The Future is Digital

Published in: Morf 15, 2011, p. 27-40

 

Every second, a piece of the present imperceptibly vanishes into the past. Our expectations for the future are necessarily based on our past experiences. Man “backs up into his future,” as Buckminster Fuller wrote.¹ We don’t see the new coming, it looms up unexpectedly from behind our back.

This can lead to an uneasy cohabitation of the old and the new. So it can happen that a major American publisher thinks it is reasonable to compel libraries to re-purchase a digital book after lending it out 26 times. Digital books don’t wear out, and that’s not fair because in the past publishers have always made money from the deterioration of printed matter.² Vested interests perpetuate the past, which is further enhanced by the value we attach to security in our existence. The less things change, the more predictable the future will be, and the less we have to worry about. The new draws attention and is greatly exaggerated by the focus of our attention, but we can safely assume that most things remain unchanged and that most of the changes are so gradual that we don’t even notice them.

We see this in design too. Although the word ‘design’ suggests that something is created from nothing, this is rarely the case. Most design projects should actually be called re-design projects.³ The designed object already exists and the design can not be changed too much for it to remain recognizable, understandable and usable. Also, most clients are – from the perspective of the designer – conservative. They want something similar to what they already have, or similar to what their competitors have, and usually with good reasons too. Deeper still is the influence of convention and technical constraints that can’t be broken without compromising the usability of the design.

Although most designed things already exist, occasionally, a completely new product comes along. It seldom acquires the right form immediately. It’s hard to get away from the existing and to think of a completely new form. It’s more difficult still, to introduce one because of people’s fear of the unknown. The computer is a good example. It started as an huge and extremely costly calculator that only large institutions could afford. Through miniaturization and lowering of component prices, it evolved first into an office machine and then into a device for personal use. Despite the prevalence of the term personal computer, the desktop computer still has the constitution of an office machine. However, since the advent of the Internet and wireless communication this has finally changed.

Ongoing digitization leads to a convergence of all media: writing, graphics, sound, photography and film. More and more aspects of our personal lives are mediated by digital media, which makes other demands on the devices that provide these services. Only with the introduction of the smart phone and the tablet, the computer seems to have acquired a form that is more tailored to intimate use in the personal sphere. Only now, the computer starts being personal, finally liberated from its past as an office slave.

Non-things and non-space

Partly, the immutability of the world is mere appearance. The speed with which people adapt to new circumstances is astounding, but some changes, such as digitization, go much deeper than we tend to realize. To clarify this, Marshall McLuhan used an image similar to the one Buckminster Fuller used:

“Most people […] still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world.”⁴

Digitization not only changes the devices that provide access to the digital world, but also changes something much more important: our relationships with things, and with ourselves.

Before the invention of the printing press, every object was unique. When an object was lost, there was no other exactly like it. In the era of mass production this changed. Mass products are interchangeable. When a mass-produced object is lost, you can always find an identical copy. Now we live in the age of the clone: ​​digital objects are indistinguishable, the supply is endless and, as we have seen, they don’t wear out.

In his book The Shape of Things (1989), the Czech philosopher Vilém Flusser refers to things on computers (software) as ‘non-things.’ He based his analysis on the finiteness of human existence, where physical things are obstacles that hinder us, and, eventually, if they can’t be overcome, lead to our death. Digital things offer no resistance and play a very different role in our lives, according to Flusser. People surrounded by non-things are less concerned with overcoming physical obstacles, and value playing and having experiences.

“[…] ‘modern’ life, life surrounded by things, is not the absolute paradise our ancestors perhaps thought it might be. Many non-Western societies in the Third World have good reason to reject it. If our children too are starting to reject it, this is not necessarily reason for despair. On the contrary, we must try and imagine this new life surrounded by non-things.

