Email Copy for Emergence Magazine
Utuqaq
What the Ice Sees
“There are visitors here. What do they want? The visitors know that the borders of this landscape are melting. What they don’t know is what happens here, where the ice has remained the same, year after year.”
New research examining pieces of the most ancient rocks on the planet has provided some of the sharpest evidence yet that Earth's crust was pushing and pulling in a manner similar to modern plate tectonics at least 3.25 billion years ago. The planet’s foundations have been in constant, yet steadily imperceptible, movement since the dawn of time. Human activities, however, have introduced rapid movements, like the melting of the arctic ice, which have vastly shifted the timescale of the earth’s progress.
Iva Radivojević’s starkly beautiful film, named Utuqaq (ice that lasts year after year), depicts a team of researchers drilling ice cores in the arctic: putting us into contact with the confluence of human endeavors and the shifting depth beneath them. With mesmerizing images of ice and snow that evoke the consuming waves on the surface of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, this film begs the question: when we dig for answers, what does the vast steadfast ice reveal back about ourselves? Narrated through the Kalaallisut language of West Greenland, whose melodies carry a deep knowing of the spirits and presences that inhabit the land, the film integrates the viewer into the perspective of the ice itself.
My Name is Beauty
Communication as Communion in World of Rhetoric
“Language matters: it matters to our reality. The very constructions by which we design our lives begin and end with words.”
Artificial Intelligence has, in a groundbreaking MIT study, learned the rules and patterns of human languages on its own. The deeply complex, contextual and iterative nature of language has made it challenging to pin down in machine learning. The breakthrough points to the subtle structural similarities that unite diverse languages: a significant and beautiful sign of our connectedness, despite cultural differences. Yet, what are the implications of these meta relationships where the very tools and technologies we have created, robots, are able to adapt and learn one of our original tools, language? What different role does language then take on when uttered from the mouth of an artificial intelligence?
In his poetic essay, Jake Skeets roots language’s function in qualities entirely beyond the grasp of AI: beauty, emergence, and resistance. Merging art and function, language is like a craft, akin to Diné weavings. It is itself an organic machine, a tool for maintaining homeostasis in a world where structures of dominance upset the balance all too frequently. Skeets identifies the uniquely generative power of Indigenous communication to rename our realities in a process of becoming and healing from ongoing colonial legacies.
Rights of Nature at the Border
The Life and Death of an Ancient Giant
“This lack of rootedness can make it harder to see other rooted beings as beings who deserve to live with integrity in the places where they belong.”
With the recent loss of an elderly and iconic Saguaro cactus in Arizona to fierce rains, Indigenous communities are devastated and apprehensive of the future for these large stoic beings. The 200 year old cactus, monumental in the landscape, was host to life in the desert, providing shade, flowering for pollinators, and food in the form of seeds. Both climate change and the border wall have posed a threat to the Saguaro’s right to live in their ancestral home.
In this op-ed, Lorraine Eiler chronicles growing up and learning in and from Quitobaquito Springs, where Saguaros are the pillars of the community. Her people, the Hia-Ced O’odham, were driven from their land first by settlers, then the National Parks Service, fabricating a wilderness for consumption. Yet, the land and its people, now legally including the Saguaro, are resilient. Eiler hopes for a future where the law will protect the inhabitants of the land, and the ecosystem will become mutually sustaining again.
EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE ON KENGO KUMA, ARCHITECT
Lotus House, designed by Kengo Kuma, is a villa set in a forest in Eastern Japan nestled beside a quiet river. The main concept circulates around integrating and cross-pollinating structural elements of different zones, between the house, forest and river. Kuma filled the space between the river and the house with water, and planted lotus flowers to establish a connection between the house and the woods. Each distinct zone integrates elements of its surroundings to ease thetransition between the two. The rooms are organized in two bands aligned lengthwise, with a central courtyard that relates the vegetation on both sides of thehouse, separating the main living room from the other rooms. The house, a permeable stone envelope, was devised as a combination of solids and voids. It wrapsand visually unifies the whole. Light enters through the cracks in between stones, becoming a porous material. The screens on two sides of the house consist of a series of stainless steel stretchers that hold thin travertine plates, constituting a porous checkerboard pattern. The flat bar chain structure allows the screen to be very flexible to outer forces, winds and movement.
