January 21, 2021

Artifacturing

Hybriditing

“Intelligence . . . is the faculty of making artificial objects, especially tools to make tools.” Henri Bergson

“the technium exists on a continuum between the born and the made.” Kevin Kelly

Encounters with the limits of our ability to think our being-in-relationship to our environments have humbled us - re-placing human beings within the context of an autopoietic Kosmos shared other beings and entities. In his influential work on artificial intelligence and his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon lent credibility to the modern design enterprise and sharpened our appreciation of design as a particular type of world making oriented to materiality, culture and technology as domains of the production of artifice. Positioning design as a “science of the artificial” serves as a radical reminder of the irrevocably hybrid nature of reality. Design theorist Clive Dilnot describes how as we come to understand ourselves as hybrid, emergent assemblies of the biotic and cybernetic, the categories natural and artificial are no longer useful. “The artificial does not oppose nature in a simple binary opposition. It, or rather we, affect a synthesis. A genetically modified tomato is neither purely natural nor purely artificial.  It belongs rather to the extended realms of living things that are, as we ourselves are, a hybrid between these conditions. Neither nature nor the artificial nor the human are totally pure” (Dilnot)

Given the wide range of research, ideation and production choices available to designers today, dualistic terms such as nature and culture or nature and artifice can no longer lend meaningful distinctions to our everyday experiences. The categories nature and artifice are so entangled, hybridized and enmeshed that on the level of artifacts “we are making nature” (Whitehead). From an evolutionary perspective we may, with Wired editor and author Kevin Kelly, define the Technium as the seventh kingdom of life, including but not limited to technological artifacts, within us, nearby, and enveloping us, as Clive Dilnot describes “The artificial is by no means confined to technology. Today, it means the combination of technical systems, the symbolic realm, including mind in the realm of our transformations and transmutations of nature” (Dilnot). There is only creating and destroying. Although as designers, the configuring of hybrid inputs as artifice is our horizon of possibility and artifacture is our mode of generativity, the ramifications have yet to be fully assimilated in mainstream industrial design practice where “nature” and “artifice” are still treated as separate stable categories rather than fluid entangled and hybrid assemblies. <Coupling - Decoupling>

As our categories blur we come to see ourselves as always already hybrid. Looking back, we can see the evolution of our technologies as proto-biomimetic. Science writer and educator, Janine Benyus’ key contribution was to popularize the ideas of biomimetics for a broader audience, including designers and architects, in her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She and her team developed a massive interdisciplinary translation project, the Biomimicry Institute’s design portal, Ask Nature. Ask Nature aims to strategically influence the capacity of scientists and other experts, such as architects, engineers and designers, to communicate with one another in unprecedented ease. This breakthrough communication platform is an influential game changer that can unlock capacity for transdisciplinary collaborations aimed at sustainable biomimetic innovations. Some examples from their public domain website include these:

• Learning from humpback whales how to create efficient wind power; • Learning from termites how to create sustainable buildings; • Learning from kingfishers to break through boundaries; • Learning from prairies how to grow foods in resilient ways; • Learning from mosquitoes to create “a nicer needle”; • Learning from dolphins how to send signals underwater.

As biomimicry gains more influence and is adopted more widely, its application becomes more nuanced, deeper and more complex and more systemic in orientation. Bridging hybrid memes as well as functional and behavioral epigenetic patterns, biomimetics heralds the beginning of a quantum shift in the way we think about artifacturing. The catalytic potential of biomimetics to influence the very deepest assumptions of design and architecture practice, is only beginning to be felt and realized. As theory and practice in biomimetics evolves, so too does the richness and complexity with which it is applied to designing occasions. Velcro for example, one of the earliest applications of biomimetics to mass-produced designed objects, was a prototypical example of biomimicry as mimesis of form factor. The grabby Velcro hooks having been modeled after the physiology of the gecko. Evolving understandings of biomimicry expand the repertoire of design approaches to encompass biome mimesis of whole systems. This shift from form to whole system context means that designers and engineers study life in a greatly broadened behavioral context that reflects the myriad interdependencies of local niches. Thus, the level of intelligence that humans endeavor to borrow from nature, is ever more subtle and complex, constantly challenging us to raise the bar.

What began as rudimentary biomimicry —learning and modeling-based on forms found in the natural world —is being superseded by forms of biomimicry that transcend this more limited, form-factor-driven sort of biomimicry in ever more sophisticated mimesis of whole ecosystem behaviors and processes. Human beings have always been performing biomimetics and designing has been one of our primary ways of doing so. The evolution of our brains, our upright posture and in particular our hands with opposable thumbs have disposed human beings to certain forms of world making. It won’t be long before the term biomimicry loses meaning as we recognize human artifacture as mimesis prior to language. <Enforming - Forming>

If artifice is our horizon of possibility then the thriving of life on planet Earth will come about by means of artifacturing rather than in spite of it. Clive Dilnot, in his essay “Reasons to Be Cheerful, 1, 2, 3, …* (Or Why the Artificial May Yet Save Us” articulates a post-representational shift in orientation away from simple mimesis and toward artifice as our second nature. This shift allows us to embrace designing as the proposing, configuring and negotiating of the very fabric of artifice which is our embedded beingness. Dilnot points out that artifice by definition is radically contingent. He explains how, because of its essential mutability, artifice obeys no natural laws. The ethics of artifice are instantiated situationally, therefore the potential for caring mediations and liberating structures is enfolded but not ensured. Artifice is decisive of the being and becoming of humanity not as a dualistic means to ends but rather as profoundly entangled in and as our evolutionary drift and enacted as the opportunity for ethical choice making and stewardship, “… human mental sensibility was formed, came into being as such, through artifice; that the artificial is therefore both the condition of human becoming, that without which the human could not be, and through which we may become, in Vattimo’s telling phrase, “(finally) human.” Dilnot

 

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