Design Yearbook 2017

Towards a Synthetic Morphogenesis for Architecture
Paola Carolina Ramirez Figueroa
www.syntheticmorphologies.com
Synthetic Morphologies is a design exploration project that emerges from a
growing design discourse on the possibilities afforded by Synthetic Biology.
The 21st century is poised to be the era of biology, very much like the 20th has
been the age of digital information. The notion comes from recent advances
from Synthetic Biology in manipulating and creating new living organisms
that exhibit unprecedented traits in nature. Design, as many other fields, has
felt the influence of such a paradigmatic shift. In architecture, for instance, a
growing body of speculative work imagines a future material reality enacted by
hybrids of machine and living organisms, whereby building are grown rather
than constructed.
Yet, Synthetic Morphologies poses the possibility that, in fact, Synthetic
Biology presents design with a more profound challenge – one that stirs the
restating of the discipline of design itself. To think, for instance, of buildings
which are grown out of pre-programmed living organisms is, in effect, to
continue the classic paradigm of design wherein the designer is an almighty
giver of form. I propose an alternative approach – an organicist-inspired
material practice for synthetic biology.
I believe the intersection of design and synthetic biology invites us to think
of design as a negotiation between different actors, some of which include the
chemical environment, mechanical conditions, designers and living organisms
themselves. Throughout my doctoral research I’ve engaged in different
projects which characterise and trace the evolution of the speculative discourse
initiated by synthetic biology, and which eventually leads to the notion of
a biologically-oriented material practice: a technique to engage with the
processes of designing through and with living organisms.
Space Thickening and the Digital Ethereal: Production of architecture in
the digital age
Jose-Luis Hernandez-Hernandez
www.digitalethereal.com
Digital Ethereal came about as a design discourse on digital technologies, and
the invisible infrastructure underpinning it. I believe our interaction with
this landscape of electromagnetic signals, described by Antony Dunne as
Hertzian Space, can be characterised in the same terms as that with ghosts and
spectra. They both are paradoxical entities, whose untypical substance allows
them to be an invisible presence. In the same way, they undergo a process of
gradual substantiation to become temporarily available to perception. Finally,
they both haunt us: ghosts, as Derrida would have it, with the secrets of past
generations; Hertzian Space, with the frustration of interference and slowness.
But it is these same traits of Hertzian Space that affords the potential for a
spatially rich interaction with information systems, one that more closely
resembles the interaction with real architecture. The challenge however lies
in how to design with systems that are fundamentally invisible. They can
be ‘translated’ – changing their modality into one which is tangible. This
modality change is however always laced with cultural charges, which changes
the nature of Hertzian Space.
In order to take advantage of Hertzian Space, I advocate for a creative
practice aimed at creating new objects, indexed to Hertzian Space, but
which also captures the cultural and social complexity imbued in the use of
such technologies. I call this new series of objects the digital ethereal. The
design work created throughout this project blends together disciplines and
techniques such as performance, photography, design, programming and
electronics.
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