Multiverso

The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the state of parallel realities. Once science fiction, as the digital-info world overlays the physical world, it has become everyday fact.

The globalisation of markets has been inseparable from rapid and complex developments in virtual technology. And yet how this affects our everyday world has often been hard to grasp. It was only their speedy collapse in September 2008, which brought home how everything – including us – is folded into this process. What became clear in the fallout was that, philosophically speaking, any old ideas we may have had about singular experiences are untenable – be they individuals, single markets, protected rates of exchange or safe pots of cash. All are interlinked. A change in one effects dramatic shifts in all the others.

Design developments are also impossible to separate from changes in technology and global markets. This critical period in the ‘global collapse’ collided with ’Multiverso’, the Icograda conference held during Torino, Italy in October 2008. Planned in the heady days before the fall, the conference’s aim struck a more optimistic note: to explore ways design can “record and give exposure to a complex and flowing, imperfect world that is prone to error but that is nonetheless alive for those very reasons.” This is a departure from a modernist tradition of information design, which sought to rationalise and simplify the chaotic world in order to ‘explain it’. Nor does it ask us to submit to a kind of data sublime. Instead, design index links people (not figures!) to the global flux.

…And so we can say that any old idea of a singular experience of design is untenable. This includes: any ideas of a singular author; finite images or texts; self-contained media or stand-alone contexts. Instead: people collaborate; meanings proliferate; information changes; images mutate and media fold into one another.

The question of agency –or how little of it we have – becomes renewed. Back in 2002, in the music promo Remind Me by Röyksopp we already saw how the minutiae of a city worker’s day is connected to the global flows of capitalism. It reminds of just how un-reciprocal this relationship can be. Set to the beat of pop and cued into the media image-circus (then MTV, at the time of writing YouTube), any critical comment intended by the musicians/designers (appropriately!) becomes suckered up too.

Design changes come quite simply because the technology allows it. However, as relationships between people, technology and contexts evolve, new ways of thinking philosophically about design start to take shape.

One strand of practice that has emerged aims to bring people into a more reciprocal relationship with this world. In this process, the manifold ways in which agency can be enabled – and disabled – by design are thrown into relief.

One example of this practice is Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping project which started in 2004. This involves asking local community members to walk around their area wired up to a GPS device which records emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This data is annotated onto maps, which can be used in discussion with councils, to make meaningful changes to the local area in response. Here, there are no ‘end users’ any more. People are mapped in to the world from the start and, also, all the way through. If Röyksopp presented a world that is alienating because it is disembodied, then this project might provide a kind of  ‘re-embodiment’. Nold’s project was part of his research for Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions programme where ‘people are [the] primary subject matter, and people cannot be neatly defined and labelled. We are contradictory, volatile, always surprising.’ If contemporary technological culture is so easily associated with disembodiment, then this might be a form of ‘re-embodiment’.

We can’t escape exposure to the erroneous data-verse. New approaches to design will have to fold the way people are complex, imperfect – and alive (!) – into this process too. The question now is this: How we can engage with a global, technological world without destroying our own temporal rhythms? Or to turn it around: How can design engage with the world through our bodies?

Limited Language 2009

http://icogradadesignweektorino.aiap.it/EN/
http://royksopp.com/videos/remind-me
http://biomapping.net/
ww.interaction.rca.ac.uk