15 Hugh Dubberly, “Design in the Age of Biology: Shifting from a Mechanical-Object Ethos to an Organic-Systems Ethos” Interactions 15, no. 5 (2008), 35–41.
16 Paola Antonelli, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” in Design and the Elastic Mind (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 19–24.
17 Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey, and Roel Wouters, “Conditional Design Manifesto,” Conditional Design, April 3, 2015, http://conditionaldesign.org/manifesto. 18 British mathematician John Horton Conway developed the cellular automaton called Game of Life in 1970. Conway’s game is often cited in discussions of emergence and self-organization.
16 | Digital Design Theory
Hugh Dubberly, co-creator of Apple’s well-known technology-forecast film of 1987, Knowledge Navigator, asserts that we are moving from a “mechanical-object ethos” to an “organic-systems ethos.” He points out that in contrast to the rigid mechanical brain of the last century, we now describe our computer networks in flexible biological terms, such as “bugs, viruses, attacks, communities, social capital, trust, identity.” The modernist design methodology of the 1900s coalesced around reducing complex, chaotic information into simple, orderly forms by forcing materials and layouts into streamlined, efficient designs of our choosing. In the current century, Dubberly emphasizes, the massive increase in computer-processing power has enabled us to look instead to biology as a model for growing complex systems out of simple elements.15 Paola Antonelli, senior curator of art and design and director of research and development at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), considers biomimicry and nanotechnology to be natural steps in the move toward organic, systems-based work. She explains: “Nanotechnology, in particular, offers the promise of the principle of self-assembly and selforganization that one can find in cells, molecules, and galaxies; the idea that you would need only to give the components of an object a little push for the object to come together and reorganize in different configurations.”16 We are moving beyond twentieth-century systems thinking into a period in which we frame systems that can evolve on their own. This change in process— simple to complex rather than complex to simple—is only possible through the processing power of computation and the connectivity underpinned by the Internet. Emergent behavior, a topic long discussed in computer science circles, has become a buzzword of the design disciplines. In the 2000s, creatives including Luna Maurer, Edo Paulus, Jonathan Puckey, and Roel Wouters of the collective Conditional Design expressed their desire to produce work appropriate to the now, exhibiting a passion akin to that of the avant-garde. They build upon the work of other generative designers, including Karsten Schmidt and Michael Schmitz, to delve purposefully into processes. Through a combination of rigorous process, logic, and organic input from “nature, society, and its human interactions,” Conditional Design hopes to identify emergent patterns.17 In such work, the ideology of John Conway’s cellular automaton, the famous Game of Life, combines with algorithmic design thinking and making to physically and digitally produce artifacts of unexpected behavior.18