Designing the virtual
The experience of design is one of signs and their infinite manipulation. It takes place in an experiential context that moved away from the object, away from immediacy and from co-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real, without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. When pushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands in imaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a city built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire. One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials, even new human beings. Once the imagination is opened to fresh human endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest or heaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what you wear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtual space is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtual experience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations of images and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digital embodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-based constraints and embodies new languages, especially synaesthetic languages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practical experience, the design of virtual space is one level beyond, i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines a realm where the person frees himself from the structures characteristic of literacy.
In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language is overwritten by the very configurational nature of the context. Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linear because their descriptions are no longer based on the reductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague and allowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual space, self-constitution, hence identification, no longer regards cultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changing self-reference. All attempts to see how a human being would develop in the absence of language could finally be embodied in the individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a state of tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such an experience turns out to be a design experience, not a biological accident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whose language fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), is relevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigated only in relation to its consequences pertaining to human practical experiences.
Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any design practical experience. From among the very many designs in a state of virtuality, only a small number will become real. What gives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality are contextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework. Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up with airplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats or submarines. There are many design experiences that are based on knowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But there are many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There is nothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, and even less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, and machines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repair and virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Design in the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on human cognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practical endeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantly computational and disseminates computational means.
Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from the pragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences of service economy, effected differentiations in respect to means of expression and communication, in respect to the role of representation, and to our position in regard to values. The electronic data storage and retrieval that complements the role of print, and progressively replaces it, results from the experience of design supported by fast and versatile digital data processing. When, at the social level, representation is replaced by individual activism, and by the militancy of interest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics into the private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation by interest groups assembled around causes of short-term impact that keep changing. This change effects a shift from the expectation of authority, connected to literacy-based human experiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice.
The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials, messages, and images (including the image of the individual) is a world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Its life results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedom to re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed under these new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations associated with illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressive mechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems, articulations, precious finish-they all belong among the collectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designed to be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflecting a generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces discipline and self-control in our interaction with artifacts.
Design also affects change in our conception of fact and reality, stimulating the exploration of the imaginary, the virtual, and the meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations and by representations of representations, and so on until the reference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivist expectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization of literacy are reconstituted as a frame of relativist interactions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noise included). Imaging technologies make drawing available to everyone, exactly as writing was available to those processed as literates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-the electronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and the digitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processing the image in full control of all its components. A sound level can easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressive power of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process, adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the many languages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in its various forms to further its own program is clear. Probably less clear is that the literate experience is itself changed through such instances. After all, literacy is the civilization that started with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Book open to all possible interpretations, as these were generated in the attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmatic contexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that become possible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular to those that design affords, results in the infinity of books, printed for the potential individual reader (or the very limited readership that a title or journal tends to have) who might finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) by placing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radical description given above might still be far away from today's reality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction.
On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as a qualitatively new form of human interaction. Design is integrated in the networked world in a number of ways: communication protocols, hypertext, document and image layout, structure of interactive multimedia. But no one designer, and no one company (not even the institution of defense, which supports networking) can claim that it designed this new medium of human practical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostly unaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolving whole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one could predict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and will continue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.
Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies all there is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disassembled, turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or a portion of a letter), and given indications where they should arrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they are reassembled, after each package travels its own path. But in order to become a word again, they are further processed according to their condition. Such communication protocols negate the centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all that is information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Many other characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics are overridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rules of language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributed resources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelism ensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number and types of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost any conceivable form of practical experience, becomes global.
Enthusiasm aside, all this is still very much a beginning. Networks, for transportation (trains, buses, airplanes, highways), for communication (telephone, telegraph, television), for energy distribution (electric wires, gas pipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers and digital processing. In the context in which human cognitive resources take precedence over any other resources, as we face efficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind, connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but a revolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above can participate in the emergence of humankind's integrated network. Their potential as more than carriers of voice messages, electricity, gas, or railway passengers is far from being used in the ways it can and should be. Design experiences of integration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to the integration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a reality that extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, the Netizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is a consequence of our self-identification in practical activities based on a qualitatively new understanding of design.