How everything we design will in turn design us back
And why the notion of ontological design means that we as designers should think a step further and design mindful systems that will, in turn, affect us back in a favourable way.
“What we design, will in turn design us back.“
Wow. That sounds deep. Let me explain.
This idea derives from the notion of ontological design. The basic idea of ontological design is that everything we design in this world, will in turn design us back. First we as humans build the tools, then these tools build us back: We are the creators, but then we are created by our tools.
Let me give you an example:
We all know how the smartphone has revolutionised our lives. Today, we have these little devices in our pockets that have thousands of times more computing power than the computers that first put a man on the moon. The majority of Internet traffic (over 60 percent) now comes from mobile devices rather than desktops, which long served as the dominant online portal. But in addition to changing our browsing habits, affecting us culturally and socio-economically, the smartphones have also impacted our brain in a deeper way: With search engines and digitally managed contact lists just a touch away, analysts say smartphones are affecting how the brain processes information.
The authors of a study conclude that persistent access to information via search engines is permanently changing how our brains catalog knowledge. In other words, the processes of human memory are adapting to the new computing and communication technology. According to the authors: “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found.”
What this means is that design affects us in a way that’s much deeper and more pervasive than what we usually think. Ontological design implies that there’s a certain circularity to the world we design: There’s an infinite feedback loop.
Man and his environment participate in moulding each other. Man is now in the position of actually creating the total world in which he lives, or what the ethologists refer to as his biotype. In creating this world he is actually determining what kind of an organism he will be.”
By harnessing these feedback loops, we can build better “mindware”. Everything we design should be thought of as a building block for our future, for our society and for our future “mindware”.
Our various creative choices feed back into our lives and our ways of thinking in ways we don’t even realise: Even our linguistic choices can shape us to think differently about gender or even affect our ability to save money.
“We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.”
Ontological design and our future
It’s easy to get lost in thought while contemplating the idea and repercussions of ontological design. It’s a crazy idea. But it’s an inspiring one. Why? Because it means that we are the architects, we are the composers of our future.
If you ask whether the future of our society is going to be a utopian or a dystopian one, the answer is: We decide. We hold the pen, we get to decide how our future reads. As long as we make mindful decisions with our design and think a step further, we can affect positive change that in turn, in a longer timeframe, will affect even more positive change in the future.
And that is a reassuring thought to me.
PS. The whole notion of ontological design inspired me to put together a little creative coding / creative writing / digital art installation experiment. It aims to illustrate how we have a choice, how we get to decide how our future looks like: http://experiments.joonasvirtanen.com/future/
The idea is, if you only read the side you see first (the one with black text) it reads like a dystopian poem. But, if you shift your perspective (by rotating the square a bit) and read both the black text and blue text as one story, the outlook of the story is quite different. It should work ok on mobile devices too, allowing to rotate and zoom in/out.
PPS. Feel free to follow my future endeavors at www.joonasvirtanen.com.
