January 21, 2021

Informing

(Forming)

“Form is emptiness; emptiness form” Diamond Sutra

Designing, functioning as a mirror, tangibly shows us what we take to be true about reality, and what we take to be the limits of that reality. Art, science and spirituality are converging around the emptiness at the heart of matter, even as we appreciate innovations in new materials science. For decades now professional design has been mirroring the impact of the information age by lightening, dematerializing, packetizing and encoding. Now the 3-D printing revolution has democratized access to home based self- prototyping and -assembly. This has been closely followed by a wave of new innovations in 4-D printing that introduce the element of time by programming materials for choreographed propensities and behaviors. Living in the midst of the disruptive innovation era that 3D and 4D printing truly are, it’s difficult to have perspective on how these changes are changing us.

As information becomes foreground, human beings are becoming collectively conscious of the information rich nature of reality in general and the information rich nature of the natural world in particular. From this perspective it’s quite a misnomer to discuss so-called “new” materials as information rich. “Old” materials have always been information rich but we have not had the range of sensitivity to appreciate the inherent intelligence of the natural world. From the primordial perspective of DNA, the ur-code of life, we might say that programmable materials are rich-er and less clumsy ways of rendering possibility, and less clunky ways of providing for human needs while minimizing negative impact to our bio systems. Many leading programs in industrial design have long ceased making a distinction between digital and analog approaches to design education. Digital and analog methods are complementary avenues along a continuum of technological developments.

As we come to experience ourselves as being in collaboration with what we used to call Nature and Artifice we are “naturefacturing”. Likewise matter and information —and time and space— are seen to be enfolded. Matter and formation are deeply interconnected. Information is not just intangible. Matter is information and information matter. On the microcosmic level and the physio-sphere of gross manifestation, information and matter are both/and. On the level of the semiosphere, the realm of ideas transcends and includes matter and bare life. Here, our diverse claims about Nature are intertwined with and informing of our future Natures.

What do these shifts in apperception of reality mean for designing as encoding and informing? Our designing has not yet caught up with our awareness. Designed artifacts still tend to function as separate from, agnostic toward, competitive with, or sometimes even negating of life. As our views of matter expand in complexity they gain more nuanced recognition of inter-being. As dualistic categories blur, our fundamental embeddedness in matter and saturation with information becomes more apparent. Post-postmodern designing is an invitation to expand our capacity for awe and humility. The more sophisticated our capacities for artifacture the more plastic our apprehension of our complex universe also becomes. The more we know, the less we know — and the more comfortable we are with this state of not knowing. As our sophisticated prototyping processes give us greater insight into the profound order of the multi-verse, we taste the Mystery at the heart of reality. If we can make use of new learnings about process inter-ontologies, we may have a chance of avoiding the trap of applying “smart” technologies to “dumb” purposes. Grasping our profound embeddedness is an entry point for the designer to encode and inform for designs that elicit humility. From here, we can deepen our capacity to literally perform the possibility that all matter and all life are sacred —and profane — and worthy of our utmost care and respect. We are the possibility of designing agency that facilitates the proliferation of products, systems, structures and services that care for life.

We are the simultaneity of designing unfolding in time. Algorithms, the raw materials of creative designers of the information age, expand our perspective as the microcosmic and breathtakingly fractal order of the multi-verse is revealed. Nature is an iterative, algorithmic process and matter its exquisite algorithmic artifact. If we harness 4D printing only for ever-more efficient ways to exist in a just-in-time world where matter is treated as standing reserve instead of as Mother, we will have learned nothing. This is not an anti-technological stance, but rather an observation that our ethics of practice in design, production and distribution evolve along with our technologies, reciprocally eliciting more complex and wise understandings. Let’s celebrate the 3D and 4D printing revolution — along with the co-evolution of our minds and the co-expansion of our hearts to enable the wisdom that these new capacities will demand.

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