PARSONS re:D

THE ALUMNI MAGAZINE OF PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN SPRING 2011 DESIGN AND THE BODY

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NEW BODIES NO LIMITS TO DESIGN?

by Ed Keller
ED KELLER, PARSONS ASSOCIATE DEAN OF DISTRIBUTED LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGY, DESCRIBES THE ROLE OF ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS IN DEVELOPING EXTENDED PERCEPTIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY AND CALLS ON PRACTITIONERS TO IMAGINE AND DESIGN SUSTAINABLE SYSTEMS TO SAFEGUARD THE COLLECTIVE BODY OF HUMANITY

These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step weve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. [Our] central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World

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Chris (Dystopia Series), Aziz + Cucher, 1994. C-print, 50 x 40.

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We live in an era of unprecedented interest in design. New pathways are continually opening, allowing designers to help steer the development of goods, forms of communication, communities, and policies. Is the human body the next frontier for design? Although the challenges facing humanity involve factors beyond human needs, the human body remains central to formulas for the planets survival. Designers have always regarded the body as a client, site, and scale. Da Vincis Vitruvian man (circa 1487), inscribed in a circle and square, is the classical depiction of the human form expressed in perfect geometric proportions. Over time, our concept of the human body as a discrete entity with knowable, obvious boundaries has evolved into something more nuanced and complex. The body is now seen as part of a web of systemsecological, political, geographical, cultural. The result is a body understood as more than a closed system. A related example can be found in sustainable design, an evolving eld that evaluates products in relation to an en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ ever-widening Vitruvian_Man. array of factors such as energy consumption in production and recycling, equitable distribution of resources, and effects on biodiversity. What systems are connected to this newly de ned body? What role does design play in enabling us to understand it? Can we design in a way that engages the systems within and connected to the body, from genetics and metabolism to culture and politics? What we have learned from the elds of sustainability and product design helps answer some of these questions. Take the design of a chair, for example. Today the designer considers not only ergonomics but also the products lifecycle, the materials and processes used in creating and recycling it, and its suitability for markets worldwide.

EXTENDED BODIES AND NEW VISUALIZATION TOOLS Challenges to the classical image of the body have existed for centuries. One nds in art and literature unnatural bodies formed not through discrete biological processes but instead by social, technological, economic, and modi ed biological systems. An early example is Pantagruel (1532), Rabelais satirical exploration of social systems. Modern examples can be found in lms blending hard science with science ctionworks like Godards Alphaville, Cronenbergs The Fly, Boyles 28 Days Later, and Natalinis Splice depicting a future threatened by technology run amok. Today much of the technology presented in such lms is real, running on ordinary laptops. The information these tools use is available on the Internet. Does such widespread availability help us avoid a brave new world dystopia or summon it? This question is a call for designers to intervene to help the public grasp the implications of technological advances and understand their effectspositive and negativeon the individual and communal body. Nuclear science offers an extraordinary example of designs role in raising public awareness of the systems-determined bodyand threats to that body. Harold Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, designed a camera capable of taking exposures less than one millisecond in duration. His photographs of the Trinity nuclear bomb tests in 1945 reveal the intricate morphology of an atomic blast (page 17). Capturing events at macroand microscopic scales in time and space, Edgertons edgerton-digital-collections.org/ arresting techniques/rapatronic-shutter. images established a critical cinematic threshold, a designed visualization, enabling one to see the scale and trajectory of the forces of the blast. Details made visible by Edgertons camera clearly communicate the bombs great power. The images also suggest the scale and uncontrollable nature of those forces, the effects they might have on the individual and collective body of humanity, and, by extension, the repercussions of rapidly evolving technology. The Trinity bomb explosion challenged designers to safeguard the human body against the sinister blooming of atomic weaponry that has shaped geopolitics for more than a half-century. To cope with the existential risks unleashed by our rampant progress, we design ever more advanced techniques to study the world and the extended body. These tools include software that graphically represents mathematical equations programs like Gephi and Cytoscape, developed to visualize genetic relationships but now used to map social networks like Twitter. The promise of such tools is demonstrated in an article published in Nature in 2009, showing that Google search

