Hasta La Ideas

Opinion: in the second of two columns exploring the impact of digital culture on design, Sam Jacob looks at how Google Maps is reshaping cities while Apple, Facebook and Amazon are reshaping the natural landscape by building their own headquarters as self-contained ecosystems.

The real shape of digital culture does not reveal itself to us in plain sight. In designer and urbanist Dan Hill’s recent essay for the Strelka Press, he neatly describes the substance of what he calls strategic design, which – if you’ll excuse my use of a gigantically broad brush – might be thought of as a welfare-tinged European cousin of North American corporate design thinking.

He calls it dark matter: the stuff that you can’t see that has enormous impact on the way things work and how things happen. For Hill, the dark matter of strategic design might be the complex machinations of healthcare, education and the environment, but for the American National Security Agency it’s something far more wide-ranging. How much darker is the matter that the Prism surveillance program deals in?

Prism highlights the very real nature of this digital-system dark matter that’s usually hidden from us, though we might feel its vague outline bump against us at moments or see its shadow cast fleetingly across our field of view.

It’s there, for example, in the way Google Maps redraws the city in relation to its own way of seeing. Maps, as we know, are a form of information that not only shows us the terrain in question but also reveals the concerns of its author. Maps are not neutral windows onto the world: they colour, frame and distort the world they describe.

Think, for example, of the way alternative forms of mapping projection alter the image of the world and how, seeing the size and balance of continents shift, one’s own understanding of the world also shifts. Think too of how a map’s point of view is itself a cultural expression – literally a world view. Maps describe the culture that creates them as much as they describe their ostensible subject.

As Slate magazine’s Evgeny Morozov explains, Google’s business model of targeted advertising is soon to merge with its description of the physical fabric of the city. Using the data that Google already knows about you through your email, your searches and so on, it will generate personalised maps of the city. As Morozov writes, “Space, for Google, is just one more type of information that ought to be organised.” And monetised too, we can add. The city, through the map, is remade according to the data held by Google, and according to Google’s idea of what a city is and what it thinks you will do there.

Imagine how the experience of Google Glass might alter your experience of the city as it overlays information onto your view, with the city literally becoming framed by Google. This Googleopic way of seeing transforms space and the urban environment through how and what it reveals and excludes. Its ways of seeing, as John Berger’s 1970s book of that title explored, contain hidden ideologies in its visual depiction of landscape. What’s relevant here is the way an ideology is made invisible through the manufacturing of images. Increasingly, this frame is used not only to show the world, but to make the world. The map and the territory, in other words, converge.

Over the last year or so, many of the key digital behemoths have unveiled plans for new headquarters: the grand edifices that they choose to erect for themselves. These are the physical ecosystems inhabited by our digital ecosystems, and in these habitats we can read technology companies’ own ambitions and their own self images, and perhaps glimpse something of the distortions that digital culture brings to the world around us.

Apple, for example, has long been arrayed in a set of buildings arranged around a road called Infinite Loop. Even here an idea is embedded of how the physical world might be spatially distorted by digital culture: the suburban cul de sac re-read as an endlessly looping piece of computer code.

But having peaked – for the moment at least – as the worlds most valuable company, something more fitting is in store: the Norman Foster-designed Apple City, Cupertino. Arranged as a giant circular plan, the project’s renders read like a non-slip, smooth Pentagon, set both in and around a forest. Just like digital space, it’s a form that has no front or back and whose interior is the same as its exterior, resisting traditional urban hierarchies.

Its plan reads as symbolically as anything by nineteenth-century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. Its expression is one long zero as though it imagined, despite its 260,100 square metres, that it almost wasn’t there. Apple workers stroll dappled by endless autumn sunlight. This is a particular version of a digital community, accelerated into a perfect hallucinatory cocktail of hyper-tech building and idealised nature.

Facebook’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, designed by Frank Gehry, suggests a different relationship to nature. Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying: “From the outside it will appear as if you’re looking at a hill in nature,” but what the hill will actually contain is the largest open-plan office space in the world.

“The idea is to make the perfect engineering space: one giant room that fits thousands of people, all close enough to collaborate together,” Zuckerberg said. Perhaps, just like the image of the cloud, the intention is for Facebook to disappear into the landscape, to become invisible and indistinguishable from things as natural as trees, grass and hills.

