Man Confronted by the Third Technological GenerationAuthor(s): Maurizio MorgantiniSource: Design Issues, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 21-25Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511496Accessed: 07/07/2010 21:37

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Fig. 1) Direct rapport between man and machine; (photo by Arkadij Sajecht, 1931)

Maurizio Morgantini

Man Confonted by The

Third Technological Generation

Immersed as we are in an artificial landscape, sickened by exces- sive abstraction, we find ourselves surrounded by an historical hoard of objects with which we entertain various and often

ambiguous relationships. An elementary school teacher once said to me that, although the bear has always been endowed with claws - a natural weapon of defense as well as offense - man had to invent and build these weapons for himself: thus we have the knife with all its heterogeneous ancestors and great-grandchildren. One

may therefore consider objects as functional extensions of man which can be cataloged into three different generations: prostheses of the limbs, of the senses, and of the mind.

For many centuries, or millennia, man has been making prosthe- ses of the limbs, such as knives, spades, bows and arrows, shelter and clothing, buildings for defense in general, machines for writ-

ing, automobiles, and aeromobiles; he therefore cuts more easily, digs, sews, changes places more rapidly and kills from afar.

In the course of the past century, man has realized objects belonging to the second generation: prostheses of the senses.

Helped by a more sophisticated technology, he has built tele-

phones, television sets, and machines to reproduce images and sounds, thus giving substance to very hidden dreams.

The third generation of objects, the most recent and disquiet- ing, marks the still nebulous and equivocal encounter between human and silicon intelligence. Confronted by objects that are an extension of mental faculties derived from the spreading applica- tion of electronic technology, design has found itself faced with

problems that have substantially upset its methodology: designing is no longer a question of concealing mechanisms, wires, and valves or of troubling itself to make one object look like another.

Designing has become, instead, an ambiguous celebration of a broad technological effect that places the functional power of the machines and the reduction of their physical dimensions side

by side. Therefore, a certain kind of design has found itself in difficulty.

Sick of protagonism, assisted by supporting sciences and pseudo- sciences, it has been incapable of metabolizing electronics and

processes of miniaturization and therefore, of overcoming its

Design Issues, Vol. I, No. 2 21

Fig. 2) Prototype of a unified telephone designed for Sit Simens by Maurizio

Morgantini and Luciano Pirovano.

ru m. ::.?: ?:-_ ??l.r ..*? ??.. ???-- C;T c:

r

i ,, t "

Fig. 3) Time machine: "agitated" clock

designed by Daniel Wiel and presented in the 1982 Memphis collection.

traditional sphere of action. It has also been unable to overcome the climate of suspicion generated by many objects (such as cal- culators, keyboards, and plasma television sets which are by now devoid of thickness) that are progressively losing their atavistic three-dimensionality or even their own body. Electronics, with the enormous possibility of feeding on itself, has modified objects, functions, forms, and project and building techniques, as well as

changed the relationship between us and the objects. Prostheses are no longer directly activated but, instead, are interfaced by arti- ficial intelligence in a way that is both simple and obtusely infalli- ble: the oven regulates itself according to the food being cooked, the vacuum cleaner travels by itself the whole length of the house, the landing gear pops out of the airplane's belly at the optimum moment of the landing maneuver.

Who can forget the classic submarine hero of naval battles in American movies? With his T-shirt spotted with grease and his skin shining with sweat and at the order of "rapid immersion," he would turn the fly-wheels, which were directly connected to the valves regulating the intake of the water: he would carry out a direct mechanical relationship with the objects. Today that very same sailor would be dealing with small levers or buttons requir- ing the lightest touch: between the action and the effect, various interfaces, which have become stratified, are used to amplify sig- nals, activate servomotors, initiate autodiagnostic processes, and link an event with other surrounding events.

Man is no longer surrounded by objects to be moved, but rather surfaces to be tactilely grazed, and, therefore, by events that are

provoked by simple actions and are to be observed in their development. In many cases the keyboards have already been superseded by acoustical sensors that allow man to impart orders

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to the machines by voice. Such events correspond to the re-estab- lishment of a different relationship to the assembled fragments of the artificial landscape; this relationship may be contemplative, esthetic, self-gratifying, or baroque. The modern astronaut will

probably look like Ludwig in that he will not have manual or tac- tile contact with the objects around him, but he will contemplate them, and his ship will be more similar to the Nautilus of Jules Verne than to the spaceship of "Alien," with that touch of class conferred by the paradoxical presence of the pendulum clock.

