“Spectra of various light sources, solar, stellar, metallic, gaseous, electric” from Les phénomènes de la physique.
TERM II
Design & Unification of Randomness
CONTEXT
On a usual sunny day in a small town, Monu is waiting for his father as the clock strikes 3pm. It’s almost about time when his father reaches back home and the entire family finally has lunch together. Monu loves savoring the everyday lunchtime Dal with an extra bit of the cumin tempering. Everyone knows how he loves spices a little too much. As soon as the sound of his father’s motorbike is heard roaring through the main gate, he runs to the kitchen to alert his mum. While his father enters the house and freshens up, the aroma of mustard and cumin sears through every corner and edge of the house. Monu’s anticipation comes to rest as they finally sit down altogether to eat. They always sit down next to each other as if eating was some harmonious act to check on each other’s well being. Monu usually imitates his father’s hand gestures and the way he would eat. From the way he keeps each portion separate and nice looking to him allowing everything to touch and mix together so synchronously. Monu takes small and clean delicate bites, savoring the flavors, textures, making an effort to let his father know that the harmony is maintained. He uses his hand to gather the bits of Dal and rice every few minutes at the edge of the plate, only to keep things organized and waste no single grain. One would think it’s a theatrical performance.
How can a combination of few random asynchronous hand gestures result in a clean plate left with almost no traces of existence? Funnily enough, this is a measure of food well cooked and a meal well planned in the Indian culture. If you look at the person sitting down for a meal, you will see that it doesn’t just involve the act of physically sitting down on a dinner table. Instead, it is a combination of numerous factors and decisions that had to work and sit perfectly in place for this meal to take place. While each decision might be part of the same journey, not all of them would have the same goal or the same reason to happen. While each person brings their unique personal story and experience to the table, they all will eventually return back to their own fights and stories. Is it only a combination of a few yes and no enquiries that had to come together or is there more to it? How does this unification of randomness imbibe values and cognitive biases?
OUTLOOK
Creativity defies precise definition. This conclusion does not bother me at all. In fact, I am quite happy with it. Creativity is almost infinite. It involves every sense—sight, smell, hearing, feeling, taste, and even perhaps the extrasensory. Much of it is unseen, nonverbal, and unconscious. Therefore, even if we had a precise conception of creativity, I am certain we would have difficulty putting it into words.
- Ellis Paul Torrance, 1988.
Beyond the organic yet one-dimensional act of randomly picking up portions of food to eat, there are many other kinds of random steps and factors that contribute to it. Many instances of such exist in nature, from the way a lichen spreads on a rock to how bread catches fungus. All of these shapes emerge naturally in the metaphysical world, yet until recently they’ve existed beyond the boundaries of human understanding. You take the most natural objects like trees, paths, surfaces and you show they’re all related to each other. Once you have these relationships, you can prove all sorts of new hypotheses you couldn’t prove before. These random decisions and patterns can be categorised and can surprisingly have clear connections with other kinds of random cognitive values, like creativity.
These values took a huge toss during the times of pandemic only two years ago when people around the world struggled for basic necessities like food and water. Things will never be the same. This is the new normal. While a few MNCs and big stakeholders controlled what these resources looked like for us, we found our own personal ways to combat this shared empathy and disconnect across the globe. While we were moving away from dinner tables and family brunches beforehand, we reconfigured our relationships and came back to that table and brought things to the table. Literally and figuratively. We learnt from the disconnect and turned the one sided conversation into a two sided one. While the cities turned into dungeons, the dinner tables were turning into altars.
It was only through the times of pandemic I realised that design has been a part of me since the tender age of 8, from the times I was trying to imitate my father’s way of eating Dal and rice. Little did I know that it was his way of imbibing values of respect, appreciation and understanding of food in me. As a child I used to help my father maintain our garden, whether it was sowing or pruning. And what that has taught me is the intrinsic importance of maintaining harmony within the various elements of life and nature. A harmonious and well-balanced garden attracts more life and even more bounty. But the exploitation of such an ecosystem only attracts complex problems like the ones that this world is facing currently. I try using this as a guiding principle in my life even today. This in itself is indeed something very complex to define, I’d rather define Design as a creative approach of imbibing values, most times without verbal communication.
PURPOSE
Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
- Clifford Stoll.
While it is well known how food dictates our health, it remains quite in-evident how the multi-sensory experience of eating might influence complex abilities like creativity. Eating, being one of the most multi-sensory of all human behaviours, is an interesting playground for creative development. Creativity as influenced by the senses, both singular and in conjunction is something that interests me. The ways in which we eat, where we eat, and how we eat positively supports nourishment not only physical but also mental. Most of the memorable stories in life usually happen around good people and great meals. This might seem like an old-fashioned saying today, and it is. That’s exactly what makes it so powerful. Life happens in the sequences and narratives we tell and share with one another.
I’d like to believe my purpose relies in story-telling and catalysing conversations. One’s self knowledge and awareness are at the root of consciousness and I’d like to contribute in making it better. (Not forgetting the firing up of oxytocin a thousand times per second during storytelling; biologically speaking) In this era of digital supremacy, a story can go where data is denied entry. Data can persuade people, but it doesn’t inspire enough to create action; to do that, I’d emphasise on wrapping a vision in a story that fires the emotion and radical imagination. It’s about taking a piece of the human condition, ultimately so subjective, yet so humanely common, like birth, growth, emotionality, aspiration and conflict, to create evoking conversations. Based on my brief journey and understanding of design, I've paused only to realise that one can not change the system without being it. Activism can be a really important part of a designer’s inquiry to familiarise oneself with contexts, realities and futures to design better while staying in the trouble.