In designs for both the Apple and Facebook headquarters, the idea of nature is at once highly present and highly synthetic. It’s a level constructed above vast parking garages, quoted as experience and presented as mission statement. In both, there are echoes of the hippy pastoral techno-utopias of the 1960s, washed together with management theory and marketing. These are ideologies made glass and grass.

Google’s Bay View campus for California, designed by NBBJ, will be its first North American new-build. Though its appearance is closer to an average business park, it too has its roofs littered with green stuff.

The generic building forms, though, are distorted by what Google knows about: the acquisition of data about human behavior. The buildings are thus twisted and bent by patterns of work, desires and adjacencies, as though the data harvesting of Google Maps were able to warp the world into other organisations. They claim that employees across the 102,200 square-metre development will never be more than two-and-a-half-minutes from one another, creating a kind of hyperlinked organisation.

Proximity and loss of hierarchy are, in this headquarters, core issues. These reflect both the nature of digital work culture and the nature of the digital too. The absence of distance and constant adjacency is at once both the liberation that digital culture brings and the springboard for loss of liberty that Prism suggests. In architectural terms, we might understand this problem in terms of openness: the open plan and the curtain wall are simultaneously things that give us spatial transparency and a condition of panoptic surveillance.

Plans have just been unveiled for Amazon’s new Seattle headquarters, also by NBBJ, that includes a trio of 6039 square-metre biospeheres. Each sphere is conceived as “a plant-rich environment that has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting.” Within these bubble micro-climates will be floors of offices, shops, lounges and canteens – essentially total environments.

Of course Amazon itself is named for an environment, a habitat with geographic scale and significance in arguments of climate change. That the company should actually become a habitat itself, a technologically induced artificial ecosystem, is perhaps a fulfillment of this baby boom radical-to-corporate digital trajectory.

We might trace the roots of these places just as we might trace the origins of the Californian ideology. In part, they are university campuses, the sites of innovation research out of which some of these corporations and their culture spring. In part, too, they emerge out of the hybrid offshoot of architectural design that spliced management consultancy with spatial design.

They also owe much to those intentional communities that bloomed in the 1960s and 1970s: the communes pioneered by hippy culture. Places like Drop City struck out as techno-rural settlements, abandoning the city in favour of Buckminster Fuller-esque geodesic inhabitation of the wilderness. They were ideologically driven as spaces apart from the rest of society where alternatives for ownership, family, energy use, materials and so on could be explored.

They created their own ecosystems, if you will: self-sufficient as sci-fi space ships, supplied by the Whole Earth Catalogue, the hippy version of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue that architectural critic Reyner Banham argued had made the west habitable through mail-order delivery of gadgets and devices in his 1965 essay The Great Gizmo. It’s worth bearing Banham’s thesis in mind: if, as he argued, the colonisation of the West was made possible by the gadget, then maybe the gadgets the West now produces are not only a product of some kind of fatalism written into its own origin myths, but the gadgets they now produce are devices of colonisation themselves.

Biosphere 2 was perhaps the largest and most ambitious offshoots of these colonies. Conceived as an ecological experiment, it was a closed system housed in a giant pyramidal greenhouse. Its mission was in part determined by a hippy-science group called the Institute of Ecotechnics, whose mission remains “to establish and develop the new discipline of Ecotechnics, which deals with the relationships between ethnosphere, technosphere and the biosphere” and “which intends to harmonise ecology and technology.” It was named Biosphere 2, of course, because Earth is conceived in this way of thinking as Biosphere 1.

The gigantic corporatised versions of these idealised hippy communities also separate themselves from society. These too are idealised spaces, techno-utopias that turn their back on the world that surrounds them in order to manufacture spaces that can sustain their own ideologies. Just as the biosphere is an introverted ecosystem, we see a similar kind of disconnection, a resistance to the idea of the urban. Each becomes its own world, a place that operates according to its own set of rules and ideas, each wrapped up in its own vision of nature.

These are the citadels of the Californian ideology, places where the digital distortions of traditional urban, architectural and environmental space are manifested, places manufactured by processes of design thinking, holistic and totalised within their own limits.

Perfected and protected as these digital epicentres are, it is the rest of the world that feels the effects of the digital reorganisation of space far more profoundly. Outside the limits of these palaces is where the darkest machinations of digitality really work. Even nature itself, its clouds, hills, forests and rivers, traditionally figured as a place of escape and solitude, has long colonised by the digital. To escape its presence might now be almost impossible and might involve the most extreme schemes.

