Man Confronted by the Third Technological Generation Author(s): Maurizio Morgantini Source: Design Issues, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 21-25 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511496 Accessed: 07/07/2010 21:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://dv1litvip.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
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Maurizio
Morgantini
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Man Confonted by The Third TechnologicalGeneration
Fig. 1)Directrapportbetweenman andmachine;(photoby Arkadij Sajecht,1931)
Design Issues, Vol. I, No. 2
Immersed as we are in an artificial landscape, sickened by excessive abstraction, we find ourselves surrounded by an historical hoard of objects with which we entertain various and often ambiguous relationships. An elementary school teacher once said to me that, although the bear has always been endowed with claws - a natural weapon of defense as well as offense - man had to invent and build these weapons for himself: thus we have the knife with all its heterogeneous ancestors and great-grandchildren.One may therefore consider objects as functional extensions of man which can be cataloged into three different generations: prostheses of the limbs, of the senses, and of the mind. For many centuries, or millennia, man has been makingprostheses of the limbs, such as knives, spades, bows and arrows, shelter and clothing, buildings for defense in general, machines for writing, automobiles, and aeromobiles; he therefore cuts more easily, digs, sews, changes places more rapidly and kills from afar. In the course of the past century, man has realized objects belonging to the second generation: prostheses of the senses. Helped by a more sophisticated technology, he has built telephones, television sets, and machines to reproduce images and sounds, thus giving substance to very hidden dreams. The third generation of objects, the most recent and disquieting, marks the still nebulous and equivocal encounter between human and silicon intelligence. Confronted by objects that are an extension of mental faculties derived from the spreading application of electronic technology, design has found itself faced with problems that have substantially upset its methodology: designing is no longer a question of concealing mechanisms, wires, and valves or of troubling itself to make one object look like another. Designing has become, instead, an ambiguous celebration of a broad technological effect that places the functional power of the machines and the reduction of their physical dimensions side by side. Therefore, a certain kind of design has found itself in difficulty. Sick of protagonism, assisted by supporting sciences and pseudosciences, it has been incapable of metabolizing electronics and processes of miniaturization and therefore, of overcoming its 21
Fig. 2) Prototype of a unified telephone designed for Sit Simens by Maurizio Morgantini and Luciano Pirovano.
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Fig. 3) Time machine: "agitated" clock designed by Daniel Wiel and presented in the 1982 Memphis collection.
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traditionalsphereof action. It has also been unableto overcome the climateof suspiciongeneratedby many objects(such as calculators,keyboards,andplasmatelevisionsets whichareby now devoid of thickness)that are progressivelylosing their atavistic three-dimensionalityor even their own body. Electronics,with the enormouspossibilityof feedingon itself,hasmodifiedobjects, functions,forms, andprojectand buildingtechniques,as well as changedthe relationshipbetweenus and the objects.Prostheses areno longerdirectlyactivatedbut, instead,areinterfacedby artificialintelligencein a way thatis both simpleandobtuselyinfallible: the oven regulatesitself accordingto the food beingcooked, the vacuumcleanertravelsby itselfthe whole lengthof the house, the landinggearpops out of the airplane'sbelly at the optimum momentof the landingmaneuver. Who can forget the classicsubmarinehero of navalbattlesin Americanmovies?With his T-shirt spotted with greaseand his skin shiningwith sweatandat the orderof "rapidimmersion,"he would turnthe fly-wheels,which were directlyconnectedto the valves regulatingthe intakeof the water:he would carryout a directmechanicalrelationshipwith the objects.Today that very samesailorwould be dealingwith smallleversor buttonsrequiring the lightesttouch: betweenthe actionand the effect, various interfaces,which havebecomestratified,areused to amplifysignals, activateservomotors,initiateautodiagnosticprocesses,and link an eventwith othersurroundingevents. Manis no longersurroundedby objectsto be moved,butrather surfacesto be tactilelygrazed,and, therefore,by eventsthat are provoked by simple actions and are to be observed in their development.In many cases the keyboardshave alreadybeen supersededby acousticalsensorsthatallowmanto impartorders
