In an industry that's highly regulated, male-dominated, and generally a little bit on the conservative side, Smart has already proven to be able to step into a new paradigm. In this paradigm, cars are not so much designed as closed spaces of comfort on the inside, and impressive or intimidating displays of a static personal identity on the outside. Cars become minimal, open, friendly to all, shared, and flexible. The Smart Fortwo, in my eyes, has been the first global quantum leap towards this paradigm.
Smart has of course been looking to extend their philosophy further, and last summer they came out with an electric concept called the 'Forvision'. At the time I didn't think it was interesting to blog about because we all know about electric cars, and the form language lacked consistency. With the Forvision, Smart made a move towards cars that look more like intelligent, living organisms, than utilitarian products. But they completely overdid the design of course, and should probably have simply gotten rid of the idea of those angular, dented surfaces. These work well in some sculptural objects, but only when done extremely masterfully.
Now Smart has taken the prize in the LA Auto Show design competition, with a concept of a smart car that can switch modes. It can park by standing on its nose and hovering, it can fly, and even climb walls. What's more, Smart has taken a step in not putting the design of the car itself in the spotlights, but merging it into a larger, movie-like scenario. Watch it here:
By now we all know that shape-shifting can be a very powerful aspect of technology. Since we witnessed the T-1000 change his hands from knives into hooks into pins, we all unconsciously knew that one day, we could have forks that can change into spoons or into scissors. And after a dream finds root into our psyche, the real work begins, which requires us to selflessly devote our mind-processes to the manifestation of that dream.
Many creatives around the world have become fascinated by products that can morph, with one of the new minds in the game being a guy from Eindhoven, the Netherlands with a good name for a designer, Jeffrey Braun. He has posted a video that shows an initial vision towards shape-changing kitchenware. In the video, you will see him varying his movements and gripping positions in order to morph his incredible tool towards the desired shape.
Of course, this video is just a video and only a small step away from the T-1000 towards actual, marketable products. If his aim was to show us something magical, I think he has succeeded. We must not remain sentimentally engulfed in a dream for too long though. I always love to see a designer step up and create a concept that actually has potential to hit the markets within a certain timeframe. It is through the largely social filter of the marketplace that true innovation occurs, after all.
I would actually be interested myself in seeing if we can develop something. Many things need to be critically thought out to see which concepts can survive. For one, magic has its limits. It can draw attention and evoke interest to buy a product, but a product will also have to match and support the actual ecology of use, including the physical, socio-economic, cognitive, and emotional environment. For one, I think that a clear mental model has to be available. Magic can be interesting, but it actual use not being at one with our products but having them do unpredictable, magical things, can be dangerous and induce uneasiness, even fear when using the product. True magic would occur when technology would be able to perfectly decipher the intention of someone in real-time. But in general, we humans have not even generated this ability yet, as this requires an intense felt oneness with the other.
Another approach is to make symbolic couplings from a consciously implemented human action to a consciously implemented technological action, as Jeffrey has shown in his movie. But the value of this is limited by how much we can and are willing to load our cognition. Then there is the issue of confusing an actual functional action in use for having a symbolic meaning for the product, so that it accidentally triggers a function. And the last major issue is that symbolic couplings disembody us from our ecological embeddedness. We lose track of what we are embodied in when we are acting as a result of a symbolic trigger. For example, you don't want to have to stab a knife backwards four times to make it turn into a fork. I can see the symbolic approach working for only a few actions per product, as both cognitive load and accident rate are minimized. If we have to go through the interaction design paradigms that human-computer-interfaces have gone through also for everyday physical tools, things might get a little chaotic.
I see most value in direct embodied couplings, say, when the amount you squeeze the handle of the knife determines the length of its blade, and the pressure you give with your thumb the width. These couplings are intuitive, do not necessarily require sophisticated AI, and have the human being actually become more embodied because it requires him or her to develop more physical control skills. There is a great shift starting towards embodied interaction, and I think that also for shape-changing products we should follow along with it.
When it comes to vague future visions of technology, I am with CMU's professor Goldstein. He foresees to realize a technology platform that will allow for matter being fully programmable; in real time, and in three dimensions. Their own description sums it up perfectly:
"Claytronics" is an emerging field of engineering concerning reconfigurable nanoscale robots ('claytronic atoms', or catoms) designed to form much larger scale machines or mechanisms. Also known as "programmable matter", the catoms will be sub-millimeter computers that will eventually have the ability to move around, communicate with other computers, change color, and electrostatically connect to other catoms to form different shapes. The forms made up of catoms could morph into nearly any object, even replicas of human beings for virtual meetings.
