Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design

by Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationship between human and design and rethink the philosophy of design in a multi-dimensional exploration from the very first tools and ornaments to the constant buzz of social media. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outside space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Colomina's and Wigley's field notes offer an archaeology of the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world. They range across the last few hundred thousand years and the last few seconds to scrutinize the uniquely plastic relation between brain and artifact. A vivid portrait emerges. Design is what makes the human. It becomes the way humans ask questions and thereby continuously redesign themselves.

Genres: Design, Architecture, Nonfiction, Art, Philosophy, Theory, Art Design

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 15, 2017

About the author

Beatriz Colomina is founding director of the program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University and Professor in the School of Architecture.

She has written extensively on the interrelationships between architecture, art, media, sexuality and health.

Reviews

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human."

"The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species."

"Design is a form of projection, to shape something rather than find it, to invent something and think about the possible outcomes of that invention. This endless reshaping and speculation about possible outcomes is uniquely human."

"Self- monitoring is a huge part of human activity- and is inseparable from design."

"Natural selection is design without a designer."

"The human hand is human because of what it makes, not of what it is." - Andre Leroi-Gourhan

"The question 'Are we human?' immediately triggers a chain of parallel questions: What is human? When did we become human? Are we still human? Were we ever human? and Are we human yet?"

"The human might be the species that asks this kind of question of itself, yet the very act of asking indicates that there is no clear line between human and nonhuman."

"The human becomes human in seeing itself in the things it makes, or seeing its possibility in those things. So the human doesn't simply invent tools. Tools invent the human. More precisely, tool and human produce each other. The artifacts that prosthetically expand thought and reach are what make the human human."

"Design is always understood to be a good thing. The empire of design reinforces the idea that good design is good business that makes good people. This concept has been so successfully promoted that all design is thought to be good design. The word 'good' no longer even needs to be said. The very word 'design' already means 'good' - as if we dont need to think about the fact that the same concept is active in weapons, surveillance, invasions, policing, nationalism, incarceration, and terrorism."

"All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity." - Victor Papanek

"Design is not simply concentrated where wealth is concentrated. Rather it is everywhere, and it engineers concentrations of wealth and privilege. The spaces in which people and resources are exploited have been designed. They are the result of systematic decisions over centuries sustained by the latest technological and administrative systems."

"Inequalities are being crafted in everything we see, don't see, or don't want to see."

"Technology wasn't invented by humans. Rather the other way around."- Jean-Francois Lyotard

"The Berlin critic Adolf Behne cannily argued in 1926 that those designers who only care about the mechanical logic of function, and aim to make a building a 'pure tool', actually end up with an anthropomorphic architecture: 'In fact dehumanization is the very thing that leads to humanization, to anthropomorphism.' And in reverse, those who claim to care only about 'human will' end up producing and inhumanly standardized architecture."

"Behne insisted that from the first very first tools and shelters, architecture has always been a combination of function and play: " Primitive man is not simply utilitarian. He demonstrates his instinct for play even in his tools, which he makes smooth and beautiful beyond the demands of necessity, painting them or decorating thing with ornaments."

"There is no line between tool and toy. In fact, Behne argued that it is play that generates form in the first place. Function itself is unable to 'arouse human interest in any way.' Any attempt to separate function and play is foolish. The supposedly pure functionalist is actually more interested in redesigning humans than in function itself."


"Modern design keeps declaring its loyalty to the human but actually flips back and forth between ignoring the human and inventing a new one."

"The situation of the refugees and of climate change has been obvious for a very long time and is watched in real time by all, yet there is little action. The world has developed an ability to watch everything yet do nothing. This lack of action is also designed. Neglect has been shaped."

"Today the mantra 'human-centered design' is changed again as the way to approach any question, as if the human is a specific knowable entity. It presupposes a kind of transparent human, which is such a fragile, utopian, or even dystopian idea. Freud insisted that real needs are the ones that can never be expressed: 'The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.' The distinction between needs and desires is anyway never clear, and both are multiple and typically contradictory."

"The precise context of design is the indeterminacy of the human. Design has never been about giving someone or some group what they ask for but what they wish they had asked for and retrospectively pretend that they did ask for."

"The idea of the transparent human fully articulate in its likes and dislikes is a market-driven concept of an ideal consumer constantly offering feedback to reduce any friction in the production, distribution, and consumption of artifacts. If Freud says you can never know yourself, perhaps Amazon agrees, as its algorithm informs you that 'people like you also bought x' before tweaking the algorithm in response to unexpected responses from people like you."

" 'Human- centered' means 'market-centered' in an age in which the market is not just for visible products but all the interconnected calculations of government, education, health, water, energy, finance, debt, copyright, genetics, and access. When the reach of the market is so massive and so comprehensive that it no longer seems to have an outside, human-centered design is ultimately not so interested in human well-being. What if design is precisely not human-centered? What if design is only design inasmuch as it challenges contemporary definitions of 'human'?"

"There would be no concept of design if the human was something clear and stable."