to the machines by voice. Such events correspond to the re-establishment of a different relationship to the assembled fragments of the artificial landscape; this relationship may be contemplative, esthetic, self-gratifying, or baroque. The modern astronaut will probably look like Ludwig in that he will not have manual or tactile contact with the objects around him, but he will contemplate them, and his ship will be more similar to the Nautilus of Jules Verne than to the spaceship of "Alien," with that touch of class conferred by the paradoxicalpresence of the pendulum clock. At any rate, prognosticating the perceptible reduction of objects to zero is no longer the issue, nor is it that design will be deprived of objects to be given form. A chapter of design's history is simply coming to a close. In the last analysis, this ending is rather recent and circumstantial:design, understood as a more or less mediated and filtered functional expression, is a 19th-century heritage that has lasted until the present with the complicity of an terrorism and with a planned moralism already destined \ t^8r@M ^^esthetic to succumb. How can one then explain the most recent tendencies, which are so distant from the "future" prefigured in the last decades? The 3_^pL^HJgHH ^&^ men of the last century, those conscious of being at the threshold of a future populated by machines accomplished an encyclopedic Fig. 4) Prostheses of the limbs: a series recovery of the past: neoclassic has therefore been an ultrafine of knives for cutting, skinning and of positivistic flavor. We men of the present at the dawn of flour engraving; (photo by Ezio Frea.) the computer era have been sucked up by a future that generates only apparent throbbings toward the past and instead tend to recover whatever may be filtered from the dream, singling out the myth beyond whatever has been built. For these reasons, dreamy and dreamt-up objects are proliferating around us. They poetically reaffirm the automony of our intelligence from the artificial one which, not by chance, we have worked to remove from our own body. The violent emotion we experience every time we look at the pyramids, those terrestrial symbols of mystery, is due perhaps in part to our hope that they might be truly useless, truly
Fig. 5) Prostheses of the mind: pocket calculator, Canon.
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Fig. 6) Upside-down pyramid: the missing part of the sand-glass (from "Didactic Monuments" by Maurizio Morgantini and Charlie Botteghi).
great, beautiful, magical, or dreamy precisely because they have no practical function. Beyond the useful and the useless, design is intuiting a more evolved dimension sublimated by the artificial landscape, well beyond the narrow confines of a planned territory tied too much to design and the procedural limits of the designable, which is only a part of what can be planned. For a long time, the environment has been understood as a motionless abstraction far from life and its rhythms. To plan a biotronic environment, it will be necessary to consider factors over and beyond objects, light, air, and sounds - self-regulating, dynamic elements in harmony with man who lives in that environment; to plan environments and objects for the man of the present, involved as he is with a technology in rapid and irregular development, will have to mean, moreover, the beginning of a different relationship with chaos which is moralistically and stubbornly being kept outside the door. For the desks overloaded with objects and kitchens crammedwith optionals, the concept of flexibility and modularity no longer suffices and the mesh of nothing but an abstraction, a pretext for dominion over the postproject, inadequate and too narrow. Chaos, kept until
Fig. 7) The objects lose their atavistic three-dimensionality: structure and mechanical part of Divisumma 24, design by Marcello Nizzoli for .. Olivetti, 1956
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Fig. 8)... or even lose their own body: "a nebulous informatic object," by Alessandro Mendini, published in Ufficiostile n.4., 1982.
Fig. 9) Integral project of editorial offices TGI and TG2, of RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), production by Morgantini Associates. The spatial organization of the editorial offices foresees the coexistence of "collective" tables (active terminals for various usages) together with integrated machines for the exploration of taped memories and the simultaneous communication with other centers of information. The "telematica" (control room - sets of monitors) allows a modality of work physically independent of coexistence in the same space: the office is then justified by the creative work of the group (brain storming) and by the decision-making dialectic on the inflow and outflow of information.
now outside the door, has however, always re-entered the house through the window and could really become a fundamental element of the project. That recent and diffused design, populated by relics of the future induced by technology (hi-fi sets and microwave ovens) and pregnant with restrictive frustrations derived from the imposition of mass production, is abdicating in favor of projects replanned from the roots up. Not by chance does the robotization of production plants mark the surmounting of "stamping"and introduce the variability of mass production, thus bringing about the possibility of overcoming the concept of mass production itself. As the possibilities and technological supports rise little by little in order to realize utopia, doubts also rise: for which utopia? Rather than the choice of a utopia, electronics and artificial intelligence will be able to bestow upon us the utopia of choice: "CHOICE" is that little word that, seen in the mirror the real image- is always CHOICE.
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The possibilityof turningthe pyramidsupsidedown requires the autonomousintelligenceof equilibriumbecausethe equilibriumwill be variable,dynamicratherthanstatic.Metaphorically andotherwise,we will be ableto turnthe pyramidupsidedown, an operationbeyond the useful and the useful and the useless, which will permit Tom Robbins to write yet another book, Fiorella to telephone me, and the designers to invent a new, artificial landscape. TRANSLATED FROMTHEITALIANBYANTHONYC. MASTROBUONO
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