ABSORPTION & DISSIPATION
Humans are known to be as speciesist as a species could get. We tend to invade, conquer and disrupt elements of the cosmos that are not familiar to us. The thought of venturing into space excites one more than exploring the deepest oceans and habitats within our own planet. Is it in any way related to our percievance of how growth and sustenance looks?
Our current world is interestingly shaped in a way that controls and hinders everything that we do or consume on an everyday basis. From the education systems transforming into supply chains providing ‘Industry-ready’ professionals to creating ‘solutions’ that contribute to more coagulation rather than solute. We expect the quality and quantity of life to be greater and superior, all because humanity has invested itself in learning how the Universe works and how we can apply that knowledge to bettering our lives. But at what cost? It’s eerily interesting how humans sometimes cannot see beyond either what we’re used to or what benefits us.
The difficulty in implementing the real solutions we’re already aware of, is not caused by a knowledge gap. The problem could be a disconnect between our collective consciousness and our collective action. This gap drives us to collectively create results that nobody wants: massive environmental destruction, societies breaking apart, and social media-induced mass separation from our deeper sources of self. In the era of digital parallax, where politics and media dictate our understanding of the everyday world, one could make a decision to become scientifically aware and conscious. Being scientifically aware means recognising the inability to be experts in all areas of science no matter how smart or qualified one could be; it means recognising the need for legitimate expertise and skill, and for valuing the conclusions thereby reached. Being aware also means that one cannot choose a preferred conclusion and then use whatever pieces of evidence available to support it; that is the antithesis of how science works.
At some point, this situation could also have a positive outlook for the ones who look. The not knowing has cheered the knowing for ages. This understanding has given rise to an uprising of a revolution that is granular, generative and distributed. Academics in various fields have been talking about how labeling objects to create a sense of familiarity and safety might not be a solution after all. Information and knowledge exists on a spectrum just as our bodies, brains and identities do. I think it’s equally revolutionary that there were knowledge systems that are focused on liberation rather than enslavement to desire as tradition. In the end, all the knowledge systems like science, politics, psychology and design are all made up and real at the same time. They are constructed by us, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important or impactful to everyone. Being a social construction means that we made this system and maintain this system. And if a system is made, it can also be re-made, re-configured and re-imbibed to include the wide, natural variation of all non-human entities and agents using symbiosis and co-design. The act of co-designing should be about facilitating a respectful conversation. It is a return to the global and cosmic community, to provide confirmation that one’s lived experience is both heard and validated. The idea should be based on building skills and capacities within communities to identify, report and demand future changes. The foundation should resonate on intellectual wealth that is synthesised, distributed and shared with everyone.
MEDIUMS
Amidst the bits of and pieces of life, getting the opportunity to travel within the lengths and breadths of India and Spain, is one of the biggest privileges I’m grateful for. Traversing through various terrains and engaging with communities, I have realised the importance of something that ties people, politics and diversity together. Food. This deep interest inspired me to base my focus around food and social innovation. The practice of designing and co-creating with communities can imbibe a sense of purpose in my work. It could teach one deeply about the social constructs, politics, culture, and wellbeing of another. Using food as a tool and a medium, to cross paths between design and technology, to bridge social constructs and exploring the human psyche, interests me a lot. The goal is to create agents that work around solving intricate problems like food wastage, food safety and accessibility.
Just like extracting the essence of the ingredients in a dish, When I design, I want to focus on the essence of the solution. I believe that even if design solutions are being studied and interpreted from different contexts, they must be translated in a way that communicates the purpose of its creation. ‘Food and consumption behaviours’ is a lens that I’m really looking forward to exploring through my practice in coming years.
GRAY ACTIVISM
Science has always acted as a guiding tool and anchor for me and the many to assess whether something is real or unreal. It’s almost as if our understanding of it locked us in the paradigm that if everything about the universe was known, we can predict it throughout the future. Maybe the ideology originated from the success of Galileo and Aristotle when astronomical predictions and philosophy found its place in society.
A few centuries ago when the existence of other galaxies was unimaginable and hummingbirds were magical, Bach scribbled in one of his sonnets “Everything that is possible is real”. A few centuries into the future(s), we only come to the conclusion with Modern science that while dealing with the smallest of microcosms of the universe we are quite unable to know the exact state at a singular given time since time behaves like a fabric. We have a will which is able to determine the action of the atoms probably in a small portion of the brain, which is made of atoms and electrons itself. We have struggled wondrously through ages while turning misconceptions into assumptions, assumptions into objective truths and then the objective truth into the truth itself. But to understand something, we must first understand what it isn’t. Exactly how Greeks revolutionized Matter Science by understanding the ‘void’ or anti-matter first. The great gift of science is that it continually reveals to us what is real. But science is merely one atom in the vast existence of the other ethereal yet concrete knowledge systems that have shaped the world. Knowledge describes only a particular bit of information which has the capacity to perpetuate on its own. It is the key to resilience, in fact it’s the most resilient stuff that can exist in the known universe. But one thing that transcends beyond all the known universes is consciousness.
In my practice I ground my fears of the unknown by something I call ‘Gray activism’. I’d define it as the experience of inhibiting more than one consciousness or realities in a single body. It seems close to accurate to say that consciousness is more about watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it. At an intuitive level, we live life in assumptions because human beings act in certain ways based on our own positionalities. Personal experiences such as fear, love, and pain feel like such powerful motivators within our consciousness that drives our behaviors. And in fact, our behaviors are driven by our awareness of them or they would not occur at all.
Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity. Let’s practice it while we can and tell stories while we can. Until words create worlds.
