The Theory of Nevolution

Do You Remember the Future?

I remember the future well. Jetpacks, Mars and food capsules. It used to be so much fun. The promise of plastics just over the horizon and a helpful robot in every home. Say what you will about those times, but at least the future meant something in those days: Progress. You knew where you stood and our enlightened little selves could never do any wrong.

But then some of us started venturing off into the night like moths to a neon green flame. It was getting dark and we didn't really have a choice. Besides, Mars was getting boring and we needed something grittier than what our streamlined lives could give us. The first time you jacked into cyberspace with it's glowing grids of unfolding information you forgot how painful getting those damn chips inserted into your brain was. And oh the parties; throbbing music, lasers and reflective fluoro clothes were such a distracting novelty at the time. But we'd all become fragmented cynical beings and whimpering moral relativists. So much so that we didn't realise the robots had started turning against us until it was nearly too late. I mean, who were we to judge their value system? Thank god for the millennium bug is all I can say. Who knew that little bit of errant code would shut them down? 

But where to now? It's been nine years since we've been really living in the future and everyone seems to be taking it for granted. We've been sampling the past for so long that everyone's forgotten how to look forward and come up with something new. I thought progress was supposed to be a linear function of time? People just don't seem to want to live in the future anymore. Sure, we have personal communication devices but how boring is that? Speaking of boring, have you been to the suburbs lately? There's not a cantilevered helipad in sight. And what's with all the cheap neo-Edwardian facades? That's not how I remember the future. They're pretty much raising their finger to any notion of futurity, aesthetic or otherwise. Hell, I'll even sheepishly admit to turning my back on the future. I've had a beard for the past few years and nothing says dismissal of the future like scruffy unshaven facial hair. Who saw that trend coming a few years back?

But as much as I miss my jetpack I don't really want it to be part of my future today. I don't have a nostalgia for the absolute and I'm certainly not sentimental about the impotent haze of moral relativism. So where does that leave us? It seems people are just getting on with it and being pragmatic about the whole thing. It's not like we have a choice these days. Sure there's movement, but it just seems to be too informal at this point. Everyone seems to be so process orientated and participatory; but I'll happily accept that this seems to be the point.

But If you want a taste of what it's going to look like, trawl through some architectural renderings. Big shiny impossible ones. The crazy stuff seems to be coming from students and the big studios.  You can't start with the future until we have a general consensus of what the city should look like. If any of those urban concepts intertwine with a global mega-slum as their backdrop then you know you've found something. 

When your done glossing your eyeballs with pretty pictures go read some good old fashioned Science. The mind bending stuff. Anything that does a good job of melding complexity theory, relational generative networks and biotech is a good place to start. As long as you're running far away from Reductionist and Post Structuralist theory. And if you don't understand it yet, just keep on going until your nose bleeds. Those scientists never give up on progress, whatever the political climate. It's in their blood to keep on pushing the boundaries of what's appropriate. We'll worry about navigating microtopian ideologies later on, if at all.

Were not there yet, but we'll know when we move back into the future. We'll know because it will be weird, achingly weird. If it's both familiar and unrecognisable but it smacks you in the face with progress then you'll know you've found it. Even if it happens to have a damn jetpack.

Design Reportage

Have you picked up yours yet? You should, it's great. Pick it up, if there are any left from Greville St books, Metropolis, the Narrows, Lamington Drive and the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Oh, and it's free, so you have no reason not to. Great writers, great design, great design writing. We're looking at making more and turning it into a bi-monthly thing. Which, is awesome. We'll be looking at ways to improve on it (hard to do, I know). Particularly in the area of creating a community around this thing (everyone else seems to be doing it) and looking at post-collapse methods of income generation (is there any other choice?). Naturally we'll be looking at design and writing and design writing (kind of a no brainer) but trying to expand and improve upon the gold standard that's in issue one. And if I said I'd send you one, I'm working on it (I promise).

Built Systems 2040

By devoting a whole post to one room of the fantastic Built Systems 2040 exhibition it feels half hearted to put the rest into one post. Despite Plastic Futures being the clear winner, the rest were worthy of mention and despite my memory being hazy after a month, I'll do my best. OUTR][RTNO looked self organisation in the urban context by looking at a few examples in mega cities that have a certain plasticity in the built environment. One of the key themes that I've been picking up lately is that we seem to be moving away from the finished result and instead moving towards looking at processes as more important virtue. Nothing brilliantly new there, but I felt a heightened sense of this direction here. Moving away from the architect (or designer) as celebrity but to the system as celebrity. But then again, I'd expect that in an exhibition titled Built Systems, wouldn't I. 