Think, for example, of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in west London, or of Edward Snowden, the Prism whistleblower currently in his Hong Kong hotel. Both are now in exceptional spaces, holes in the continuum of globalised digital space. These strange anomalies are perhaps the only escapes from the ever-present digital backdoor, the only respite from the colonisation of earth by digital culture.

In his previous column, Jacob argued that the American National Security Agency’s Prism surveillance program was something born not only out of the networked world we now inhabit, not only out of our reliance on a small group of Californian companies who may well have cooperated with the intelligence services, but out of a way of thinking that characterises those very same companies: design thinking.

Read part one »
See all stories about technology companies »

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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to Google’s world view” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: instead of serving up “mundane and predictable” cliches, the world of luxury design should be tempting us with things we never knew we wanted, argues Sam Jacob in his latest column.

For some, the relentless tyranny of luxury rolls on from business class lounge to hotel lobby via restaurant interior and beachside condo. A continuous experience of glistening surfaces, with the spaces in between plugged with walnut-dashed limos.

These are the weird scenes inside the goldmine of a world that never stops lustering, glistening and shimmering. A world made up of a continuous interior space polished entirely smooth. Each hermetic bubble annexed to another equally high spec bubble. Exterior-less, with no threshold to the un-luxe world the rest of us live in.

This is the world described in the Robb Report, the self proclaimed “global luxury resource”, which has just released what it calls its 2013 Luxury Portfolio. To the copywriters of Robb, it’s probably supposed to summon up sheaves of investment certificates slotted into a leather-bound folder with gold embossed lettering, lying on the smooth surface of an executive desk somewhere with a W1 postcode – but to those of us who went to art school it sounds more like a plush way to carry your A1 sheets.

If we are to believe that a Robb Report world actually exists, it might like to read an edit of American Psycho containing extended descriptions of embossed Silian Rail on business cards. Or Fifty Shades of Grey minus the sex, with page after page in which Anastasia goes wild over the technical specifications of Christian’s latest gift…

Your Christophe Claret Soprano watch chimes its divine four cathedral gong sound, cutting across the vivid, natural sound that remains remarkably stable throughout any listening space emanating from your Steinway Lyngdorf Model LS Concert speakers. You tap your Santoni footwear to the beat, the distinctive features of the shoe unchanged by the passage of time, still emanating the same luxury, design, and perfection as before.

The topnote of Chanel 1932 wafts into the room, and, as you recall that it is the latest addition to the Chanel Les Exclusifs family, you remember too the Louis Vuitton Paris Vendôme store, which truly represents the essence of luxury and sophistication with its mesmerising and innovatively designed interiors exuding opulence. Your Vertu Ti rings and as you pick it up you can’t help but note its high-end features and urbane look and feel. “Hello?” It’s the Amanzoe, a 38-suite resort whose peaceful and luxurious surroundings offer avid travellers like you an ideal environment to explore natural beauty, coastal pleasure and the ancient heritage of the Peloponnese region. Blah, blah, blah…

The Robb Report is, of course, not really a world at all. It’s a lump of inert media made out of mechanically recovered press releases perfectly designed for media sales. Nevertheless, it does corral a world of global luxury between its covers. A world over whose surface a particular idea of design is poured like a lacquer.

International luxury is a language spoken by high-end brands as a kind of design patois. But for all its apparent sophistication and refinement, it’s a language of primitive grunts that can only parrot back cliches of exclusivity. Though it tries to speak to us as though it were looking each one of us deep in the eye, it can only bark at us all in generalities. It’s a language of design spoken by corporate monoliths totally devoid of humanity that can only conceive of the most base and generic of value systems.

Surely the whole point of luxury brands, sitting as they do at the apogee of capitalist consumerism, is the creation of value? Instead, they rely on things – often on substances themselves, as well as signs and symbols – that already have value. There’s no fun, no risk and no imagination in that. Surely the role of luxury design is to make us want what we never imagined we wanted, not what we always knew we wanted? If this is the place where our wildest dreams are supposed to take material form, it seems depressing that these dreams are so mundane and predictable.