Admittedly, this is no easy task. This new human being in the process of being born all around us and within us is in fact without hands. He does not handle things anymore, so in his case one cannot speak of action anymore. Nor of practice, nor of work for that matter. The only things left of his hands are the tips of his fingers, which he uses to tap on keys so as to play with symbols. The new human being is not a man of action anymore but a player: homo ludens as opposed to homo faber. Life is no longer a drama for him but a performance. It is no longer a question of action but of sensation. The new human being does not wish to do or to have but to experience. He wishes to experience, to know and, above all, to enjoy. As he is no longer concerned with things, he has no problems. Instead he has programs.”⁶

Absorbed by our interactions with and through the computer, the world of tangible things disappears into the background. This was also the case with older media such as the book and television, but these only demanded an abnormal amount of our attention. The digital world is a place where a part of our lives is actually taking place.⁷

We could extend Flusser’s argument by denoting the environment in which we stay while using computers and similar devices as ‘non-space’.⁸

Things becoming non-things

When our daily lives increasingly take place within digital dimensions, the same automatically applies to our past as well. How fundamental this is becomes clear when you consider how strongly past and identity are intertwined (you are formed by what you have experienced you and are what you have done). At a cultural level, museums and archives are digitizing their collections to make them publicly available through the Internet. Google wants to index not only the whole World Wide Web, but also all analogous sources of human knowledge. If it were up to Google, all books ever published would end up on their scanners to be made accessible through Google Books.⁹

Not only institutions work on the retroactive digitization of our heritage. Private collectors of all kinds of objects take photos of their collections and post them on the Internet. These are often humble objects that you will never find in any museum, providing design aficionados with a virtual museum of unprecedented proportions.¹⁰ In what he called a ‘lifestyle experiment,’ the American tech journalist Mike Elgan attempted to digitize as much of his business and personal affairs as possible. He took digital photos of all his official documents and personal memorabilia and then disposed of them. In his article ‘Why You Should Digitize Everything’ he reported excitedly about the benefits, for example that digital files stored in the cloud are immune to calamities.¹¹

Not only the things that we consciously choose to preserve, are preserved digitally. Almost everything we do in the digital world is recorded and much of it remains traceable in one way or another. Even many of our actions in the real world end up in the digital world, through smart phones, GPS devices and social media. In exchange for free digital services, we abstain from our right to privacy to an extent that was utterly unthinkable until recently. Family albums and padlocked diaries as carriers of our memories are replaced by a complicated and semi-public pattern of digital traces, left behind randomly and often involuntarily. ¹²

Things are reproduced as non-things, and some are completely replaced by non-things. The vinyl record, the audio tape and the video tape have been superseded by digital alternatives, and printed matter seems to be next. Holding a paper journal in your hands, conditioned by six hundred years of printed matter, it is hard to imagine a world without printing, but the production and distribution advantages are so obvious that it is perfectly clear in what direction things are moving, and fast too. The art of printing will not disappear, but it will be marginalized; the only question is how soon. In anticipation, furniture giant Ikea has already decided to make one of its most popular products – the Billy bookcase – deeper, under the expectation that it will soon be used for anything other than storing books.¹³

Non-things becoming things

Graphic designers will hardly notice anything when the book ‘disappears’. This has to do with the rationale and the history of their profession. Design emerges when the devising and the making of an object are separated from each other. This happened for the first time at the end of the 19th century under the impulse of mechanization. Graphic (and industrial) designers are by definition alienated from the product of their labor. Whether a design is printed or distributed digitally makes little practical difference for a graphic designer. Their practice was digitized twenty years ago and most of them already have a lot of experience with design, production and distribution taking place in one and the same medium.¹⁴

Similarly, industrial designers have made use of CAD / CAM software for more than twenty years. Like a photo or a graphic file, a digital 3D design can be ‘printed’, resulting in a three-dimensional object (rapid prototyping). The costs of this technology have declined dramatically; earlier this year [2011], the Netherlands-based company Ultimaker introduced a 3D printer for the consumer market.¹⁵

In the future, this essentially primitive technique may be replaced by a method that offers truly fantastic possibilities: molecular manufacturing. In the visions of nanoscientist Eric Drexler, we will be using digital tools to impose our will on individual atoms in order to produce structures on a molecular scale that can ‘grow’ objects of use.¹⁶ This is not science fiction. It is basically the same method that nature uses to produce living things, with DNA as the digital code. In scientific laboratories work is being done to develop this type of nanotechnology and pave the way for quantum computers, thinking robots, cyber people, and many other applications.

It took nature millions of years to develop this method of production. Will man succeed to do the same within fifty years? If molecular manufacturing is indeed possible, it will have immense physical and social impacts. The production of tools, materials and even food will be almost free of charge. No special materials and hardly any energy are needed, and no waste or pollution will be produced. It can happen on a small scale, at any location. For most goods we would switch from an economy based on scarcity to an economy of abundance.