Of course this is still very rudimentary, and it reminds me of a guy saying that he would be able to create the T-1000, whose proof of concept was a soccer-ball size cube sliding over another cube. A phone changing into a laptop, a physical re-instantiation of another person, and shape-shifting furniture can then become a reality, according the team. Well, nothing is impossible with the right resources and at least now a research group is working on this matter, so keep your antennas tuned.
Here's an interesting little interview with technology-guru Kevin Kelly, who is currently finishing the first draft of his upcoming book "What Technology Wants". The simple but catchy animation is done by the Dutch agency FreedomLab.
Basically, he discusses technology's cosmic driving force that propels us further in our evolution. He also thinks this process is deterministic, i.e. that it evolves towards an end state, as if it had a single intention.
What i would add to his vision comes from a more psycho-spiritual point of view. I would refine technological determinism by stating that there is no end-state technology wants to evolve us towards, it only seems to be so. Not only that, adopting the stance that there seems to be a technological destiny for us can make us happier, because it gives us a sense of purpose. The thing is, I think that this end state can never be known, that we can only flow along with technology, see what it is in technology that truly makes us see and experience happiness, and find it in moments of interaction with technology. Technology progresses with us towards happiness, and this is not happiness as in a desired object outside of us, given to us by technology, but happiness that is always already here in the moment, which technology can reveal to us. Ultimate happiness lies in perfecting skill wherein you are liberated from yourself and are fully absorbed by the environment, so in the end you become one and do not need conscious thoughts anymore. I think that the purpose of anything is to become obsolete, and that we are supremely happy when everything is obsolete. Thoughts, intentions, reactive emotions, words, expressions, objects, concepts, etcetera. Then we come to be pure nothingness and just flow along with whatever happens, and so to say become manifestations of a cosmic force that transcends our thinking, desiring, feeling, experiencing self. That to me is what both humanity and what technology wants.
The 2002 song "Hayling" by dj FC/Kahuna has often been in the back of my mind because of its striking message and accompanying video clip, showing singer Hafdís Huld becoming seduced and fertilized by the piano she is playing. The clip's beautiful cinematography, though with outdated CG work, shows Huld playing the piano, while from underneath the piano extends a tentacle-like protrusion towards her sexual organs. It distracts her by showing off like a peacock, gently waving feather-like modules, while internally it's picking an identity for the baby to be born, or should we say produced.
All the while, the woman is singing:
"Don't think about all those things you fear; just be glad to be here."
In 2009, I find this situation quite representative of our relationship towards technology; technology holds a facade before us that hypnotizes us into thinking it's an incubator in which we can all enjoy pleasures to an infinite extent, attracting us into a fake paradise. At the same time, it blinds us to the residue and waste the technology leaves behind on a holistic level. In a way, we are already in a state of technologically-induced ecstacy.
The message of 'Hayling' seems to have an undertone of humanity, or what we define as humanity, inexorably becoming replaced by technology. The only useful stance then, according to the lyrics, is one of accepting this loss of control and inherent blindness to what's happening around us. I sure think that technology, as anything else, is inherently uncontrollable, so any feeling of control we create for ourselves is temporary. As our technological lifeworld becomes as complex, and in the future probably much more complex, than our social lifeworld, we must start to treat technology as we treat people we identify with. People must learn to let go of narrow-minded identifications based on superficial notions as to what seems to be similar to them as opposed to non-identifications to what seems dissimilar. In the future it is pressing that we start to connect to a deeper process of a holistic, evolutionary complexity, that can only be felt but can be conceptualized as underlying everything we experience. We need to redefine who we are, which is a point that cannot be stressed too often in my opinion.
If we see that everything is merely experiential data, we see that any concept or model is created by us, and as any creation, only useful in certain localizations in for example space and time. As a side note, this renders science as a lens we created and learned to use to a very sophisticated extent. In that we have collectively adopted the scientific stance in our blind pride of our neocortical, rational brain, we have institutionalized our worlds with externalizations that perpetuate this stance, so we all tend to spiral into it. But if we see that we do not necessarily have to cling on to the concepts and models we have created and can be free from any stance by connecting simply to the direct experiential lifeworld, we can come to see that we are all fundamentally artists who create lenses, and are free to do so.