The real role of luxury brands is not moral – luxury will always deal in excess and over-abundance – but philosophical. After all, isn’t philosophy itself a form of luxury? Luxury design is the space in which we should explore the very question of what constitutes contemporary luxury. It’s the place we might imagine the possibilities of 21st century luxuriousness, to invent new ways of being, feeling and making deluxe.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

Top image is from Shutterstock.

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in luxury design” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: as the Bank of England unveils the design of its new £5 note, Sam Jacob ponders the historic and cultural symbolism of money in this week’s opinion column.

Last week the Bank of England announced its new £5 note. In 2016 Elizabeth Fry (don’t worry, I had to look her up too) will be replaced by a new design with Winston Churchill’s jowly boat race plastered all over the great British Pam Shriver.

Of course, we need new notes. Money gets worn out. It gets handled, dragged out of pockets, shoved in purses, rolled up, folded, scrawled on and so on. And as forgery gets smarter, the anti-forgery devices incorporated into currency need to evolve. But the changing cast of characters that play across our national currency also provide a portrait of the nation at any given moment.

The design of currency is then a technical, cultural and conceptual project. Money first is a representation of value, a kind of floating signifier of the value it represents. It’s both the value and the representation of that value simultaneously and locks value into its representation through the steps it takes to be unforgeable.

While performing these complex sleights of hand and technical feats, money also acts as a piece of national pageantry. It sits amongst the accoutrements of state that include the symbols and bureaucratic paraphernalia of a state, somewhere between a flag and a driving licence.

We know that money – as in coins and notes – isn’t really real. It’s just a physical manifestation of an abstract value. It is, in the great phrasing of a US customs form, a ‘monetary instrument’. Monetary value itself is an invisible entity that can leap from one state to another with ease. It slips in and out of substances as though it were a restless supernatural spirit.

We know the story of how money developed this supernatural power: how coins began as the thing of value itself, as lumps of value, actual pieces of gold for example, unitised. We know that this equivalence of substance to value shifted so that the coin referred to a value that was now held elsewhere. We know too how notes became a way of referring to value by acting as a promise that the actual material would one day change hands. And we know that this act of referred value came to mean something so significant that it gained a life of its own – the sign became a thing in itself. Money flipped. It changed from being the substance that contained the value to a symbol of that value, from the thing to a sign.

As objects, coins and notes are pitted by the residues of this history and scored by the presence of value. Their design is a record of the ways in which value is manufactured and protected.

Its surfaces construct the idea of value. They are embellished with symbols of nationhood, state, monarchy and culture that derive from the arcania of heraldic design, a language that links it to the sovereignty and government, symbolically tied to economic mechanisms that underpin the idea of money. Equally they protect value through the intricate lacings of so many security systems: inks and colours, holograms and watermarks, foil strips and paper, the fritted edges that once foiled those who would have shaved off slivers of gold.

Filigree lines loop back on themselves with almost psychotic intensity, so fine that you can zoom in and in. Images break down into patterns like fingerprints as though money wasn’t something you could actually draw with a line, only suggestively sketch. Its tentative quality is a matter of anti-counterfeiting but also perhaps an expression of the immateriality of value, graphically on the verge of immateriality, a point cloud that can only approximate the thing it is trying to represent.

Money is covered with historical reference. Maybe it’s the same kind of validation that banks once used when they were built in the form of Classical temples: historical reference somehow conferring significance. Churchill’s image on a bank note then transfers his significance, his personality and historical narrative not only onto money, but into it too. It works as a form of cultural guarantee. Euro notes too seem to have the whole history of Europe backing them. They have images of bridges, arches and gateways that look quintessentially European. Except, look closer: that’s not actually a Rialto or Pont de Neuilly! The landmarks depicted are not real things or places, they are things designed to evoke the sensation of European history and culture. They are imaginary renditions of Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Modern. It’s the story of Europe told through an imaginary architecture.

One can imagine the extreme lengths designers and their Eurocrat clients went to avoid national favouritism, to tell an inclusive story that all of the EU could feel part of. But one wonders if they also considered the narrative they were writing through this imaginary, non-existent Europa-heritage. For example, did they think of the implications of using essentially faked-up historical images as the face of money? As a thing that spends so much of its effort – so much of its surface and material quality – being authentic and non-fake?

