“These are the oldest memories on Earth, the time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. … [Our] central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.”
—J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World
We live in an era of unprecedented interest in design. New pathways are continually opening, allowing designers to help steer the development of goods, forms of communication, communities, and policies. Is the human body the next frontier for design? Although the challenges facing humanity involve factors beyond human needs, the human body remains central to formulas for the planet’s survival.
Designers have always regarded the body as a client, site, and scale. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man (circa 1487), inscribed in a circle and square, is the classical depiction of the human form expressed in perfect geometric proportions.¹ Over time, our concept of the human body as a discrete entity with knowable, obvious boundaries has evolved into something more nuanced and complex. The body is now seen as part of a web of systems—ecological, political, geographical, cultural. The result is a body understood as more than a closed system. A related example can be found in sustainable design, an evolving field that evaluates products in relation to an ever-widening array of factors such as energy consumption in production and recycling, equitable distribution of resources, and effects on biodiversity.
What systems are connected to this newly defined body? What role does design play in enabling us to understand it? Can we design in a way that engages the systems within and connected to the body, from genetics and metabolism to culture and politics?
What we have learned from the fields of sustainability and product design helps answer some of these questions. Take the design of a chair, for example. Today the designer considers not only ergonomics but also the product’s lifecycle, the materials and processes used in creating and recycling it, and its suitability for markets worldwide. Product development is increasingly complex and involves many considerations: aesthetics, culturally determined preferences, production and shipping costs, required technology, market values. All these elements involve systems that meet in the chair. Contemporary research tools allow designers to identify and visualize these systems and measure their environmental impact and the environment’s effects on them. Such tools have enabled designers to map the “extended product.” Now designers are using them to help us imagine the “extended body.”
EXTENDED BODIES AND NEW VISUALIZATION TOOLS
Challenges to the classical image of the body have existed for centuries. One finds in art and literature “unnatural” bodies formed not through discrete biological processes but instead by social, technological, economic, and modified biological systems. An early example is Pantagruel (1532), Rabelais’ satirical exploration of social systems. Modern examples can be found in films blending hard science with science fiction—works like Godard’s Alphaville, Cronenberg’s The Fly, Boyle’s 28 Days Later, and Natalini’s Splice depicting a future threatened by technology run amok. Today much of the technology presented in such films is real, running on ordinary laptops. The information these tools use is available on the Internet. Does such widespread availability help us avoid a “brave new world” dystopia or summon it? This question is a call for designers to intervene to help the public grasp the implications of technological advances and understand their effects—positive and negative—on the individual and communal body.
Nuclear science offers an extraordinary example of design’s role in raising public awareness of the systems-determined body—and threats to that body. Harold Edgerton, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, designed a camera capable of taking exposures less than one millisecond in duration. His photographs of the Trinity nuclear bomb tests in 1945 reveal the intricate morphology of an atomic blast (page 17).² Capturing events at macro- and microscopic scales in time and space, Edgerton’s arresting images established a critical cinematic threshold, a designed visualization, enabling one to see the scale and trajectory of the forces of the blast. Details made visible by Edgerton’s camera clearly communicate the bomb’s great power. The images also suggest the scale and uncontrollable nature of those forces, the effects they might have on the individual and collective body of humanity, and, by extension, the repercussions of rapidly evolving technology. The Trinity bomb explosion challenged designers to safeguard the human body against the sinister blooming of atomic weaponry that has shaped geopolitics for more than a half-century.
To cope with the existential risks unleashed by our rampant progress, we design ever more advanced techniques to study the world and the extended body. These tools include software that graphically represents mathematical equations—programs like Gephi and Cytoscape, developed to visualize genetic relationships but now used to map social networks like Twitter. The promise of such tools is demonstrated in an article published in Nature in 2009, showing that Google search query data could be tracked for reliable real-time estimates of flu activity around the world. Consider also the “Diseasome” map,³ which graphs overlapping gene lines of human illnesses, and projects visualizing social behavior and identities on platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. Use of these tools introduces a further abstraction of the human body into the realm of statistical data. Our new collective bodies consist of aggregated information as well as material components. As gene sequencing becomes cheaper and more accessible, the data can expand to encompass individual genetic codes.
THE RADICALLY OPEN BODY, THE DESIGNED BODY, AND THE ROLE OF ART AND DESIGN
If we extend the concept of the human body, envisioning it as part of many interacting systems and even as data, we can also understand that the body contains systems and entities within. For example, we know that eating yogurt introduces probiotics, independent organisms that improve digestive functioning, into our bodies. The Human Microbiome Project4 takes this concept to the next level by mapping out thousands of microorganisms living on and in the human body that affect health. Designing objects that interact with this bodily ecosystem is a topic of discussion among design theorists and practitioners today.
In The Extended Phenotype (1982), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins speculates on even deeper interactions between design and the body. He describes the constructed environment as integrally connected to the body, calling the product of genetics and the built environment an “extended phenotype,” part of an epigenetic landscape where the built environment shapes evolution on the genetic scale and vice versa. Artists and designers have explored this convergence of body and product design. Their work ranges from wearable technology to art series like Peter Allen and Carla Ross Allen’s KnoWear, which imagines a merging of designed motifs with genetic engineering to produce designer logo skin embosses (inside front cover).5 Standing somewhere between a tattoo and gene splicing, KnoWear is a creative effort to understand the epigenetic and imagine a radically open body. These artistic explorations suggest new ways of thinking about design. If we can map and modify an epigenetic landscape, which then alters a human genotype, physical form, and behavior, then by designing a network of systems, we can design a body and vice versa. In this model, the design process focuses on the molecular level, the less visible layer.
NEW ROLES FOR ARTISTS AND DESIGNERS
Edgerton’s camera revealed more than the unseen dynamics of atomic explosions. It also suggested an unsettling truth about how little we understand of nuclear energy and, by extension, the planet’s delicately balanced systems. Thanks to contributions by Edgerton and others, artists and designers have new tools with which to graph, extrapolate, and contextualize data, helping us better grasp the forces interacting in our environment and constituting the extended human body. In turn, we can intervene on the public’s behalf by advocating for design that recognizes the deeply interconnected nature of the ecosystem. Opportunities to do so have arisen in a growing number of areas through methodologies ranging from process design and service design to genetic design. We must use the insights arrived at through design thinking to establish models of sustainability incorporating a holistic consideration of the extended body in political, economic, and environmental systems. Japan’s historical and recent experience with the disastrous effects of technology on humanity and the environment makes clear the risks of designing only for the obvious body.
