Week 2

Modern humanity is an ever evolving cyborg, unable to function without it’s social structures and human implication appendages, equally so it’s technological and computation appendages, raising debates of control and emancipation through the streams of humanity and technology. Antoine Picon questions whether history and architectural development is relevant in a technological age of design, commenting in an ever reminiscent fashion of Jean-Louis Cohen on the impact of the industrial revolution upon the built environment and social constructs. However he draws conclusion that the implementation of digital tools are a hybridisation of the current human condition resulting in the notion “a home for cyborgs”. Thus Picon constructs his three themes that will serve as trends for design in the digital age.

Digital technologies have a tendency to alter the physical realm; Picon believes that “materiality as a way to understand our world both distinct and direct to us.” Noting the revival of ornament as a surface condition rather than a localised element, digital interaction will no doubtably trend towards an altered interaction with the physical realm, giving the designer the ability to engage sensory inputs and perceptions.

The individual by definition is a highly unique object, Picon criticises the segmentation of individuals through design which is all to enticing given the trend of blogs, social networking and targeted advertising. He prophesies that architects should view the individual in the context of its environment, alluding to historical notions of city design and the public shared realm, concluding that the individual is an extension of the natural environment and that segmentation is a determinate for the established ignorance of social inequities.

Lastly, Picon conjures up the theme of occurrence, events and scenarios as a perpetuating factor of future design. The use of precedence is ever important in the evaluation and evolution of space, Picon believes that digital modelling of scenarios is key to urban development and that designers should pay attention to their frequency. However I personally feel his grasp of this concept lacks the inclusion of historical geo-political occurrence, where social upheaval or collective trauma give way to a renascence of social behavior that the built environment must accommodate for.

Through these themes there is an ever present interaction between humanity and technology in a day to day environment, highlighting the true reality of the cyborg, not as a fictional dystopic character with aspirations of human demise but as a reality of humanity’s dependence on the ‘device’ ever since the invention of the personal computer. Picon then prescribes the true nature of the future built environment where the digital and reality are connected as an indecipherable hybridised state.