As an aside: oh how I’d love to build full-size replicas of these imaginary historical sites – a version of fake Europe so real that it would be indistinguishable from actual Europe as precipitated by, y’know, real events and people (aka, history).

The aesthetic of money remains distinct even as it intersects with more contemporary design sensibilities like the recent British coins that fragmented the Royal Shield head over varied denomination coins if you arranged them in the right way, or Hong Kong dollars with their see-through plastic.

Maybe the future of money is Bitcoin, the digital currency based on open source cryptographic protocols that has recently been in the headlines for the volatile fluctuations in its value. Bitcoin has internalised the visual and material security systems of physical currency into the complexity of its algorithmic generation – the so called ‘mining’ of Bitcoins. Its value is (if I understand it correctly) related to the computational labour of manufacturing it. Which seems far more appropriate, far more accurate a description of what contemporary money actually is than being linked to gold reserves.

Right now Bitcoin is really only useful for buying sandwiches in Kreuzberg or illegal substances online. But perhaps it provides a far better, far more realistic depiction of value than those anachronistic notes and coins.

Sam Jacob is a director of architecture practice FAT, professor of architecture at University of Illinois Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, as well as editing www.strangeharvest.com.

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of national pageantry” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports from Milan design week, where he finds a city seemingly determined to make life unbearable for visitors.

Grey skies over grey buildings make for a grey mood. I’m in Milan for the annual design fair and it’s impossible not to be affected by the miserable weather. But the unseasonal chill that has descended on this dour northern Italian city seems to be a metaphor for the fortunes of the world’s biggest design gathering.

The Fuori Salone events around town feel much less busy than in recent years. You can walk down Via Tortona without running the risk of being crushed to death. Exhibition spaces are unfilled. Taxis are plentiful. I’ve met people who’ve found hotel rooms at the last minute – and not been ripped off. All these things would have been unthinkable in previous years.

There’s also little sense of the excitement of past years when Twitter, SMS and Bar Basso would be buzzing with hot tips and must-see recommendations. As one designer said to me the other night: “It must be a bad year – Alice Rawsthorn has hardly tweeted anything”.

It’s not surprising, since Europe – and Italy in particular – is mired in a seemingly endless economic crisis and the Milanese design brands that form the fair’s backbone are suffering. None will admit it openly but I’ve heard talk of four-day weeks, extended summer shut-downs and mothballed research and development centres.

The Milanese are masters of surface confidence – whenever I’ve asked senior figures asked about their company’s fortunes, the answer has always been a variation of the conspiratorial stock reply: “We’re doing well, but our competitors are finding things very difficult.”

The Salone Internazionale del Mobile (the official fair held in a vast Fiera Milano exhibition centre on the edge of the city) has dealt with the tough conditions by pretending they don’t exist, hilariously plastering Milan in 2009 with banners declaring “Crisis? What crisis? Salone is here!”

But the arrogance and swagger of previous years has finally ebbed, and more than one local has nervously mentioned last September’s article by Julie Lasky in the New York Times, which declared that London had usurped Milan as the world’s design capital.

I don’t (yet) agree with Lasky on this point and nor do any of the senior designers I’ve spoken to in Milan this week. For them, it’s still the paramount get-together of the year and the place where the key product launches take place. They love the city and desperately want it to thrive. Milan’s sheer size and heritage remain unparalleled. The Salone itself gets over 300,000 visitors and citywide an estimated half a million people are involved in the week in one way or another.

Milan practically invented the contemporary furniture industry in the second half of the last century and the Salone, established in 1961, has long been the definitive fair. This dominance stems from the network of family-run companies, prodigious home-grown design talents and highly skilled artisans who collaboratively turned Milan into the furniture design and production capital of the world in the post-war era.

Yet towards the end of the twentieth century the city’s stock of great designers mysteriously began to peter out – Sottsass, Castiglioni and their ilk left few protégés of note – and Milanese companies instead turned to foreign designers to design their products and give them marketing cachet. This has led to the curious situation today where rival Milanese furniture companies work with the same promiscuous pool of international names, resulting in product portfolios that are often indistinguishable. It’s hard to think of another industry where brands would allow their identities to be blurred in this way.

