Transdisciplinary Design

DREAM-HOME-LAND

Posted on December 4, 2016

THE PLAUSIBLE

“The actual limits of what is achievable depend in part on the beliefs people hold about what sorts of alternatives are viable.”[1] – Erik Olin Wright

What began as a dream in a natural expanse has over the course of civilization turned into the plausible within the human agglomeration. A mindset framed by a path that follows not natural laws, but human laws. Limited by the politicized and created structures of our own invention, locking ourselves into a specific way of living. “Realities” that have emerged and dispersed all throughout our human history, creating new forms of living that never existed before. A world within a world. For generations now, we have lived this way. Expanding our empire, encroaching upon all corners of the earth and replacing what was once there, with a new idea of the world. Growth becoming our central goal. The more we accumulated, “the better we became”, the more we built, the more we wanted to build. A sprawl of civilization that expands to saturate not only previously barren areas of the earth, but also the invisible realms that surround us. From infrastructure, politics and the mining of the commons to the economy and the internet of things. Growth and expansion always as the constant beacon of success, the tour guide shaping our own land.

Yet, despite all of our growth, we seem to not be able to shake off many of our troubles. We may now live in polished and efficient cities, and be able to contact anyone on any part of the earth at the touch of a button, but our life quality has progressively become more and more faulty. What’s more, the earth is now faulty, for within our effervescent search for growth, we have managed to divide the colony into “rich” and “poor”, while simultaneously altering the course of our homeland.

Homeland

“The author has forgotten the most essential characteristic of all organic growth – to maintain diversity and balance, the organism must not exceed the norm of its species. Any ecological association eventually reaches the ‘climax stage,’ beyond which growth without deteriorations is not possible.[2]” – Lewis Mumford

Earth is our home, our planet, our life. The universal homeland of all we’ve ever known and seen. While the modern human has only evolved about 200,000 years ago (with earth being formed 4.6 billion years ago [3]), our effects on the planet have been vast to say the least [4]. What began as a partnership with earth, morphed into a dictatorship of earth. An unbalanced relationship that could only produce a dystopic future. Perhaps right now the dystopia looks nothing like our sci-fi interpretations of the future, but we are also just exiting our latency period, where our behavior’s effects weren’t visible yet, to the period where they are finally becoming visible. This time gap of cause-and-effect-reactions extending the existing disbelief that — “there’s nothing inherently wrong with how we have run our human colony throughout the years”. Colony because, while the human civilization extends to cover much of the world, this doesn’t mean that when we talk about the world it becomes a synonym for the human civilization within, it’s quite the opposite, for as Lewis Mumford states, we are but a parasitic colony within earth, that has grown past its “climax stage”.

Dreamland

“We simply have to ratify what we have always done, provided that we reconsider our past, provided that we understand retrospectively to what extent we have been modern, and provided that we rejoin the two halves of the symbol broken by Hobbes and Boyle as a sign of recognition. Half of our politics is constructed in science and technology. The other half of Nature is constructed in societies. Let us patch the two back together, and the political task can begin again.”[5] – Bruno Latour

The design of a human civilization that is not abusive but inclusive, (inclusive of our human differences and inclusive of the planet and the creatures that live in it) while continuously pushed as progressive, is really just introspective and true to our fundamental origins. A civilization that understands its true essence and considers it a given that if we treat the planet, it’s natural elements and it’s creatures as “resources” that simply become part of an economic and political plan, then we must as Bruno Latour exemplifies in his theories of the “Parliament of Things” and “Actor-Network”, also represent them with laws and a government of their own, giving them equal treatment[6]. In the documentary film “Project Nim”, we can see an example of this, when lawyer Henry Herrmann suggests that chimpanzee Nim be taken to court, given the same rights as a human and testify on his own behalf using sign language[7].

The creation of this “progressive” dreamland seems to be at a standstill for now though, not because of lack of do gooders, but because of a lack of introspection, emotion and the belief in our emotions as igniters of change. A plausible planning mindset that creates a disbelief of ourselves as meaningful creatures. Living our “reality”, we simply tell ourselves we are stuck in a world that doesn’t care about us, so we give in and sell our labor to survive, we stop fighting, we stop dreaming, we stop believing in change. We tell ourselves that the fight is only for the powerful, we can’t do anything, we are merely an ant in a colony of accumulation. A colony that decided growth and economic gain was better than happiness and balance, and so we self inflict a lack of self care in ourselves, our home and in finding meaningfulness in our life. Instead, we become pawns of extrinsic values, code that stopped dreaming of a different future and went on as being a 1 and a 0 in this programmed colony called capitalism that we refer to as life.

Of course there are a myriad of other aspects at play, nothing is ever just a one part solution to a problem. Despite this, the importance of revived introspection, empowerment and self belief is an essence that is lacking and must be reinstated. A robbed aspect of humanity. While we all know that going back in time is not the viable plan for the future, we must indeed analyze our past behavior and reassess our current path. This is the path that will lead us to the future, so it’s within this area that we must explore divergent paths of alternative forms of living that can be accessed and expanded across our human colony. We must question the consumer world, reevaluate our idea of success, and retrofit it back to earth, re-instating the partnership. For in the words of Carolina Vallejo, designer and creator of the competition “Design for the First World”, “this is one planet and the multiplicity of voices should be working together to design a developed world, one that fits us all”. [8]

1. Erik Olin Wright’s point in “Envisioning Real Utopias”, found in Speculative Everything, by Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby – P.161
2. Lewis Mumford critique of Jane Jacobs’s manifesto, in Steven Johnson’s book Emergence, P.147
3. Data from Hereistoday.com – “Here is the earth: A volatile formation about 4.6 billion years ago.”
4. Data from Elizabeth Howell’s article “How long have humans been on earth?”; universetoday.com/38125/how-long-have-humans-been-on-earth
5. Bruno Latour, We have never been modern (trans. Catherine Porter, 1993).
6. See Bruno Latour theories: “Parliament of Things” and “Actor-Network”
7. Documentary Film “Project Nim”; The story of the chimpanzee who became the focus of a landmark experiment, an experiment that consisted in raising Nim as if he was human.
8. Carolina Vallejo’s, Design for the First World competition; cooperhewitt.org/2011/12/21/design-by-the-rest

Dani V. Sánchez