The experience of design is one of signs and their infinite
manipulation. It takes place in an experiential context that
moved away from the object, away from immediacy and from
co-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real,
without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. When
pushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands in
imaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a city
built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from
location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as
someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire.
One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials,
even new human beings. Once the imagination is opened to fresh
human endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest or
heaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what you
wear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtual
space is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtual
experience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations of
images and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digital
embodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-based
constraints and embodies new languages, especially synaesthetic
languages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practical
experience, the design of virtual space is one level beyond,
i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines a
realm where the person frees himself from the structures
characteristic of literacy.
In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language is
overwritten by the very configurational nature of the context.
Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linear
because their descriptions are no longer based on the
reductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague and
allowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual space,
self-constitution, hence identification, no longer regards
cultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changing
self-reference. All attempts to see how a human being would
develop in the absence of language could finally be embodied in
the individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a state
of tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such an
experience turns out to be a design experience, not a biological
accident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whose
language fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), is
relevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigated
only in relation to its consequences pertaining to human
practical experiences.
Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any design
practical experience. From among the very many designs in a
state of virtuality, only a small number will become real. What
gives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality are
contextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework.
Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up with
airplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats or
submarines. There are many design experiences that are based on
knowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But there
are many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There is
nothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, and
even less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, and
machines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repair
and virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Design
in the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on human
cognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practical
endeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantly
computational and disseminates computational means.
Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from the
pragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences of
service economy, effected differentiations in respect to means
of expression and communication, in respect to the role of
representation, and to our position in regard to values. The
electronic data storage and retrieval that complements the role
of print, and progressively replaces it, results from the
experience of design supported by fast and versatile digital data
processing. When, at the social level, representation is
replaced by individual activism, and by the militancy of
interest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics into
the private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation by
interest groups assembled around causes of short-term impact
that keep changing. This change effects a shift from the
expectation of authority, connected to literacy-based human
experiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice.
The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials,
messages, and images (including the image of the individual) is
a world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Its
life results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedom
to re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed under
these new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations associated
with illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressive
mechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems,
articulations, precious finish-they all belong among the
collectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designed
to be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflecting
a generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces discipline
and self-control in our interaction with artifacts.
Design also affects change in our conception of fact and reality,
stimulating the exploration of the imaginary, the virtual, and
the meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations and
by representations of representations, and so on until the
reference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivist
expectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization of
literacy are reconstituted as a frame of relativist
interactions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noise
included). Imaging technologies make drawing available to
everyone, exactly as writing was available to those processed as
literates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-the
electronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and the
digitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processing
the image in full control of all its components. A sound level
can easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressive
power of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process,
adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the many
languages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in its
various forms to further its own program is clear. Probably less
clear is that the literate experience is itself changed through
such instances. After all, literacy is the civilization that
started with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Book
open to all possible interpretations, as these were generated in
the attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmatic
contexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that become
possible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular to
those that design affords, results in the infinity of books,
printed for the potential individual reader (or the very
limited readership that a title or journal tends to have) who
might finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) by
placing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radical
description given above might still be far away from today's
reality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction.
On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as a
qualitatively new form of human interaction. Design is
integrated in the networked world in a number of ways:
communication protocols, hypertext, document and image layout,
structure of interactive multimedia. But no one designer, and no
one company (not even the institution of defense, which supports
networking) can claim that it designed this new medium of human
practical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostly
unaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolving
whole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one could
predict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and will
continue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.
Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies all
there is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disassembled,
turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or a
portion of a letter), and given indications where they should
arrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they are
reassembled, after each package travels its own path. But in
order to become a word again, they are further processed
according to their condition. Such communication protocols negate
the centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all that
is information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Many
other characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics are
overridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rules
of language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributed
resources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelism
ensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number and
types of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost any
conceivable form of practical experience, becomes global.
Enthusiasm aside, all this is still very much a beginning.
Networks, for transportation (trains, buses, airplanes,
highways), for communication (telephone, telegraph,
television), for energy distribution (electric wires, gas
pipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers and
digital processing. In the context in which human cognitive
resources take precedence over any other resources, as we face
efficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind,
connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but a
revolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above can
participate in the emergence of humankind's integrated network.
Their potential as more than carriers of voice messages,
electricity, gas, or railway passengers is far from being used
in the ways it can and should be. Design experiences of
integration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to the
integration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a reality
that extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, the
Netizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is a
consequence of our self-identification in practical activities
based on a qualitatively new understanding of design.