Now the companies themselves seem to be under threat from more adventurous overseas operations that are making the running on their home turf. The most impressive individual show this year is the vast, lavish, recession-defying installation by Dutch brand Moooi. The most innovative new players over the past few years have been the Dutch-run Ventura Lambrate district and the MOST exhibition at the city’s science museum instigated by British designer Tom Dixon (and this year sponsored by US online retailer Fab.com). Unlike his Italian counterparts, Dixon understands the digital forces that are changing the way design is manufactured, marketed and sold.

But the thing that most threatens Milan is Milan itself. The city treats fair visitors with contempt, allowing hotels to more than double their rates during the week, fleecing exhibitors with permits, bamboozling them with red tape (such as the Byzantine impossibility of getting a licence to sell products direct to the public) and doing nothing to help baffled foreigners negotiate the arcane taxi-booking system or the complex public transport network.

There is little evidence of curation across the city, with good shows mixed up with dreadful ones. Cosmit, the company that owns and operates the Salone, has appeared to lose touch with reality in recent years, commissioning lavish cultural spectacles in the city or organising sprawling press trips that had no relevance to the business of selling chairs and lights.

Through greed and mismanagement, the Tortona district managed to turn the most vibrant core of the fair into an overpriced, over-branded and overcrowded hell. The other districts and the Salone itself seemingly refuse to communicate with each other. There is no overarching organisation linking everything together, no decent free guidebook (the ubiquitous Interni guide is a navigational disaster) or map  (although our digital one is pretty darned good) and – astonishingly – no agreed brand name for the week. Is it Milan Design Week? Milan Furniture Fair? I Saloni? The Fiera? Nobody knows.

Milan’s hotels and exhibition venues appear to treat the internet as a nuisance, making it as difficult as possible for visitors to get online. Its design brands don’t seem to be capable of printing enough press packs to last beyond the first day or setting up a functional and up-to-date online presence. “How can they produce such beautiful furniture yet do everything else so badly?” exclaimed an exasperated American architect over dinner earlier this week.

Most incredibly of all, the Salone doesn’t even have a website, but rather piggybacks on the domain of its Cosmit parent, which provides little useful information beyond the dates of the fair. How can the world’s biggest design fair not have its own website?

In short, to visit Milan during the Salone is to experience the antithesis of design. Given the sheer hassle and expense of attending, it’s little wonder people are staying away. Compare that to London, which has brought all its sprawling September design events under the London Design Festival banner with a clear identity, website, guide and purpose. London is ten times the size of Milan but the London Design Festival is ten times easier to comprehend. If I were a rookie foreign design journalist trying to choose between the two cities, I know which I’d go for.

Another fair that understands the importance of the visitor experience is Kortrijk’s Interieur design biennale, which last year made huge strides towards treating that experience as a design task. “I sometimes get a bit frustrated coming back from Milan and feeling that even though I travelled a lot, I missed a lot,” its curator Lowie Vermeersch told me, pointing out the paradox that as a design fair, it “is not designed.” But Milan doesn’t seem to be listening.

The one glimmer of light in Milan this year seems to be the Salone itself, which has been packed with visitors after several years in which it felt like an increasingly optional sideshow to the events in the city. Besides being under a roof and therefore offering one of the few warm and dry experiences in town, this was surely helped by the common-sense decision to at last present a high-profile and relevant design-related exhibition – Jean Nouvel’s Project: Office for Living show – at the fair itself, rather than in a remote palazzo.

Last December, Cosmit appointed Claudio Luti – the savvy chairman and owner of thriving Milanese design brand Kartell – as its president and the word is that further long-overdue changes are afoot. Perhaps the next thing Luti should do is put together a high-powered Milanese design delegation, and visit London.

Top: photograph by Nicole Marnati at Ventura Lambrate 2013

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the antithesis of design” appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in this week’s column, Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs discusses how wearable technology will “transform our understanding of ourselves”.

I’m being watched. My steps are being counted; my location is being tracked. My sleep is being monitored and my calories logged.

The person who’s watching me is… me. I’ve put myself under auto-surveillance and I’m having a data-driven out-of-body experience. I don’t keep a diary; instead, I have a graph.

I’ve been wearing a Nike+ FuelBand on my right wrist since last summer. This device measures my footsteps, estimates my calorific burn-rate and rewards me with “Nike Fuel” – an arbitrary and essentially useless currency that I can’t spend or trade.

