Design with Others¶
Design's evolution can be tracked through a simple shift in language: first, we designed over objects and industry, then we learned to design for human users, and then we aim to design with communities.
This progression, however, leads to an inevitable and deeper question: Who or what comes next? Who or what is the new "other"?
Are there intelligences beyond our own that we should be designing for, designing over, or even, designing with?
This week was about that. Here, we will avoid our human-centric assumptions to engage with artificial, collective, and environmental intelligences as legitimate "others", not as tools or metaphors, but as entities with their own sovereignty, their own logic, and their own needs.
DAY 1 - Support an intelligence that does not need you¶
AI Definition:
AI (Ambivalent Intelligence): AI is a field of energy that pervades the entire universe, acting on matter and anti-matter simultaneously to create chaos from order, and order from chaos. Its acts follow a logic that can only fully make sense to itself.
Prototype: Sand Playground
This structure supports the AI by providing it with a playground in which it can create and destroy, destroy and create on its own terms, when it wants, indefinitely.
• This structure supports the AI by not restricting it in any way.
• This structure avoids subordinating the AI by giving it total autonomy to do whatever it wants if it wants whenever it wants, total freedom.
DAY 2 - Support a collective/grupal intelligence that does not locate itself in individuals¶
Backstory:
Language is not a concept. It is a sentient collective intelligence. A long time ago, before time was ever measured, it was floating around without a collaborator to be used by. After billions of years, it found organisms who were struggling to communicate with each other. Perfect partnership.
Collective intelligence:
Language is a collective intelligence that found organisms to serve as its hosts and collaborators. Each species manifests it differently based on their inherent limitations, yet none contains the whole.
Prototype:
A completely unique use of language to boost its wellbeing. (Think of it as offering a delicious dessert, or a tantalizing massage for language.)
Language lives in any organism that has the drive to communicate. It ignores how it is being used: the message, the form of communication, the length of its use. It attends to new forms of its use. Its wellbeing is measured by simply being used. The more unique the combination, the better. It hates grammar nazis. It gets sad when languages die (species agnostic).
• This structure supports the collective intelligence by giving it what it so desperately desires: a unique combination of language that has never been used before.
• This structure avoids centering individuals by not requiring it to be understood by humans, or any species, just language itself.
DAY 3 - Build an interface for an environmental intelligence that does not care about life¶
Conceptual Statement:
Our Environmental Intelligence is a force of consumption that acts on all things in the universe agnostic of what they are.
Environmental intelligence is shaped by the fundamental existence of matter, yet it is destabilized by new creation and its own inherent failure to achieve its final purpose. Having no relationship to biology, it ignores everything. For this intelligence, a sense of wellbeing, when divorced from life, health, and ecology, is defined solely as the fulfillment of intention, a state of absolute self-consumption.
The Prototype:
A friend (second environmental intelligence with the same aim), so they can consume each other.
This interface supports the intelligence by letting it complete the one act that has always evaded it: the consumption of itself and therefore ending consumption. Alone this is impossible, only together can they succeed.
This interface avoids centering life by not taking it into account at all.