"Designers are always understood as solving a problem. Artists, intellectuals, and writers are expected to ask questions, to make us hesitate, to see our world and ourselves differently for a moment, and therefore to think. Why not design as a way of asking questions? Why not design that produces thought-provoking hesitations in the routines of everyday life rather than simply servicing those routines? Why not design that encourages us to think? Design as an urgent call to reflect on what we and our companion species have become?"

"When humanists accuse people of 'treating humans like an object,' they are thoroughly unaware that they are treating objects unfairly." - Bruno Latour

"Machines are increasingly asking us to demonstrate that we are human. The CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), invented in 2003, presents online users with a simple puzzle that machine intelligence was unable to do, like reading the letters of a warped word. When artificial intelligence was able to solve such puzzles in 2014, a new system was introduced. It asks you to confirm a single remarkable statement: ' I am not a robot.' Your answer is not the point. The self-adjusting program determines if you are human by monitoring how you interact with the content on the page before and after you click."

" The constant labor of proving that you are yourself, with passwords and biometrics offering a thin and fragile defense against the traumatic threat of identity theft, gives way to the labor of proving that you are not yet a machine."

"Design cannot make sense without considering biodesign, the self-conscious design of new life-forms within a genetically engineered environment. With biodesign, the sense of the human redesigning itself and every element of the living environment is direct and palpable. "

" Sebastian Seung, one of the neuroscientists leading the effort to map all the neural connections forming the 'connectome', argues that simply to think is already to change the brain. Each thought adjusts the geometry of the internal forest of interconnections."

" The instability of the human begins with the redesign of its own brain through the very act of thinking."

"Cities were the fist form of social media. Urban density maximizes possible social connections. You walk 100 meters from home in a village, and you see two cows and your grandparents. You walk 100 meters in the city, and you have potential interactions with 1,000 people."

"Social media and electronic communication is a new form of urban life. It is not simply an expansion of design. It is a revolution in the capacity to be human and inhuman."

"But this smoothness of good design is also an anesthetic. It numbs us to the huge changes in ourselves and our world. The cell phone tries to be as thin as it can be but actually there is nothing light or immaterial about this object. It is densely packed with high technology and integrated into global networks sustained by vast infrastructures and economic systems."

"When you ask a question of your phone, the answer given is not simply to the question you ask but to the question that the real-time data analysis thinks that you are really asking, based on all the other things you are doing and have done. Your location movements, interests, images, favorites, purchaese, reading and reactions are continuously scrutinized to produce a kind of evolving model of you."

"Ina strange mirror logic, the phone through which you interact with the world constructs a version of you that is the real you for that world. "

**photo** Regugee's phone protected by balloon on the coast of Lesbos, 2015

"Perhaps the most important transformation in social, cultural, and economic life since the year 2000 has been the arrival of social media and ubiquitous surveillance culture."

"Social media is the ultimate space for design, a space where design happens at high speed by an unprecedented number of people."

"Line, a messenger service for instant communication on electronic devices, was launched in Japan in 2011 and is also extremely popular in South Korea. It has 700 million users worldwide. It was designed by 15 members of the NHN (New Human Network) in response to Japan's devastating Tohoku earthquake in March 2011, which damaged telecommunications infrastructure."

"Any building will be experienced far more often in social media than in the streets and the encounter in the street is already shaped by social media. Social media is not simply the posting and sharing of things that have occured. Rather, the experience occurs within the environment of sharing."

"It is not simply the expansion of reception that matters here. The Internet and social media are fundamentally redefining the spaces in which we live, our relationship to objects and to each other. Social media is a new form of urbanization, the architecture of how we live together."

"In Laura Poitras's film 'Citizenfour', we see Edward Snowden close up, sitting on his bed in a Hong Kong hotel for days on end, surrounded by his laptops, communicating with journalists in the room and around the world about the secret world of massive global surveillance."

" The most public figure in the world at that moment is a recluse. Architecture has been inverted."

[Rilka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nourishing, provocative, perfect ✨ to be human is to be endlessly re-designing what it means to be human

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A paean to the essential fungibility of humanness, and a plea for intentionality in the design of our interfaces with the rest of the world. On one level it tells a familiar story of homo faber -- man the maker, from the caves to the stars to the "inevitable future where the fleshy body is left behind" -- but it does so with a gimlet eye toward how in the process of making we are always remaking ourselves. Colomina means this quite literally and physically: humans objects, whether tools or ornaments, place outside of ourselves what in the animal world is achieved inside by species adaptation, but in this process of externalization continuously reconfigure our sense of our interiorities. The book begins with the discussions of the making of stone tools and how eventually our hands were reshaped by bio-evolution specifically to optimize for the the wielding of such tools, and concludes with the lyrical-sublime paean to the arrival of the global communications systems into which we are all plugged by the most perfectly designed objects ever made, namely the smart phone, which has refactored our sleep, our sex lives, our exercise routines, our work, and our very identities themselves. In the end, it becomes a plea for greater intentionality in the way we design our interfaces the rest of the world, beginning with the demand to recognize that every interface, every interaction, is a product of more-or-less intentional design. It might paraphrase Stewart Brand to say, "We are inescapably designers, so we might as well get good at it."

