Like Gulliver, we return from Lilliput and Brodbingnag only to find hat some of the srangest goings-on are happening at the human scale. There is a case to be made that, for all their unanswered questions, it is the very large and the very small that are the best understood in science.

Water Writer by Mitsui Zosen

The middle of the range, the mesoscale, offers plenty of mysteries yet. There is much that we know, from Newton’s laws to chemistry, but there are also the puzzles of the organisation of life, the conscious mind, and the uncontrollable weather. You don’t need to go down to the scale of the atom and Schrödinger’s wave-in-a-box to be awed by the mystery of waves. Mitsui Zosen’s arrangement of wave generators in a circular tank order to create standing waves of unwavelike shapes, such as letters of the alphabet, reminds us that they are strange enough in the everyday world.

The mesoscale is where matter and energy behave in the ways intuitively familiar to us, where visualization is most relevant, and therefore where it is most likely that designers have a real contribution to make.

All of biology happens at this scale. When he wrote about technology as the extension of man, Marshall McLuhan did not explicitly invoke technologies based on biological systems, although that possibility is inherent in our conception of such powers – we speak of of having eyes like a hawk or there are hearing ability of a dog, we envy bat’s radar and migrating birds navigational skill. The huge progress in bilogical sciences during the twentieth century now dictates that designers should no longer consider the mineral world as their raw material. Early work at this new boundary between science and design is both exciting and disturbing.

Seed Media Group Identity

Stefan Sagmeister and Matthias Ernstberger created the Seed Media Group Logos, based on a phyllotaxis structure, a quintessentially organic algorythm. Seed’s Mission is to establish science Position into culture. Jonathan Harris took the logo as a basis for a web-based project that symbolizes the space, where science meets culture, www.phylotaxis.com.

Susana Soares uses the fact that bees can be “trained” to react to specific odors to harness them in a kind of olfactory appurtenance that could enable us to sense toxins or pheromones. The idea may be bizzare now, but is it really stranger in principal than an explosives-sniffing dog? It is beayond question that closer appreciation of biological systems of all kinds now raises the prospect of extending human capabilities in many ways.

If tissue cells can be cultured to emulate human parts for use in reconstructive surgery, some designers have reasoned, then they can also be made to follow entirely novel forms. It is relatively straight forward matter to produce something faintly creepy using these techiques, as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr do in their long-running project, Tissue Culture & Art. Their Pig Wings Project, wing shapes grown from pig tissue, is an example of a semi-living object, one which, by title and appearance, mocks the aspirations of the very biotechnology it utilizes to achieve its result.

It is all together harder, in the early days, to produce thing of beauty. However Tobie Kerridge, Nikki Stott and Ian Thompson may have succeded with Biojewellery, a project that allows wedding rings to be exchanged that are made of the bone grown from each marriage partner’s bone cells.

This approach on design seeks to adept specific advantages observed in natural ogranisms into human technology, but the polemical subtext of any design inspired by nature is that we are in danger of losing touch with the natural world. It pleeds for the biological, the technological, and the ethical to come together.

This is the objective of “consilience”, the term coined by biologist Edward O. Wilson for the reunification of the strands of intellectual inquiry artificialyy seperated as a consequence of the growth of specialized disciplines in science and the humanites. In his book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, Wilson writes: “If the world really works in a way so as the encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe the enterprise of culture will eventually fall out into science, by which i mean the natural science, and the humanities, particulary the creative arts.”

Charles Eames and Richard Feynman were consilient personalities, but their meeting never happened because the world didn’t work in the right way. The question is: Does it now?

This was taken from the book “Design and the Elastic Mind”, edited by Libby Hruska and Rebecca Roberts, published by the Museum of Modern Art, NY.