In this sense, friends and children are technologies you create for yourself, as much as a new bicycle is. But if we choose to lose all identifications with concepts such as 'my body', 'my culture', 'my country', and 'my car', which can induce some anxiety at first, we do come to see that beyond these fragile crystallizations we can connect to an immensely rich realm of direct experiential data, in which nothing is different from anything else unless we want to see it that way. The important thing is then, that we uplift ourselves as to be more adaptive in the sense that we gain the ability to choose the stance we adopt for acting upon the world.
As soon as we connect to the direct experiential realm, we learn that all that is meaningful is our current action, embodied in the current perceptual environment. When choosing to be free from concepts, not think of anything beyond our current experience, and act upon the now with the perceptual-motor, social and cognitive skills that are already embedded into us, we come to see that through action we create a new world, in that action directly influences perception. This stance can bring about a holistic awareness that the purpose of life is to be the optimizing, self-organizing pattern of your perceptions that always acts according to an ever-evolving and self-generated ideal about what is the best possible lifeworld for you. Open your mind and you see that you are nothing but an adaptive self-organizing pattern towards a perfectly beautiful and moral resonance between your actions and perceptions. Whenever you have internalized this fully, by coming to see that all static crystallizations are inherently temporary and fleeting and all there is is the current moment, you also lose your fears and end up in a state of invulnerable contentment that is beyond any form pleasure. So yes, throw away all your fears, and be glad to be here, but know why and act with purpose.
Continuing on the notion of that we should come to treat technology as an other that we can fully identify with, like a close friend or lover, it's not hard to tell that trying to control technology will not work any longer. We must create our relationship towards technology as being one of equality, and we must do so before the side effects of our current myopic stance badly start to bite back into the deepest organs of humanity. In case we are not able to transcend our selves as concepts that identify with other concepts and fail to come to see ourselves as dynamic, creative processes, we will be clueless about what to do when events like massive deaths inflicted by malfunctioning nanobots start to happen. It is crucial that we learn to act positively and invulnerably, and no matter what happens keep believing in a dream we create for ourselves as to what our worlds should be like, and acting according to that dream without falling into the trap of a fearful existence. It is when we adopt the positive, creative stance, that we come to see that the only way is to keep shaping and guiding technology, as it were a child of us, and stay compassionate with it no matter what happens. We must help it grow, despite that it may display childlike behaviour such as random spasms, directed at humans. We must refrain from attaching egoic projections to that technology and come to see it as an other, but instead learn to see that we are everything we have created, including all we perceive and interact with. I am my technologies, and must continuously co-evolve with them.
Don't resist, and succumb to the overwhelming flow of technology so we can mutually attain a state of holistic contentment. Technology is willing to help us if we guide it well, without judgment and fear. Think, create, transcend, inspire, and be glad to be here. It is time for a revolution where we come to see ourselves as artists, creators of our own world. Where we come to see that our current experience and action is all there is and that that is what defines us. Where we come to see that we are free already, if we only choose to be.
Today, I thought out my transhumanist vision for the future of technology; the Cosmic Cyborg. Here is an excerpt of my vision.
In terms of the definition of a ‘cyborg’ given by Clynes and Kline (1960) as an “exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously”, we are already cyborgs from the moment we started wearing clothing. Wearable technology will only increase the extent to which we are cyborgs, slowly fusing the organic and the artificial, and it is up to designers to critically explore what kind of cyborg we should become.
So far, explorations into wearable technologies seem to have led mainly to the following directions for human augmentation: The ‘radical cyborg’: a functionality led approach that keeps us in the flow of handling digital and physical data The ‘expressive cyborg’: emphasizing our feelings or social identity, possibly in a poetic way The ‘regressive cyborg’: technology will pervade our bodies although in an invisible way, so we still look like ‘ordinary humans’
What this project poses to create is a new kind of cyborg that I term the ‘cosmic cyborg’. By adopting technology into his body he is able to transcend his own local self, and live a life perfused by a cosmic awareness of everything he perceives, including his body, the world, other people, and products of technology, not necessarily identifying with these. Digital wearable technology should provide this awareness on the background of a fully lived embodied experience, where the human and the technology feel at one.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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