The fluidity and dynamism of mega cities is shaping up to be one of the early twenty first centuries greatest metaphors as more and more case studies seem to focus on them. And while we all get caught up in 'favela chic'  still get the feeling that Melbourne and other developed world cities don't have the ability to be as plastic as we would all like. There's just too much hard infrastructure and regulations in the way. We can all dream though. Dreams aside, it's hard not to get enthusiastic for architecture-speak when it's this good:

Possibilities exist to utilise and develop notions of indeterminacy and 
self-organisation in city fabric, facilitating the emergence of the urban 
landscape as a set of systems operating under dynamic, temporal and 
fluctuating conditions.

DIY CITY looked what effect the Do-It-Yourself culture could have on Architecture (on a slightly tangental note, I read the update to this phrase the other day: DIO – Do-It-Ourselves). Looking at pre-fabrication, nomadic lifestyles, community building methods and other areas it discussed how might architecture help these communities and individuals instead of seeing it as a threat. Not my interest but worthwhile nonetheless.

Urban Rooms had a lovely mix of discussions and propositions looking at new ideas for making Melbourne's urban spaces more comfortable and usable from an individual perspective. Two such projects caught my eye, one theoretical and one more concrete. The images above discuss the possible idea of using the dead space on shop awnings above Swanston St as a new walkway. Nick Visser has come up with a plausible solution in creating more civic space much in tune with the new Highline park in New York (which seems to be a resound success) and would be a great alteration to Melbourne.

Below, the question of loose space was looked at with regard to the role of the designer. The construction of loose space undoes the 'looseness' inherent in such a spatial and temporal experience. By accepting this as a starting point, Alice Kohler looked at several ways in which it could be encouraged while retaining ways that the designer could influence positive interactions (and some rather nifty illustrations documenting found examples of loose space.

Plastic Futures

Those lucky bastards at the RMIT School of Architecture and Design get to take an elective called Plastic Futures 1 & 2. Lord how I would have killed to have taken that class. It was by far the highlight of the Design Laboratory 2040 City exhibition. I might get around to showing the rest of the exhibition, but it can't really compare with a room full of cotton wool. This is how I like my future; weird and dirty. Very dirty. Each student was given a bag of cotton wool, some thread, plastics and knitting wool. This at the end of a semester of discussions and told to come up with something in five days.

It was wall to wall post-singularity perversion and I was grinning the whole time. Crocheted coral reefs hanging from the ceiling was the most familiar thing I could find. Mostly because of the project going on at the Institute for Figuring; where they've been crocheting coral reefs for some time. It was refreshing to see other people getting into it, and not just from a  feminists handicrafts perspective. They were looking at it as 'coding as nature' and discovering wonderful ways of letting the algorithms come up with interesting forms. There was some other wonderful algorithmic patterns and sculptures, such as the cardboard piece above. 

But pumping up the weirdness quotient were two separate pieces that shared the same ideas were the two pieces below. The first, looked at the future of plastic surgery, and in this case, rhinoplasty. Leaving the surgeon behind, plastic surgery of the future would entail the act of biological additions to our code that would grow the 'corrections' into our DNA. This idea was ripe for corruption which they gleefully saw to. 

I'm a little hazy about the next piece, but I a have understanding that children's toys would be grown to be semi-sentient, instead of manufactured in a factory. Each model had little descriptions about the toys behaviours and odd habits; rolling around and becoming fixated with sand. I'm having trouble conveying the peculiarities of this piece, but peculiar it was.

The students went on an excursion to West Australia and looked at these weird growth forms on the beach that have some odd linking to some of the first examples of life on earth. Strange rock formations in the beach turn out not to be rocks, but microbial forms that harden with each layer called thrombolites. Read more about it here, it's delightfully bizarre. 

Then there was the living memory extension product called iPatch. By attaching these somewhat parasitic creatures to the body, they would absorb all unnecessary memories and thoughts, or act as a personal hard drive. They took it one step further and asked what would happen if people were to swap their patches? People memories could be wilfully planted into others. 

The whole exhibition was imbued with the fun that the students must have had in projecting all these ideas into their 'logical' conclusions.

Abundance

I'd heard Alan Saunders interview some of the curators of the Australian Pavillion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice more than a year ago and was disappointed that I'd never get the chance to have a look. It was thankfully part of the Design Festival and I took it upon myself to visit a few times. I'm always a sucker for architectural models and kept on giggling at how many there were to look at. Part of me felt sorry for all of the interns and their cut fingers; the other half was jealous at all the little toys they would have used to play with. The festival's theme - Sample the Future - seemed tailor made for this exhibition. 

