifts we can accept from Eastern cultures is the understanding that our journey is not taking us from now to then, or from here to there in a straight line.
A sublime touch, this off-hand line from Shaping Things: “I no longer hunt anxiously for my missing shoes in the morning. I just Google them.”
Transparent production is one of the key concepts in Shaping Things. All objects are documented, trackable, searchable technology. “This whirring, ultra-buzzy technology can keep track of all its moving parts and, when its time inevitably comes, it would have the grace and power to turn itself in at the gates of the junkyard and suffer itself to be mindfully pulled apart.” I hope that’s where things are headed. But I also hope we’re headed for a future in which a lot of it is things-free. An “ID Camera” is in development. It will be able to “read” the IP number of devices carried by people walking down a city street. Answer: carry no things.
Our dilemma is not that we receive too much information. We don’t receive anywhere near the quantity of data it takes to overload our neurons; our minds are capable of processing and analyzing many gigabits of data per second—a lot more data than any of today’s supercomputers can process and act on in real time. We feel flooded because we’re getting information unfiltered, unsorted, and unframed. We lack ways to select what’s important. The design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. I call them macroscopes. Tools, and aesthetic notions, that help us understand – and act mindfully in – the big picture.
The Macroscope is a textual filter, a mode of meaning making enabled by databases and inspired by both Bruce Sterling's pamphlet and John Thackara's poetic response to the work. The Macroscope collects related nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the text of Shaping Things.
As Thackara puts it in his conclusion, the "design task is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. “A macroscope is intended to "help us understand – and act mindfully in – the big picture.”
This particular Macrosope enables you, the user, to actively filter the index, creating visualized, dynamic databases that open new inferential paths, creative interpretations, and unexpectedly productive juxtapositions. By using different keys, you can select a word with your mouse in the left panel, and then see all the existing combinations in the right panel. The fontsize of the index corresponds to a word's frequency of occurrences in the text, the font color indicates whether a word is a noun, verb or adjective. The syntactic annotations were generated with the Stanford Parser, but the ultimate meanings are yours to engage.
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