When seeing this quote by Kathryn Hales, about post-human, about our own consciousness:
‘In the posthuman view, by contrast, conscious agency has never been "in control." In fact, the very illusion of control bespeaks a fundamental ignorance about the nature of the emergent processes through which consciousness, the organism, and the environment are constituted. Mastery through the exercise of autonomous will is merely the story consciousness tells itself to explain results that actually come about through chaotic dynamics and emergent structures. ‘
It is worth thinking about how our way of knowing the world is shaped step by step. When we first start to understand something, we can come across as very ignorant. Because when we don't know anything, we behave perhaps like a baby who can only think of himself, thinks the whole world happens around him and sees things through that lens. But as we learn more about other parts, we can learn that we are only part of a larger system. Many of the ideas we used to think were important no longer matter. Many cultures, societies, norms could be illusions of control that we create to deceive ourselves. Design is also part of this behavior.
For Plato, artists and technicians were traitors to ideas and tricksters because they cunningly seduced people into perceiving distorted ideas. Similarly, In Vilem Flusser’s the shape of things, he says:
‘Lever is intended to cheat gravity, to fool the laws of nature and, by means of deception, to escape our natural circumstances through the strategic exploitation of a law of nature.
This is the design that is the basic of all culture: to deceive nature by means of technology, to replace what is natural with what is artificial and build a machine out of which there comes a god who is ourselves. ‘
Design is deceptive, it deceives nature (non-human things) and ourselves (humans), to some extend resulting our unconsciousness of other things. For example, with increasingly superior user experience, easy and fast internet connection symbolizes that everything is becoming more convenient and efficient. But it hides the fact that it requires more servers, a large amount of energy and the inexhaustible work of countless people to run it. We build more new inventions and more complex and specialized tools today, while being more ignorant and powerless when they raise unexpected problems.
Regarding the sense of deception, it occurs to me that perhaps all the progress we have made today is just our own self-indulgence and self-deception. The tools designed are just a way for us to fool ourselves. Today's computers may not be fundamentally different from the divination tools of a previous time. We are still unconscious, just like our ancients, beguiling through spiritual witchcraft ceremonies. The systems we design and cultivate may be less effective and more unstable than we expect.
In this reflection, I wonder if we can go beyond the already known, by mixing boundaries, to reduce this sense of confidence and self-deception. And if we could use design in a way to promote hybridity and complexity, catalyzing exchanges and flows. Perhaps this would be creation that is of more openness rather than deception.
When I was listening to the ideas shared at this week’s scent Immersion Day, the artist mentioned that we are actually exchanging with our environment and thus connecting with others through the air every second we breathe. We cannot stop beathing, nor can we stop changing and decomposing. In addition to the theoretical ideas, she shared the work of students from previous years: they designed a perfume whose scent originates from each person's own body and emphasizes it. It promotes us to rethink ourselves olfactively and to pay attention to our own unseen complexity. I can't help but think that perhaps the scent of one's body might smell like other unexpected entities, perhaps like the smell of limescale from a bathroom nozzle or the smell of a special species on the other side of the planet in the mountains.
I think many of the limitations are actually be set by ourselves and regulated by the beliefs we have designed and Invented. When we get used to this, we are prone to believe that this is the truth and that we should live under this norm and that we should continue to act in this way conventionally. Just as a person will create a bigger lie in order to make it up, we should not continue to deceive as the truth will eventually be revealed to us.