At any rate, prognosticating the perceptible reduction of

objects to zero is no longer the issue, nor is it that design will be

deprived of objects to be given form. A chapter of design's history is simply coming to a close. In the last analysis, this ending is rather recent and circumstantial: design, understood as a more or less mediated and filtered functional expression, is a 19th-century heritage that has lasted until the present with the complicity of an

t^8r@M ̂ \ ^esthetic terrorism and with a planned moralism already destined to succumb.

How can one then explain the most recent tendencies, which are

^&^ 3 _^pL^HJgHH so distant from the "future" prefigured in the last decades? The

men of the last century, those conscious of being at the threshold of a future populated by machines accomplished an encyclopedic

Fig. 4) Prostheses of the limbs: a series recovery of the past: neoclassic has therefore been an ultrafine of knives for cutting, skinning and

engraving; (photo by Ezio Frea.) flour of positivistic flavor. We men of the present at the dawn of the computer era have been sucked up by a future that generates only apparent throbbings toward the past and instead tend to recover whatever may be filtered from the dream, singling out the

myth beyond whatever has been built. For these reasons, dreamy and dreamt-up objects are proliferating around us. They poeti- cally reaffirm the automony of our intelligence from the artificial one which, not by chance, we have worked to remove from our own body. The violent emotion we experience every time we look at the pyramids, those terrestrial symbols of mystery, is due

perhaps in part to our hope that they might be truly useless, truly

Fig. 5) Prostheses of the mind: pocket calculator, Canon.

Design Issues, Vol. I, No. 2 23

Fig. 6) Upside-down pyramid: the

missing part of the sand-glass (from "Didactic Monuments" by Maurizio

Morgantini and Charlie Botteghi).

great, beautiful, magical, or dreamy precisely because they have no practical function.

Beyond the useful and the useless, design is intuiting a more evolved dimension sublimated by the artificial landscape, well

beyond the narrow confines of a planned territory tied too much to design and the procedural limits of the designable, which is only a part of what can be planned. For a long time, the environment has been understood as a motionless abstraction far from life and its rhythms. To plan a biotronic environment, it will be necessary to consider factors over and beyond objects, light, air, and sounds - self-regulating, dynamic elements in harmony with man who lives in that environment; to plan environments and objects for the man of the present, involved as he is with a technology in rapid and irregular development, will have to mean, moreover, the

beginning of a different relationship with chaos which is moralisti-

cally and stubbornly being kept outside the door. For the desks overloaded with objects and kitchens crammed with optionals, the

concept of flexibility and modularity no longer suffices and the mesh of nothing but an abstraction, a pretext for dominion over the postproject, inadequate and too narrow. Chaos, kept until

Fig. 7) The objects lose their atavistic - : three-dimensionality: structure and mechanical part of Divisumma 24, design by Marcello Nizzoli for .. Olivetti, 1956 ..... ......

24

i . I

A. ^t/r1

Fig. 8)... or even lose their own body: "a nebulous informatic object," by Alessandro Mendini, published in

Ufficiostile n.4., 1982.

Fig. 9) Integral project of editorial offices TGI and TG2, of RAI (Radio- televisione Italiana), production by Morgantini Associates. The spatial organization of the editorial offices foresees the coexistence of "collective" tables (active terminals for various

usages) together with integrated machines for the exploration of taped memories and the simultaneous com- munication with other centers of information. The "telematica" (control room - sets of monitors) allows a mod-

ality of work physically independent of coexistence in the same space: the office is then justified by the creative work of the group (brain storming) and by the decision-making dialectic on the inflow and outflow of information.

now outside the door, has however, always re-entered the house

through the window and could really become a fundamental ele- ment of the project. That recent and diffused design, populated by relics of the future induced by technology (hi-fi sets and micro- wave ovens) and pregnant with restrictive frustrations derived from the imposition of mass production, is abdicating in favor of

projects replanned from the roots up. Not by chance does the robotization of production plants mark the surmounting of

"stamping" and introduce the variability of mass production, thus

bringing about the possibility of overcoming the concept of mass

production itself. As the possibilities and technological supports rise little by little in order to realize utopia, doubts also rise: for which utopia? Rather than the choice of a utopia, electronics and artificial intelligence will be able to bestow upon us the utopia of choice: "CHOICE" is that little word that, seen in the mirror the real image- is always CHOICE.

?::::~

The possibility of turning the pyramids upside down requires the autonomous intelligence of equilibrium because the equilib- rium will be variable, dynamic rather than static. Metaphorically and otherwise, we will be able to turn the pyramid upside down, an operation beyond the useful and the useful and the useless, which will permit Tom Robbins to write yet another book, Fiorella to telephone me, and the designers to invent a new, artifi- cial landscape.

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BYANTHONY C. MASTROBUONO

Design Issues, Vol. I, No. 2 25