Transcriber: Yonara Anastacio Cubas Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I’m Nicole Koltick,
and I’m the founding director of the Design Futures Lab.
Today I’d like to talk about the work of my lab
and the particular type of design that we practice.
And we engage in a form of speculative design, or design fiction.
And you might be asking: What is design fiction?
Design fiction is not dissimilar to, say,
a novel or a science fiction film
in that we are taking different elements from the world,
some of them very real, very present,
others more emerging.
And when we start to put these together in novel ways,
this kind of new narrative arises.
And one of the core features of our work,
and it kind of differs from a lot of design work being kind of conducted today,
is that we take very seriously the idea of design for nonhumans.
And so you’ve probably heard a lot about human-centered design.
Humans are at the center of most designs, right?
Humans, since our emergence as a species
have really kind of dominated the kind of atmospheres we find ourselves within,
as well as the impacts we have.
And as designers, a lot of our work is making things better,
solving problems for humans.
And we might do this through objects.
We might do this through environments.
We might do this through experiences,
through systems,
but the end result is the kind of end-user is generally a human or a set of humans.
And in our work, we’re really interested in,
What does it mean to design for a non-human?
What does it mean to design for an ocean?
What does it mean to design for a flock of birds?
What does it mean to design for a cave?
So I’d like to quickly go through a couple projects in the lab
which demonstrate this kind of speculative design fiction approach.
And again, I want to emphasize, these are plausible scenarios.
Some of them we actually build, others we simulate, we develop renderings,
we develop objects, we develop films.
And the role is to kind of put out these new potentials,
these new possibilities.
First project I’d like to go through is called the North Atlantic Server Farm.
And in this project, we took as our client to be the North Atlantic.
So this is the Atlantic Ocean,
which is experiencing some very drastic effects from climate change.
This project was developed in 2009.
Even at that moment in time,
we were looking at some fairly devastating impacts
in terms of the loss of sea ice,
as well as a rapid rise in global sea temperatures.
We designed this as a kind of ecological prosthetic,
an upgrade to the ocean.
And what this basically is, is an iceberg made of robots.
So for this project, we were proposing a synthetic iceberg
which would reflect back into the atmosphere.
So mitigating some of the temperature effects that we’re seeing,
as well as being a secondary function as a server farm.
This is meant to be a kind of augmentation.
And so this project we were looking at advances in small scale robotics,
small scale ARM-based processors to power this server farm.
And another important component, which is always present in our work,
is looking to science, particularly biology,
to find clues in terms of how we might solve some of these problems.
In this instance, we were looking at what's called
the distributed limited aggregation model,
and that’s a way that we see a lot in biology where things are branching off.
And so we’re thinking about the behavior of these robots.
How are they going to form together and break apart to accommodate boats?
How are they going to pack together in a highly efficient manner?
We would look to biology to help us solve this problem.
The next project I’d like to talk about is a project that we did
and we took as our client a series of caves,
and so we were designing for these caves
and the flora and fauna contained within these caves.
And this is a highly sensitive habitat, a biome
in the extreme region of Croatia.
There’s a number of really spectacular limestone caves,
but over the years, they’ve been incredibly degraded.
They’ve been used as trash dumps.
There’s been a lot of kind of illegal exploration.
And so the very rare kinds of plants and animals
that are contained within these caves are nearing extinction.
As a counterpoint to that area,
there’s a lot of large scale limestone quarrying happening.
And what you get with the quarrying,
what you have is a byproduct of limestone mining
is these incredibly large, cavernous,
empty, kind of almost negative space.
And so we proposed a novel solution where we’re using small-scale robotics -
these robots are using technology similar to what’s used to mine out these quarries,
and instead they’re redepositing and re-caving, if you like.
And so they're operating within this terrain.
They're depositing mineral solutions.
And over time they’re working together, and they’re creating synthetic caves.
And then we are able to reintroduce flora and fauna into these environments
and develop a synthetic ecology.
And so we've created new habitat for these animals and plants.
Their habitat has been destroyed.
We take a waste product and we kind of redevelop it for a new purpose.
The next project I’d like to talk about
is a proposal that I developed for the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
And I do a lot of fieldwork,
so I travel to different areas of the world.
I traveled to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
I spent most of my time in Pripyat,
which was the town kind of adjacent to Chernobyl.
And while there - I was traveling with a group of researchers, architects,
artists, filmmakers, designers -
and we were all kind of using different methods
to sense and visualize this landscape, this ecology,
and start to think about responses.
So one of the things I was really interested in
is the birds and their lack of color.
And so I dug into some more scientific research.
There’s a number of really interesting ecologists
working on animal behavior in the zone.
And what they’ve identified is that there is a side effect
in terms of all of the animals there are spending a lot of energy,
a lot of free radicals fighting off the effects of radiation.
And what that impacts then is their ability to produce color,
and color in a lot of birds is used in the male of the species
as a mating mechanism.
And so in the zone,
what they were really starting to notice
was these mating behaviors were being affected
and it had to do with this loss of color.
And so what I looked for was different mating strategies.
And bowerbirds - many of you might be aware of these species -
they build these wonderful things called bowers, and they are structures.
So these birds are essentially designers, or small scale architects,
and they’re gathering all of this waste
and all these colorful things.
Sometimes they're using berries and natural things,
but a lot of times now in the contemporary condition,
they’re gathering up bits of plastic, but it’s very aesthetic.
They’re very concerned with color, right?
So they might go out and find everything blue within, you know, a 50-mile radius,
and then they build these incredibly beautiful structures.
And this is the mechanism by which they’re attracting mates.
And so I had a thought of what if the birds of Chernobyl
could have a different type of behavior?
And so instead of their internal color - they’re no longer able to produce that -
what if we could give them a new behavior?
And so there’s a lot of research that has proven
that birds actually can learn from watching other birds.
They can even learn from watching videos of other birds.
And so this proposition proposed that we would really survey bowerbirds,
we would generate a series of films, videos, instructional how-tos,
and so we were making these videos
for these birds to teach them this behavior.
And so this basically takes a behavior from a far different place,
a different set of species, and gives it to another species.
And I think this has relevance across disciplines,
because when we shift the focus,
when we kind of de-center and have a different approach
in terms of what the end result is, the end user,
I think the lenses we use and the solutions that we generate
are actually much different.
And so in some sense, these projects are fictional,
but in the other sense, they’re very tangible, and they’re very achievable.
And part of it is really just having a leap of imagination
and a kind of different orientation to the world.
So I think this approach to design, to speculation, to problem-solving,
to methods of intervention in the world
hold incredible relevance across disciplines
to anyone who’s really looking to enact change for the present,
the near and the far future.
Thank you so much.