[Kylie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be read in every architecture theory course. It makes one rethink about design and architecture to focus outside the shallow western view. It reconstructs how human and architecture interact from a one-sided ideology to a complex interconnected cycle.

[narinna · Rating 4 out of 5]

dense and compact, too many enumerations

[Samer Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

More mind-warping for me than Sapiens by Yuval Harari

[Cierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

My least favorite book by Colomina so far, but it’s still incredibly powerful. While the ideas are prescient and resonate deeply with contemporary collective anxieties, the writing itself mirrors the ADHD-ification of the mind that she critiques in the last few chapters. The writing still contains her characteristically sharp one-liners, but are uncharacteristically riddled with repeated words and copy errors. The lack of in-text citations make the pages eerily “smooth,” a modernist quality that she spends considerable time deriding. Even the glossy paper is frictionless, which was particularly frustrating for me since I’m a heavy text-annotator and my underlines kept getting smudged. The book critiques design for promoting a simultaneously detached and overstimulated relationship with the world/self, which the physical book and writing itself both ironically represent.

She has also copied word-for-word entire paragraphs from X-Ray Architecture and Privacy and Publicity without quoting herself, which just seems lazy. Some of the examples that she gives to support her theories also appear grasping (particularly the “Edward Snowden was on a computer in his bed! The bed is the new office! and “Servers in America ask “Are you still working on that?” Everything is work!”), and their lack of punch weakens her otherwise sound arguments. Worth the read overall, but I’ve come to expect near perfection from Colomina and this didn’t deliver.

[Tija Bija · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don't get the quote:
"Nothing resembles Man less than a Man", read this thing.

This yellow book explains "the human as a prosthetic being that expands its biology and mentality with layers of technology"through design.

Bad news are "we [may] have become allergic to ourselves, to our own hyperextended body in a kind of autoimmune disorder".



(And from what time Goodreads started to doubt whether I'm a human?)

[Merilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely an essential read for designers of all kinds and design enthusiasts.
However, I didn't quite enjoy the read, as one other reviewer brought out: "The book critiques design for promoting a simultaneously detached and overstimulated relationship with the world/self, which the physical book and writing itself both ironically represent."

This book is greatly thought-provoking and "haunts" me while thinking or working, with how design has evolved and where we've ended up. I do have hope that we can aspire to use design for aspiring to be good, but we have to beware that humans are selfish, a lot of the time without knowing it.

[Adriana · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an intellectual treat this book has been! Especially for a person into design. Organised into 14 chapters, it traces the relationship between human and design. From prehistoric times and the first excavated man-made tools to the mobile phone as the changer of everything. Examples are amp and references are rich and expanding one's knowledge on architecture, interior, history and science. The language is crisp and provocative, creating ripples with a long-lasting effect. This is a book to reread and indulge many times.

[Janne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must-read for designers I would say. The book devolves around the interconnectedness of human and design (artefacts, technology, architecture...). Who is design done for? The main take away is that ”human” is not a stable entity, but is created and moulded by its own creations. Food for thought on every page of this small book

[rat · Rating 5 out of 5]

asked for this book for christmas because i saw someone on tik tok say it changed their life and tbh it changed mine too. can't look at anything anymore without thinking about it, very dreadful but very important. thankfully the last 2 pages end on a positive note otherwise my mental health would've taken a big hit

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting discussion of the history of design from its prehistoric origins until the present day. Underlying the discussion are the questions of whether design is what makes us human and whether design is influencing human life let alone altering it and humans themselves?

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting read. It took a while to get through, not because it was a slog, but because it brought up so many new ideas that I kept pausing to think. Best with knowledge of design history going in, because so much of it is calling classic Modernist thinkers into question.

[Tim Belonax · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books about contemporary design. I'm curious if it will age well, but for 2017, it's spot-on.

[Esma ⭐️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Im a little confused but in a good way

[Ankush Samant · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is by far one of the best design books that I have read! Don’t give it a miss!

[Antonio Castillo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Raises some interesting questions and brings up interesting precedents, but a lot of it just feels like a long ramble from precedent to precedent

[Read More · Rating 4 out of 5]

Important contribution to the discussion about rising influence of design, that has become ubiquitous and unavoidable. The book provides an overview of the relationship of different disciplines to self-design, from archeology to social media. Adequately disturbing.

[Kristina Fabrin Jakobsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A refreshingly critical take on all things design. A lot of really interesting perspectives with a great deal of unique factual and historical knowledge. The thoughts brought up here will definitely stick with me and I intend to pick it up once in a while for a good dose of honesty and grounding.

[XingYue · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read about the history of design. Colomina and Wigley claimed that humans and their artefacts of design exists in a reciprocal relationship - artefacts are designed by humans and in turn design humans. I do agree with this school of thought, which was well justified by their examples drawing from a huge range of topics, such as archeology, health, cellphones and social media, plastic surgery.

The chapters are succinct, dense and thought-provoking. Each sentence packs a punch and left me with a lot more questions. I would definitely read this book again.

[Astroboy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Provocative thought to any design theories, it feels like, there are still take me back into the school. what a lovely teachers. everybody say " theo-riessssss "

[Fish]

read for class :0