03: Being other
Research notes on tech, ecology, design futures, and design. This month: collective intelligence, from the cellular to the planetary
The idea: Othered states of being
One of the biggest themes in art and design over the past few years has been immersion in another state of being. In The Eyes of the Animal, a virtual reality film launched by Marshmallow Laser Feast in 2016, aimed to give the participant the viewpoint of a dragonfly, owl or frog. Numerous other artworks have taken more-than-human perspectives since. In the web-based exhibition Are You For Real, artworks take place from the perspective of a bat, fossils, and a shift in the Earth's magnetic field. In Experimental Ecology, on now at KBHG in Basel, Ingo Niermann and Alex Jordan explore “how to feel like a fish” - and, perhaps more interestingly, how to discover the fish in yourself.
Other entanglements venture into even more othered states of being: the vegetal. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Sam Cohen’s short story Becoming Trees, published in the book Sarahland, both examine trans-species urges, with protagonists dissociating from humanness by growing into plants or trees. The Inter-Species Library, set up in 2019 by Oscar Salguero, charts the “changing attitudes towards the non-human” that pieces such as these demonstrate and distil.
As artists and writers speculate around more-than-human perspectives, scientists are beginning to translate them in new detail. Bioacoustics are enabling us to hear more-than-human sounds, leading to dictionaries of elephant language, and an understanding of how coral larvae hear and perceive the world. Projects such as the Earth Species Project are using AI to translate interspecies communication. Canadian environmental scientist Karen Bakker's dearly-held hope was that “bioacoustics decentres humanity in the tree of life” by exposing our commonality with the plurality of life forms we share the planet with; using AI-translated bioacoustics, ships have successfully steered away from the swimming paths of endangered whales, preventing deaths.
But the question remains: can humans truly de-centre ourselves? What if, writers ask, speaking to animals using AI enables us to hear ourselves more clearly?
As Nigerian philosopher Bayo Akomolafe has noted, “We are secretions; tentacular extensions of the environment. We are always embedded, embodied within ecology.”
More-than-human perspectives seek to situate us within the context of nature - situate us as nature - and it is of course not coincidence that they have proliferated in parallel with the worsening effects of climate breakdown. In artist Alice Bucknell's video game, The Alluvials, the two combine: you play as wildfire raging through Los Angeles, “following a pathway of a collective and distributed intelligence”.
Dissociation from the human state feeds into a climate nihilism that is also sparking. Writing in Wired, Kelly Prendergast makes the case for radical breakdown - accepting the toxicity we have created, and learning to metabolise it in preparation for the apocalypse. It may be easier, this line of thinking goes, to accept the microplastics that are in our bloodstreams, and look forward to becoming compost.
It’s been said that technology is anything that doesn’t work yet. In this part of the 21st century, nature could be defined as anything that’s disappearing. As eco-anxiety mutates into climate despair, this last-hope round of biophilia could maybe (if only a small maybe), change human perspectives enough to change our actions.
📄 Research notes
The future of transport is mostly not cars. The OUI is a four-seater mobility concept designed for “a world without cars”
“The role of the designer is facilitator, not decider”. “There is no one universal design history”: a paper on pluriversal futures for design education
Lego is giving up on its R&D into recycled PET plastic bricks as it’s more carbon intensive, and plans to reduce the emissions of its ABS plastic bricks instead. Contrary to some headlines, this announcement is a win for sustainability strategy
Chemical engineers have developed a way for mixed plastics to be recycled together, using a molecular additive. It’s an exciting time for chemical recycling: there are big breakthroughs on the horizon
If corporations had to pay for their “carbon damages”, it would use 44% of their profits
“Saving the environment—or building architecture in harmony with it—is no longer a technological problem so much as a political one”. Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism at MoMA examines “political futures visualized through architecture” until January 20th
The new Google Pixel 8 phone’s Best Take is the most dystopian product feature I’ve seen in a while (using generative AI to swap smiling faces into a photo)
Teens in the US get at least 237 notifications a day on their phones, and spend more than 38% of their phone time on TikTok
AI start-up Osmo is designing a computer that can smell
The first woman to land on the moon, in 2025, will be wearing a NASA spacesuit designed by Prada
💻 My work
⚡️ Interesting products
Wonder, an AI app that presents “the internet, reimagined for kids”
Electrify Everything: The Clean Energy Colouring Book by Nicole Kelner
Superfan products: Olivia Rodrigo partnered with Sony on a pair of recycled-plastic earbuds tuned to the exact EQs she intended her albums to be listened to at
Printernet prints out your online reading list into a magazine
Jony Ive and Sam Altman are discussing building OpenAI’s first hardware product together, dubbed “the iPhone of artificial intelligence”, with $1bn from Softbank
📺 Watching
After Yang, a meditative film about robots and grief set in a beautifully-realised near-future world without plastic
The brilliant Dan Hill on strategic design, in a lecture for Melbourne School of Design