SEARCH IN IDEAMAGAZINE.NET

 

 FLUID DESIGN FOR THE THIRD MILLENNIUM
 Isao Hosoe (Designer, Politecnico of Milan), Presentation for the meeting
 Dedalo's faces. Second day on formal innovation


I'm going to talk about things that have already been said thousand of times. In particular, three important historical characters in three different places repeated these concepts about 2,500 years ago. The first person who dealt with this topic was Laotze and he's considered the father of Taoism. Laotze thought the world was made of fluids, of air and water. He knew that life is fluid and considered emptiness crucial. The second scholar, Eraclito, lived at the time of the Classical Greece. He's famous for his sentence panta rei, (everything flows) and he was one of the first philosophers who understood the importance of change and of the continuos modification of reality. The third person was Buddha. One principle of Buddhism is the eternal vanishing of things and the awareness that all the things with a definite shape are destined to disappear. At the beginning of the third millennium, the thought of these three scholars urged me to adapt some basic principles of design and formal innovation.
Design and designing are a bit like throwing a cobblestone in the water. It falls on the surface and then several circular waves move in every direction. Some of them go ahead towards the future, while some other go back to the origin, even to the exact point where the cobblestone fell. The designer is consequently directly involved in this process. What would happen if the cobblestone fell on ice instead of falling in water? It would surely bore it and consequently several splinters would be created. However, no wave would propagate in this case. Henri Bergson had understood this and expressed this thought in the preface of his masterwork The creative evolution. He was aware of the danger represented by the key thought of modern society, which is based on the logic of solid objects. In fact, he asserted that this logic is surely the best means to understand the material world, but as far as human beings and the natural world are concerned, the same logic is not reliable and cannot be considered the means for a thorough understanding of life.
I started from these considerations to work out some answers to questions such as, what is design? How was shape created? If it's true that the shape of objects is based on culture and that modern culture was based on the logic of solid objects, what could ever happen if this logic melts and becomes more fluid? Maybe, even the world of forms and the world of design would change.
Let's try to analyse some basic factors of the logic of solid objects.
The waves of the Pacific ocean can be as fast as the light sometimes and their speed can be correctly calculated. However, the waves break when they approach the coast. They lose their continuity and become discontinuous. They can be understood and explained on the basis of fractal geometry advanced by Mandelbrot. Together with the catastrophes theory of René Thom, fractal geometry is considered one of the theories that can help explain the natural world.
Second element, the vortex. Important artists such as Van Gogh and old cultures such as the Celts loved it so much and considered it to be the main part of fluidity together with the wave.
Physically, the vortex is always caused by external factors. It always has a counterpart as it happens in the relation between actions and reactions. Consequently, the vortex has got evident analogies with the biological world where the categories couple and symmetry are crucial. The vortex has got different sizes. For example, hurricanes can even be hundreds of kilometres wide and also the Milky Way has got the structure of a vortex.
However, a natural element like water, which can both travel at thousand kilometres per hour and can take the dynamic shape of a vortex, can also be very calm as it is in a pond. In this case fluidity doesn't have any special shape. This element urges us to create something interesting.
Let's have a look at the world of sand. It's true that sand is solid because it's made of rocks splinters. However, it's also true that minute splinters behave like fluid elements. I've always been interested in the sand essence because it supports the other basic principle of Buddhism that asserts that truth is in the middle. If the string of a lute is tightened too much, it breaks and if it's not tightened enough, it cannot be used to play music. It's clear enough that the string must be used in the right way. So, sand represents the truth as Buddha meant it.
Sand reminds me of an experience I had in Marrakech, Morocco about 15 years ago. I happened to see a group of employees who were working in their itinerant office. They sat under something with no substance, that is they didn't sit under the sunshade but in its shadow. When the sun moved, they stood up, took their stool and moved as well.
This experience made me think about the historical nature of our culture. Probably, we live the last phase of the industrialisation time, which has lasted 200 years. This phase has sometimes been called post-modern, sometimes post-industrial and sometimes information technologies age. Apart from definitions, we have to admit that we are in the final period of the industrialised era which began about 200 years ago. However, industrialisation appears extremely short if it is compared with the agrarian age, which lasted about 1,000 years. The time that preceded the agrarian age was even longer. In fact, human beings were nomadic hunters for 200,000 or 300,000 years. We've probably forgotten this culture because it's not based on objects.
Let's consider nomadic hunters' culture. The more you pull the arrow, the farthest it goes; consequently, it's maybe the idea of forwarding (which the word project, from Latin progettare suggests) that can help us to find out something interesting in the past.
I compared the agrarian culture with the industrial and the nomadic hunters one. I checked their attitude towards natural sources, the sensible world and life style. Some of these considerations can be questionable, but some of them can provide us with some good suggestions to face the III millennium.
For example, the concept of possession seems to have come out with the need for new land during the agrarian time. Possession became consumption during industrialisation. We've all become consumers, that is those who destroy. Another example. From a sexual point of view agrarian society was very women-oriented. Touching, taking care and also fondling are all women activities. On the other hand, men were the core of industrial societies. Nomadic hunters didn't probably care too much about sexual differences.
From this short analysis of the three cultures, I grasped that there are two types of energy. On one side, there's the material energy, that is the energy of the industrial and design world and of the objects. On the other side, there's the behavioural energy. I think that the real and basic problem of industrial society is the exaggerate development of material energy. We have achieved this state of affairs thanks to technology, science and the solid logic, while, on the other hand, we never seriously explored behavioural energy. This inequity between material and spiritual energy is the main cause of most of our problems.
Many industrial lobbies and even many scholars who propose eco-compatible solutions, assert that the production of material power should not change because factories would undergo shocking transformations. On the contrary, I think that we should aim at increasing behavioural energy. We should minimise material energy production and, on the other hand, we should maximise behavioural energy. I don't know what behavioural energy exactly means and how it can be created. Maybe, we could find out some hints in the memories of the nomadic hunters.
Since I don't only want to talk about theory, I'd like to show an object which is consistent with my assumption. I'll show a piece of folded paper. It's simply a brochure of one exhibition I organised about the author of this type of paper, Miura Koryo who is a professor at Tokyo University and has been a scientific consultant at Nasa. This is what I mean when I talk about behavioural energy.



Florence 
27th / 04 / 2000 

Meeting organized by:
Centro Studi
G.K.Koenig
and Artex
for Regione Toscana

Edited by:
Giuseppe Lotti

I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.

In cooperation with:
Maria Angeles
Fernandez Alvarez
Elena Granchi
Sonia Morini





TOP