The entire structure is a receptive surface to the outside world: instead of erecting barriers, adapting to the ebbs and flows of nature. From the interior, the dematerialized stone filters light and frames small fragments of the landscape. Repetitive patterns detail the interiors and exteriors of the buildings, with small square stepping stones bridging two sides of the water, and a mirroring set of minimalist stairs connecting levels of the building. The ceiling is patterned with wooden boards that form an elongated checkerboard, met with a floor to ceiling glass wall that reflects both the plants around it and the travertine wall, or perhaps the ceiling depending on where you stand. Shifting perspectives open up new dynamics between the materials: the space is truly immersive, in its self reflexivity and reflectivity.
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Imagining the future of our precarious world, we vitally need architectural solutions that use modern technology to integrate natural materials into their environment. Predominantly, architectural practices bulldoze the landscape, ruining waterbeds and natural habitats, while creating sealed glass boxes that deepen our sense of separation from the ecologies around us. The synthesizing approach that Kengo Kuma brings to design opens a space of conversation between the multifarious elements surrounding a space: human, non-human, hard, soft, light, dark, and everything in between. And, in the end, that’s what his architecture is all about, the spaces between one thing and the next, and how we stretch them to become bridges between worlds.
COPENHAGEN INSTITUTE OF INTERACTION DESIGN
LinkedIn Article: What Does an Ethical Future Look Like?
Human design along with our primary tool for energy production, fire, has catapulted us into the current state of the climate crisis, threatening the very existence of civilization. Our invention of technologies has also produced us as a species and brought us to where we are today. With tools, we have managed landscapes, cooked our food, built systems of international transport and so much more. Yet, so much has gone awry: when we travel from port to port, invasive species get carried into new territories. When we discard the byproducts of our consumed food, they get carried into the water-streams. When we cut down trees we lose valuable photosynthesizers and many species' natural habitats.
The question is, how are we going to move forward, and sustain ourselves and the planet? And, what level of human intervention is needed, or would a lack-there-of do a lot more good? And finally, who gets to decide, on the definition of "good" and then take action?
At CIID, we’re constantly asking these questions, and transforming them into our work. We want to create a space for critical thought and dialogue, moving ideas forward and allowing us to translate them into generative action. So, we’re delving into an analysis of human intervention and the climate crisis: Join us, and become part of the conversation. To understand our role as humans in mitigating climate change, we need to explore how we make decisions about the limits of our mediation. Then, we’ll look at the scales of knowledge and action: from large-scale projects like carbon capture to activating compassion and awareness within individuals. Finally, we’ll advocate for a life-centred design: one that incorporates the needs and advocates for the flourishing of both people and the planet.
WHERE ARE THE LIMITS OF OUR INTERVENTION?
There is a greyscale continuum between the things we deem morally and ethically condonable, versus those we condemn. Genetically modified plants have been completely normalized in some ways, take corn for example, while many still chafe at the idea of Monsanto’s giant tomatoes. In design, the contours of our control are an important and constant question. In everything from public infrastructure, like parks, to user experience in apps, both people and the environment are being shaped and managed. While it sounds nefarious, it can have massively beneficial effects. The unintentional side effects can also run amuck: the case of the Cane Toads in Australia has raised ethical questions around management of the environment. They were introduced intentionally to sugar producing areas, with the goal of eating the beetles that plague sugarcane crops. They arrived in Australia in the 1930’s, and due to their toxicity, exploded in population with no natural predators. Some of the solutions suggested include using CRISPR to genetically modify the toads, making them less toxic. Effectively, this would mean changing the genetic code of a species of animal, and creating a new subspecies. Inevitably, the move will have unintended consequences. So, is it a step too far, or a necessary and inventive solution to a sticky problem?