**

Next to the material world of tangible things, a second dimension is emerging – the digital world, or: ‘non-space’ – in which we increasingly spend our time. In part this is an extension of the ordinary world, in part a reflection of it, and between both a complex interaction occurs. Marshall McLuhan saw electronic media as an extension of our nervous system. Whether we should interpret this literally or figuratively, they have indeed – as much as the telescope or the microscope – changed human experience and conscienceness. Not only are they indispensable as means of communication, memory carrier or means of production, they also play an important role in the dissemination of information and knowledge. Our awareness of what is happening around the world has increased manifold on every conceivable level.¹⁷

All things that can be digitized will be digitized.

Conversely, digital things can also be materialized, in the future possibly in a way that would spell the definitive end of the industrial age – of smoking chimneys, assembly line work, bulk transportation and anything else that goes with it. But by then, maybe we spend so much time in non-space that there is no more need for the splendid proliferation of physical objects that we now have, and the job of the designer will be moved to a place where it is perfectly at home: the realm of pure imagination.

Notes

1 R. Buckminster Fuller, ‘The Comprehensive Designer’ (manuscript dated June 1, 1949), published in Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (eds.), Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller Discourse, Lars Müller Publishers, Baden, 2001, p. 244.

2 Kyle VanHemert, ‘HarperCollins Forcing Libraries To Re-Buy Ebooks After 26 Checkouts’ gizmodo.com/ #!5776518/harpercollins-forcing-libraries-to-re-buy-ebooks-after-26-checkouts [4 March 2011].

3 Michl, ‘On Seeing Design as Redesign. An Exploration of a Neglected Problem in Design Education’, in Scandinavian Journal of Design History 12, 2002, pp. 7-23 www.designaddict.com/essais/michl.html.

4 ‘The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan’, Playboy Magazine (March 1969). www.mcluhanmedia.com/m_mcl_inter_pb_01.html.

6 Vilem Flusser, The Shape of Things. A Philosophy of Design, transl. Anthony Mathews (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 89.

7 At the start of this year the results were published of a ten-year study on media in the lives of young people, ranging from eight to eighteen years old. “Recreative media exposure” (excluding the use of computers for school or work) is on average ten hours and forty-five minutes per day in seven hours and thirty-eight minutes (they use more than one media stream simultaneously). This means that young people outside school are exposed to electronic media almost every minute of the day. Source: Victoria Rideout, Ulla G. Foehr and Donald F. Roberts, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, A Kaiser Family Foundation Study (Menlo Park: Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010), www.kff.org/entmedia/8010. cfm (1 January 2010).

8 In this context usually digital space is usually referred to as cyberspace, virtual space or virtual reality, but these terms are less appropriate, due to their specific (historical) connotations.

9 Earlier this year [2011], they also announced a partnership with several prominent international museums. High-resolution reproductions of paintings show details ​that are not visible with the naked eye. Google Art Project www.googleartproject.com.

10 ‘Watching The Collectors’ www.thingsmagazine.net/?p=3607 (5 March 2011). Thingsmagazine.net also gives many links to available digital collections.

11 Mike Elgan, ‘Why You Should Digitize Everything’ www.computerworld.com/s/article/9132739/Why_you_should_digitize_everything_ (9 March 2009).

12 Kevin Slavin, ‘The Ebb of Memory’, in: John Brockman (ed.), This Will Change Everything, Ideas that will shape the future, Harper Perennial, New York, etc., 2010, pp. 32-134 www.edge.org/response-detail/1479/what-will-change-everything (10 September 2011).

13 The Economist, ‘Great digital expectations’, www.economist.com/node/21528611. Richard Adams, ‘Amazon’s ebook sales eclipse paperbacks for the first time’ www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2011/jan/28/amazon-kindle-ebook-paperback-sales (28 January 2011).

14 You might think that this eliminates the designer’s alienation with the result of his work, but this is not the case because the end result is not a tangible object.

15 See: Ultimaker blog.ultimaker.com.

16 See: K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation. The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Anchor Books, 1986 e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.html and Ed Regis, Nano. The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology: remaking the world – molecule by molecule, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, etc., 1995.

17 Cf. Marshall McLuhan’s global village.