query data could be tracked for reliable real-time estimates of u activity around the world. Consider also the Diseasome map, which graphs overlapping gene lines of human diseasome.eu illnesses, and www.nytimes.com/interactive/ projects 2008/05/05/science/ visualizing 20080506_DISEASE.html. social behavior and identities on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Use of these tools introduces a further abstraction of the human body into the realm of statistical data. Our new collective bodies consist of aggregated information as well as material components. As gene sequencing becomes cheaper and more accessible, the data can expand to encompass individual genetic codes. THE RADICALLY OPEN BODY, THE DESIGNED BODY, AND THE ROLE OF ART AND DESIGN If we extend the concept of the human body, envisioning it as part of many interacting systems and even as data, we can also understand that the body contains systems and entities within. For example, we know that eating yogurt introduces probiotics, independent organisms that improve digestive functioning, into our bodies. The Human Microbiome Project4 takes this 4 concept to the commonfund.nih.gov/hmp. next level by mapping out thousands of microorganisms living on and in the human body that affect health. Designing objects that interact with this bodily ecosystem is a topic of discussion among design theorists and practitioners today. In The Extended Phenotype (1982), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins speculates on even deeper interactions

The body is now seen as part of a web of systems ecological, political, geographical, cultural.
Product development is increasingly complex and involves many considerations: aesthetics, culturally determined preferences, production and shipping costs, required technology, market values. All these elements involve systems that meet in the chair. Contemporary research tools allow designers to identify and visualize these systems and measure their environmental impact and the environments effects on them. Such tools have enabled designers to map the extended product. Now designers are using them to help us imagine the extended body.

We can intervene on the publics behalf by advocating for design that recognizes the deeply interconnected nature of the ecosystem
between design and the body. He describes the constructed environment as integrally connected to the body, calling the product of genetics and the built environment an extended phenotype, part of an epigenetic landscape where the built environment shapes evolution on the genetic scale and vice versa. Artists and designers have explored this convergence of body and product design. Their work ranges from wearable technology to art series like Peter 5 Allen and Carla Ross www.knowear.net. Allens KnoWear, which imagines a merging of designed motifs with genetic engineering to produce designer logo skin embosses (inside front cover).5 Standing somewhere between a

tattoo and gene splicing, KnoWear is a creative effort to understand the epigenetic and imagine a radically open body. These artistic explorations suggest new ways of thinking about design. If we can map and modify an epigenetic landscape, which then alters a human genotype, physical form, and behavior, then by designing a network of systems, we can design a body and vice versa. In this model, the design process focuses on the molecular level, the less visible layer. NEW ROLES FOR ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS Edgertons camera revealed more than the unseen dynamics of atomic explosions. It also suggested an unsettling truth about how little we understand of nuclear energy and, by extension, the planets delicately balanced systems. Thanks to contributions by Edgerton and others, artists and designers have new tools with which to graph, extrapolate, and contextualize data, helping us better grasp the forces interacting in our environment and constituting the extended human body. In turn, we can intervene on the publics behalf by advocating for design that recognizes the deeply interconnected nature of the ecosystem. Opportunities to do so have arisen in a growing number of areas through methodologies ranging from process design and service design to genetic design. We must use the insights arrived at through design thinking to establish models of sustainability incorporating a holistic consideration of the extended body in political, economic, and environmental systems. Japans historical and recent experience with the disastrous effects of technology on humanity and the environment makes clear the risks of designing only for the obvious body.
ED KELLER IS ASSOCIATE DEAN OF DISTRIBUTED LEARNING AND TECHNOLOGY AT PARSONS. HE IS A CO-CHAIR OF TRANSHUMANISM MEETS DESIGN: HUMANITY+ PARTNERS WITH PARSONS THE NEW SCHOOL FOR DESIGN, A CONFERENCE TO BE HELD AT PARSONS, ON MAY 1415.

This photograph of the Trinity atomic bomb test, taken in 1946 by Harold Edgerton on his specially designed camera, illustrates the power of images to convey the complex interaction of forces unleashed by scientic discoveries. Photographs such as this one awakened public concern over our ability to manage the potentially disastrous effects of technology.

Photograph by Harold E. Edgerton. MIT 2011. Courtesy of MIT Museum