Status Updates From Are We Human? Notes on an A...

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[2/2]
"We need to put design on the couch. Design is filled by what it wants to hide. The simple question 'are we human?' is just a way to say 'what is design?' until the confessions and the fantasies come out."

[1/2]
"Design is never quite what it claims to be. Fortunately. Its attempt to smooth over all the worries and minimise any friction always fails, in the same way that almost every minute of daily life is organised by the unsuccessful attempt to burry the unconscious."

"With the death of God, design became the medium of the soul, the revelation of the subject hidden inside the human body. Thus design took on an ethical dimension it had not had previously. In design, ethics became aesthetics; it became form. Where religion once was, design has emerged. The modern subject now has a new obligation: the obligation to self design an aesthetic presentation as ethical subject." B. Groys

"The end of paid labour and its replacement with creative leisure was already envisioned in utopian projects of the 1960s and the 1970s by Constant, Superstudio and Archigram, including hyperequipped beds."

"The bed may have been the ultimate American office at midcentury. In an interview in the Paris review in 1957, Truman Capote is asked, "What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine? To which he answers: "I am a completely horizontal author. I can think unless I am lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and a coffee handy.""

"Industrialisation brought with it the eight-hour shift and the radical separation between the home and the office or factory, between rest and home, night and day. Postindustrialisation collapses work back into the home and takes it further into the bedroom and into the bed itself."

"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 urbanisation, the architecture of how we live together."

"While a generation ago design concerned itself with its reception in the printed press (newspapers, professional journals, magazines) now the concern is rather reception in social media. How many tweets? How many likes? How many followers? How many reposts: the ultimate goal is design going viral."

"Early 20th century architects lamented the effect of photography and illustrated journal on architecture. Adolf Loos for example criticised his contemporary and rival Austrian architect Joseph Hoffman because in Loos's view his houses appeared to be made for the camera. [...] Loos was proud of the fact that his clients could not recognise their own houses in photographs."

"Instagram launched in October 2010 had 3000 active users as of December 2014 and 400 hundred million million in 2015. It is one of the social networks that has reason more rapidly popularity 53% of 18 to 29-year-olds use it and only 26% of users are older than 29. It is more urban, the one was used by women Latinos African-Americans and designers."

"Perhaps the whole human race is only a temporarily limited, developmental face of a certain species of animal, so that man evolved from the ape and will evolve back to the ape again, while no one will be there to take any interest in this strange end of the comedy."

"The algorithm shows us what it thinks we really want to see, as if in a strange kind of mirror that has become the new space of design."

"because almost all these systems are market-driven, the cell phone tends to reinforce existing norms and inequalities."

"The cell phone is the perfect example of good design having gone through rapid evolution since the first 2 1/2 pound brick of 1983 to the super thin device of today."

"The cell phone permanently attached to our body has taken over from architecture."

Social media = a prove of the human capacity to maximise connectivity and therefore the ability to design.

[2/2]
"The instability of the human begins with the redesign of its own brain through the very act of thinking. The idea that the human has extended its nervous system to enclose the whole planet, that artifacts are thoughts that provoke new thoughts, folds design back onto the brain itself."

[1/2]
"Sebastian Seong, one of the neuroscientists leading the effort to map all the neural connections forming the "connectome", argues that simply to think is ready to change the brain. Each thought adjusts the geometry of the internal forest of interconnections."

"The astonishing fact that human stem cells happily assist in the construction of cells of other animals, and presumably vice versa, further destabilises the category of human with the construction of chimera, cross-species constructions at the outer limit of contemporary ethical debates."

"Each ancient culture was defined by traditions of body modification. Redesigning the body is the very beginning of culture."

"Plastic surgery in some parts of the world creates new kinds of organism entire neighbourhoods like Gangnam in Seoul are devoted to all the faces of personal reconstruction including special passport services to cater to the redesigned patient who is no longer recognisable at the border. "

"Even the doubling of the average life expectancy over the last century (with the greatest increases occurring in the poorest parts of the world, like Africa) is evidence of a whole new body."

"Every breath, meal and touch involves the unimaginably complex exchange of organisms and genetic material that triggers chains of chemical reactions and electrical signs. Our seemingly distinct form is like a mirrage, a relatively slow-moving effect of countless exchanges."

The human body is never singular or stable. On the contrary. It is defined by diversity, fluidity and transformation. Yet this diversity is continuously subjected to multiple cultural disciplines that attempt to normalise bodies into stable codes of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, globality, prosperity, subservience, and speed –even establish certain bodies as invisible or disposable or simply not human.

"only around 10% of "our" cells are human and only around 1% of the genetic material and even that one percent it's mainly called from prior and parallel species."

"should human centred design be centred on this microbes?"

"my dream is to have people working on useless projects these have the germ of new concepts." — Charles Eames.

"We are surrounded in the streets, in buildings, in planes, boats, trains and toilets by generic avatars of the human. [...] They are posted in every space, like guards that never move from their position. [...] We are supposed to identify with these model citizens, even to obey them. But none of us look like them or think like them."

Walter Gropius + Adolf Meyer, Chicago Tribune Tower

"This anonymous, androgynous, ageless metropolitan creature is modern precisely in being somehow detached from the world that it is either entering or emerging from."

Otto Wagner
"As architecture and industrial design were increasingly stripped down to a smooth shell by the 1920s, so too was the figure and its clothing."