Designed to show off the abundance of Australian Architecture; it's a multitude of not just the architectural practice but the ideas within. Instead of attempting to focus on one big idea, but instead provide a snapshot of the whole range of works. Not just finished works but explorations of form, ideas and construction methods. There's not much more that I can say about this exhibition, and would much prefer to let the variety speak for itself. Don't scroll through glancing at everything though. Give each piece the time it deserves, you'll be rewarded.

Bluestone Loungeroom

This isn't for the cool kids. This one's for the geeks, the nerds, the unsung heroes who work in obscurity and get excited about the design of a hinge of a bin. A good designer needs to be able to traverse multiple scales of experience: from the dimensions of a city to the flow of pedestrianson recently widened footpaths to the height of a bench to the bluestone paving underfoot. And yes, to the hinge on a bin. We owe these designers a debt of gratitude. They're not the ones making Melbourne cool – They're the ones making it work. Laying the foundation (pun intended) so that there's a cohesive sense of place while the rest of us get the credit. 

The exhibition "Bluestone Lounge Room – Designing the Streets of Melbourne" gives these nerds their time to shine. And shine they do. It's a beautiful exhibition that spills out onto the streets with some benches and lamp-posts from Melbourne's recent history. Leaving the exhibition you can't help but continue walking through the streets examining the rest of the citywide exhibition as it changes in real time.

Dan Hill spoke on the night and I'd planned to incorporate some of his speech from the night into this post and the article (the above review appeared in Design Reporter - pick it up it now if you haven't) but he beat me to the punch. Publishing not just the complete transcript of his talk but a fantastic overview of the exhibition. Reading over his speech I've just noticed that I somehow stole his last line by osmosis, which is fine by me. It was a damn fine talk, cheekily injecting some of his fascination with urban informatics into the speech which got a few gasps from the audience. I highly recommend this exhibition, if nothing more than to see benches curated in sequence out front. While you're at it, pick up the exhibition catalogue. One of the best I've read in some time.

Bluestone Loungeroom is on at City Gallery at Melbourne Town Hall.

City Wiki

I love the idea of a city discussing it's future orientation in an open and inclusive way, allowing for citizens to comment on how they believe the city should be allowed to grow while at the same time keeping a community based approach to the proceedings. City Wiki by Geyer couldn't be further of the mark. Which is a shame. Because it's an extremely admirable project to bring to the State of Design festival. And yes, the festival finished up a week ago but after two weeks of surrounding myself with the festival and writing I needed a little bit of a break. The failure here wasn't in it's concept, ideals or it's placement. The failure of this piece was in it's execution and in the messy realm of definitions. I feel the need to discuss it's execution first before attempting to look at why the failure of this piece lies in it's incorrect title.

Situated in the fantasy land of Melbourne's alleyways branching off Flinders Lane, the bright pink arrow invites walkers to wander down Higson Lane and contribute to this noble idea of adding to the fabric of Melbourne's future. A little informative poster provides simple instructions on how to proceed before erupting into a complex network of silver paper and rubber string. Oh, and some pink birds for good measure too. Great, I thought. My type of place. organised chaos with the hint of participative citizenship. Sign me up. But on closer inspection there seemed to be nothing to read. Nothing to contribute to. Another visitor walked up and down, looking baffled at the whole exercise. We exchanged pleasantries and both wondered what was going on. After she left, ad as I was contemplating leaving, I decided to pry open one of the silver sheets of paper and noticed that there was some writing on it. Which was unnerving. Ripping open what felt like a private letter in the interests of civil discussion seemed to go against the whole project,

The opening to chapter five (Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production) of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky is as follows:

Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. 

Several aspects of City Wiki fail to achieve collaborative production; I get the sense that little was understood of how a wiki operates. Even the premise of simple sharing here was made impossible by the method of obscuring the message behind folded, glued and obscured paper. There was not only any way to read contributions, but there was no way to collaborate on expanding the message either. Nor was there any paper or pens left there to add to the project; I'd like to chalk  chalk that up to theft, vandalism and nature, but a wiki needs a community of people who care enough about the project to constantly fix these issues. It would have been fantastic to rearrange the string to reflect the threads of different and like minded ideas, or perhaps to move the contributions around to different threads. But instead it was a static project that seemed to work on the opening night (not that I was there) but not much more thought was put into later contributions. 

I'd hoped that perhaps more work would be put into the online dimension to the project, but that seemed to have been dumped at the start and ignored save for a flickr account of the project. A wiki is meant to be an open process enabling people to contribute, change and add to a document arriving at a somewhat agreement through group communication. Instead, was a closed system that was unable to adapt or change, allow for more voices and with no connection to the project's initial aims.