Lost in Space: A Traveller's Tale
by John Thackara

Comment: With a view to stimulating debate about the design profession, Lumiance has taken the initiative of organising an annual lecture on current topics. This year the text was delivered by John Thackara during the fifth Lumiance Lecture, held on September 11, 1994 in Paradiso, Amsterdam.

As well as being thresholds between land and air, modern airports are gateways to complexity. Through them, we enter the operating environment of global aviation, surely manind's most complicated cetion. But in airports, although we are isolated from the rythms of the natural world, we remain ignorant of how this artificial one works. The result is to reinforce what philosophers call our ontological alienation: a sense of rootlessness and anxiety; of not quite being real; of being...lost in space. We need to develop new design languages, a grammar of complexity, which can describe the contemporary world not as it used to be; and not as the engineers would like us to see it; but as it actually is. A world of global computer and communication networks; of distributed intelligence; of interactivity; of connectivity.