Yet Fuel is addictively motivational. I go out of my way to achieve my daily goal of 3,000 Fuel points. I walk, run, cycle and exercise a lot more than I used to (and swim less, since the band isn’t waterproof) and actively seek manual chores that will earn me Fuel. I take pathetic pleasure in the lightshow on the band that marks the reaching of my day’s target and enjoy checking how my own “little data” fares against the accumulated “big data” of all the other FuelBand wearers on the Nike+ website.

My FuelBand was recently joined by a Jawbone UP wristband, which captures even more data about my lifestyle, including my sleep patterns and the food types I’ve consumed (although I have to enter that information manually). The accompanying smartphone app displays my life as a series of infographics and bar graphs of a sophistication that, until recently, was only available to elite athletes.

Jawbone says I’m not alone in performing better under surveillance: the firm cites research conducted at Stanford University that found people are 26% more active when they’re being monitored. Big Brother is good for you.

Having all this information at my fingertips changes the way I perceive myself. I’m forced to correlate my internal emotional narrative with the irrefutable datastream, and the former is often exposed as an unreliable fantasist. Days where I think I’ve been impressively active turn out to be days when I’ve been abnormally lazy; nights when I feel I’ve hardly slept turn out to have been more than adequate.

In his fascinating book Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains that human beings are hopeless intuitive statisticians; we are unable to accurately interpret experience as data. Instead, we rely on assumptions, prejudices and intuition, all of which have a high chance of being wrong.

So, for example, if you wake up feeling exceptionally tired, you will assume you didn’t get enough sleep, whereas it may instead be that you woke up during a period of deep sleep, which leaves you feeling groggy. The UP band offers a function to overcome this, with an alarm feature that wakes you only during light sleep. Even if this means waking you earlier, you’ll feel more rested for it.

Thus devices like FuelBand and UP, plus other wearable activity-tracking gadgets like Fitbit, serve as a relentless reality check for your unreliable brain. The next generation of technology that sits directly on the body – like digital tattoos – or inside it – such as implants or pills – will burrow deeper into us to extract further “quantified self” datasets, which will provide more evidence of the irrationality of human experience.

Take a visit to the doctor: an everyday interaction that involves multiple potential failure points. You may misinterpret the symptoms you are experiencing; you may miscommunicate these to the doctor; the doctor may misunderstand you; the doctor may misdiagnose your illness. The chances that the consultation is a waste of time – or worse – are high.

Wearable technology that detects illness could remove this potential for error. I recently had a conversation with a senior healthcare designer who told me that medical services could soon be made far more efficient by fitting people with monitors that would alert hospitals at the first sign of congenital illness.

“Then the hospital would contact you and ask you to come for an appointment?” I asked naively. “No,” he replied; as a human you couldn’t be trusted to respond in the correct way. “You would most likely ignore the message or put off the appointment. Instead the hospital would contact your partner or your mother.”

For designers working in the area of wearable computing, the quest is to make both device and user interface “disappear”. “I think the general idea is that the phone as an object kind of disappears,” said Google’s John Hanke in an interview with Dezeen last year, in which he talked about Google’s Glass project, which features a computer embedded in a pair of spectacles.

Speaking at the Design Indaba conference at Cape Town earlier this month, Alex Chen of Google Creative Lab echoed Hanke, saying: “From my personal need I hope technology disappears more and more from my life so you forget you’re using it all the time, instead of feeling that you’re burdened and conscious of it.”

Travis Bogard, vice president of product management and strategy at Jawbone, told me the objective was to make the UP band “as small as possible, something that gets out the way and disappears.”

In my case, the UP band disappeared so successfully that I forgot I was wearing it, neglected to charge it and have consequently accumulated zero data over the past week.

As for my FuelBand, I’ve figured out how to cheat it. It uses an accelerometer to track my movement but has no idea of the effort involved. Waving my arms around while sitting on the sofa earns almost as many fuel points as jogging; drying my hands vigorously and cleaning my teeth with exaggerated movements are as effective as a workout. Simply jiggling the band in my hand earns Fuel, as does giving it to the kids to run around with.

Wearable technology promises to transform our understanding of ourselves and consequently our sense of who we really are. It has the possibility to help us compensate for our inherent flaws and make us better, healthier people. The challenge for the designers of these devices is to figure out how to account for human stupidity and deviousness.

The post “Wearable gadgets serve as
a relentless reality check” appeared first on Dezeen.