Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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6.1.2 IaaC Lecture Series: Questions and Answers Carlo Ratti
IaaC Lecture Series: Questions and Answers Carlo Ratti
(IaaC Lecture Series st March 2016;
Thanks for your presentation, I loved your ideas and during your lecture was remembering how were you presenting them 10 years ago in another lecture that I assisted. My question is as follows: How is the reaction of people and Media related to your work? Is there any kind of dialogue or iterative feedback? I think that’s a great question, and I would like to frame it as follows: What is the role of design? One hundred years ago, for Le Corbusier and Modernism, the answer was very clear: There was one solution and it was proposed to society. Today we think that design is very different, and the role of design has more to do with showing how the present can be transformed. There was a great sociologist some years ago that argued that design is not concerned with how things are but instead how things could be. With this as a starting point, design can help us transform things around us as we accept that our role in society is precisely to see these potential transformations. But, the final decision is ultimately the decision of the citizen. This feedback is very important. We are happy when a project goes viral, because we receive lots of feedback, and ultimately active discussions form. Coming back to your question, in relation to the media, I think design is important for the reason that I just mentioned. It doesn’t mean that society needs to do what the architects say. Instead, it means that society can discuss the possibilities available. Sometimes you can use science to propose a design solution. And I think that this is a very different way than modernism, which was very deterministic. Now it is more about presenting a set of solutions in order to discuss them. In a way, this is similar to what nature does: nature mutates, and some of these mutations are more successful than others. I would equate this to our role of proposing mutations in the artificial world, and then letting them grow or not grow according to the feedback of society. Cover - Supermarket of the future, IaaC Archive 2
You said at some point that buildings are becoming computers. To which extend we can open-source our design? That’s to say, on the light of the opensource movement and all what surrounds it, to what extend do you believe that we should open-source our design? There are two questions there, and I would like to answer them in a separate manner. The first one is: Can we open-source design? And the second one is: Should we open-source design? In relation to the first one, yes, I think that’s quite exciting. We can open-source in different ways. As I mentioned before about getting feedback from people for designs, this is an example of open-sourcing design. Open-source means many things; it can mean that you take a design and put it in open-commons, so then open source
“...as designers, our role consists in seeing the potential transformations in our society, but who decides is the citizenship”
people can take it and modify it... that is certainly something that you can do. But it is obvious that not everyone can, for example, develop the calculations of the ceiling, so in this sense you need the contribution of certain experts. There are different ways to create open-loops with people. In the case of a building you have different phases, so for instance when you are constructing it, you can open source it and receive all the possible feedback, which will give you a lot of information for your subsequent work. The second question was as follows: Should we open-source? I like this question a lot, because actually ten years ago we developed a design for tsunamis, and people began to use it in Sri Lanka. It was our first experience and we put almost everything online. The goal is to maximize an idea through open-source design therefore; we should not approach experiences with a black-or-white mindset. Instead of thinking in an ideological way, the key is to ask ourselves how we can maximize an idea. This can happen in many ways. In a certain sense we should think that the ultimate goal of design is to transform the world, and to achieve this goal we can propose an open or closed design. The point is to discover how we can maximize the impact, specifically the good impact of our proposal.
My question is related to how do you see the profession of industrial designers in relation to the notion of intellectual propriety. Actually, the business of a designer has to do with its intellectual property, but today many designers in Silicon Valley are developing tools and selling services... How do you see our profession in relation to intellectual property? Well, I will tell you how I see our profession. In Buckminster Fuller words, this is about utopia or oblivion. And I think that we need to go back to the definition of design by looking at how the world could be. In this sense, there has never been such a strong need for design as there is today. For the first time on the planet, we have the condition of enterprises that went from nothing to being the masters of the universe, and then back to nothing again. Take the case of Nokia for example. This idea of innovation - the question of how the world could be - is the key point. If we capture this innovation as designers, we can be agents for transformation, and then society can debate and decide if they take it or not. Ultimately, we can prompt the renovation and transformation of our world. However, on the other side there is oblivion. And oblivion questions the following: what happens if we do what we have always done? Nothing.
In one of your last answers, you were proposing a parallelism between the concept of “mutation” and the manner in which architecture could evolve through society. We know that the notion of “mutation” as it is understood 4
under the Theory of Evolution of Darwin is a very slow mechanism, because it takes thousands of years to produce any kind of useful and general novelty. I would like to know how could we speed up this process without coming back to the figure of the 20th century architect. This analogy of nature in the artificial realm was proposed in the early days of the evolution theory. An author named George B. Dyson wrote a book named Darwin Among the Machines, framing machines as objects that are reproducing themselves using humans. The point is that in the natural world mutations are happening in a random manner, while in the
artificial world they are happening in an intentioned manner. For example, if we want to transform our city we will perform intentioned mutations, not random ones. However, the last few studies in the ADN argue that there is more directness in natural mutations than what we had previously thought. If you think about it, for nature to evolve through a completely random process of mutation would be ludicrous. It is a process that would be more Lamarckian than Darwinian.
Thank you Carlo for your presentation. Most of the work that you show today is related to this idea of alive matter, or if you prefer, interactive alive buildings. Same with the urban scale. Today the majority of technology that we have is technology that is designed or hacked by us, and it is becoming very controllable, because you know how the performance should be. My question is, should we, as designers, ever let this control out of our hands and let the process go alone in a completely self-organized manner?
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I think this is a great question as well, and there are two components here. One component has to do with the fear of singularity: can we really let machines program themselves? This fear of singularity has existed forever and resides in the concern that something, somehow will be stronger than us humans. If machines are really going to be better than us, then they have the right to take over. Actually, electromechanical intelligence is much more effective than electro organic intelligence, which cannot be extended throughout the universe. But the second component of your question is less scary and it has to do with serendipity. A very simple example to explain this has to do with Amazon. I don’t like the Amazon traditional system, which consists of analyzing the last ten books you bought and then recommending another one from the same topic. On the contrary, what I’m interested in is the ability that would allow Amazon to propose a completely different and surprising book choice that would have nothing to do with the last books you bought. Yet you would still enjoy this book but in a totally different manner, eventually this book could even change your life.
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