October 31st to November 4th 2022 : Living with Your Own Ideas¶
The Living with Your own ideas week is about exploring a concept without the need of a finalized prototype. Even more, it’s about involving yourself in the process of speculating the future by embodying the idea. What’s required here is to sit in the in between, before the concept fully materializes.
The goal is to think through doing, and importantly, understand the design process as a situated action: u se yourself as a design research instrument. Taking a first person perspective (also called autobiographical design, embodied ideation methods, autoethnography) allows you to immerse yourself personally in the concept, and get an experiencial perspective of you project and its socio-technical implications. The process of testing/prototyping on self and living with allows you to, over a long period of time, uncover new assumptions and grasp an emotionality about technology that you can’t get from simply brainstorming.
In essence, it can be useful when thinking about new technologies to prototype “quick & dirty” over time to dig out all of the impacts and consequences of this tech as well along with the visceral knowledge tied to it.
Assignment: Take a 24 hour period and embody one aspect of your design space
I chose to explore the topic of Interspecies communication. This is a hugely challenging subject. Communication between humans can be difficult already, and we have barely scratched the surface of what it might mean to communicate with other species. We know how to domesticate and train our pets, we know how to make others species respond to our vocabulary - but entering in a mutual communication exercise has not been a forte of the human species. And when it comes to communicating with the microscopic, it’s even more obscure (and the need is not widely felt)
To explore this subject I designed a Microbial Body Scan. I researched the microbial communities at different sites on my body (scalp, palm, gut, feet), and tried to understand their role before diving in. I then performed this meditation, scanning my body and focusing on scalp, palm, gut and feet (for simplicity). I tried to simply observe the sensations in these corporeal spaces, internally vocalizing the names of certain species I knew to be there, and somehow sensing their work in the larger ecosystem of my body.
Doing this exercise obviously did not uncover any clear answers. Meditation is in the space of “Other forms of Knowing” and vocalizing any learnings from other states than the rational/intellectual is perhaps a futile thing (though it’s been beautifully explored by poets, writers and musicians - eg The Doors of Perception By Aldous Huxley).
But as I focused on the gut space, and the sensations that came up I remembered all the studies that have recently come out. Many scientist are finding the microbial communities in our bodies are crucial to helping us produce the chemicals (the hormones) that we depend on everyday to function. In that way, our emotions and the way we feel - by being an indirect result of the microbial species within us - are a valuable avenue of exploration in terms of interspecies collaboration. And by scanning my body and my microbes and noticing these emotions deeply, I am entering into a conscious relation with my microorganisms. I notice and acknowledge their work.
I am a microbial world, I am a Home -
Our emotions hugely direct our thought patterns. How positive we feel (serotonin levels) can influence how creative we’ll be on a day, or how many ideas will flow freely. Similarly strong doses of adrenaline (stress) might allow us to find a solution fast. Low levels of these could lock us in unhelpful, repeating patterns of thought. While, these are massive simplifications, the general story is there. By helping produce these chemicals, our microbes influence how we think and hence how we act. By entering into a conscious relationship with our emotionality, perhaps we also enter into a conversation with our microbes.
Again, it’s challenging to vocalize, confirm or put forward any clear fact as the result of this exploration. But two questions come out strongly:
- Could altered states (meditative or otherwise) be key for Interspecies Communication?
- How can designers work with altered states to uncover more symbiotic systems?