As Elizabeth Kolbert, environmental journalist, says: “The good news is we have all the technologies we need to save civilization from climate collapse: solar and wind electrical grids; electric vehicles; the ability to re-wild wetlands and build artificial barriers to break and block the power of the sea.”. While the ethical lines of intervention will never be clear cut, it is clear we have the capacity to invent systems that could support our population and keep the planet in balance.
HOW DO WE RECONCILE SCALES OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION?
In order to mitigate the catastrophic effects of climate change, large-scale action is required: using new technologies, financial resources, and multinational cooperation. Yet, knowledge mobilization and action on individual and community scales are vital. It is clear, however, that messages coming top down from corporations with vested interests in maintaining a capital structure do little to build solidarity. Messaging that tells individuals that buying reusable straws and wax paper wrapping sequesters us to a capitalist logic of purchasing power: the only change we can make is through how we invest our money. What does product design and development look like that builds connection, and helps envision possibilities for a compassionate relationship to the natural world? Kate Soper, in her proposal for an “alternative hedonism”, bridges the individual with collective action: meaning, both are essential. She asks “How do we reconcile the ecological – and egalitarian – need for a more cyclical and reproductive...use of resources with the more distinctively human – and individualist – needs for continuous cultural innovation, enhanced gratification and self-expression?”
On the one hand, we have proposals for geoengineering technologies such as carbon capture, extracting carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in the form of basalt rock, as well as solar reflection, using particles to reflect rays back into space. On the other hand, as Soper and others argue, we need a “new vision of the good life”, which requires cultural shifts, re-shaping how we think about ourselves and prosperity. Some past students of CIID have created concepts and prototypes for sustainable solutions that generate new ways of thinking.
FOR A LIFE-CENTERED DESIGN.
“Nature itself only begins to figure as a positive and redemptive power, and to be valued in its sublime and untamed aspects, at the point where human mastery over its forces is extensive enough for aesthetic exaltation in wilderness to replace blind animal terror.”
- Kate Soper
Our tools and technologies are what have enabled us to live safely, and take the unique pleasures we do in the natural environment. Sensing Time is a project from CIID grads Norris Hung, Julian Jimsa, Herin Haramoto, and Majo Tamayo that facilitates empathy with other organisms and planetary events. The device allows someone to slow down and speed up time on the objects in the frame by moving the device forwards and backwards. By moving the device backward, one may clearly see the individual flaps of a bee’s wing. By moving the device forwards, one can see the “rhythm of breathing” of a glacier over decades. The project asks how we can better perceive and therefore adapt to our surroundings, taking on an interplay between evolution and technology to help us think through solutions. Heirloom is a project that emerged from a 5-day biomimicry workshop, where Elliott Wortham, Julian Jimsa, Mohit Choudhary, Nandita Nina Shenoy, and Sachin Jose created an online repository that stores the life lessons of those that have passed away so they can be shared with family members, joining a collective knowledge archive that can be accessed by the rest of society. It is modeled after mycelium networks that send signals and transfer nutrients to benefit their ecosystem. The project opens the possibility of learning from our past and better adapting and evolving our systems and technologies based on those insights.
While intervention, design and development are the things that have brought us to this place of imbalance and crisis, they are potentially the things that will move us through it. The current scale of the population requires infrastructure to support it, and the reality is that without action the progression of climate change would mean the death of 300,000 people per year by 2030 plus countless displaced populations. We can’t afford to respond from idealism, founded on a concept of nature without humans: human lives are at risk. We must become “conscious environment makers” as Christian Parenti advocates.
At CIID, we teach and advocate for a life-centered design: with a goal for both people and the planet to thrive. We believe that designers working together with scientists, private industry and public policymakers, can make civilization sustainable on this planet. Providing us with a rich, exciting, and meaningful future.
Join us in thinking through how to use design to generate sustainable futures: Our Designing Ethical Futures Workshop is now open for registration.