Marco Susani: Research strategies for 'light design'

What I would like to do is to introduce an issue that seems to me has not been touched in the speeches that we heard in these days. We heard speaking about speed, either slow or fast speed, in receiving information, in interpreting information, in retrieving and finding information, in accumulating information. We know that there is another dimension of speed, either fast or slow, in communicating with other people and we heard about it these two days. What I would like to add to this is a small question, that sounds a bit like: what happens after? This does not mean: what happens after Doors or next year, it does not mean what happens after in the sense of an apocalyptic something that comes after our lives. It simply refers to what happens after all this information and all this speed has circulated. So what happens after we receive the information and after the information lays down and where it lays down.

The reason why I include this consideration in a general conference called 'Speed', is because I think that anyway it is an important element in time and even in the time 'after'. Up till now the laying down of information after it has been chewed and circulated built, what we call, our knowledge. And I believe that our knowledge is quite an important part of our civilisation. So in some way the introduction of speed also in the moment after, the period after the information has circulated, is a passage from mere information to building knowledge. To try to elaborate more on this concept I would like to introduce a little bit of a different kind of view. Let us say: when we deal with speed in information or speed in communication, we very often have an individual point of view. So we imagine ourselves in a very speedy world, in a speedy situation, or we saw a multitude of fastnesses, people that are running and so on. The idea of 'speed after' is related not just to the individual, not to the multitude, but to the community.

The idea is, that we exchange information to build a relation between people, not really in a scalable multitude, not in an individual scale, but between some people that are able to build a common ground. And again, this is very related to building a sense of community and it is very related to understanding where the information goes after having circulated. So in the issue of what happens after, for the information I imagine we could have a very precise technical answer. I am sure that somebody could say: don't worry. Information will be very safe, laying into servers of the net, into your hard disk. And it will stay there very safely forever. In some sense this is what worries me, because this gives a sense of upper instability. It seems that it lays there forever, but actually it is a very stupid type of memory. Leaving information there forever is not building knowledge. We need in some way to recuperate, to return to an idea of real memory, that deals with time and deals with the passage of time and not speak to the binary memory of having some bites laying or not laying, being cancelled from our hard disks. And this is related in some way to what we would call the speed of memory.

Now to go further, I would like to introduce three observations that refer (and I'm sorry to make a personal reference), to a trip that I made to Mexico before coming here, two weeks ago. I mention Mexico, because my impression of being there was: they have a very strange balance between a very ancient past (because Mexico's is one of the most ancient civilisations) and having in some way tried to kill that civilisation and now living on its debris. What I think was quite interesting was the fact that it seems to be that Mexico has a very nice light sense of solidity, which is a bit paradoxical. Or in some other sense, a sense of stability that is not tragic, so a sense of being very solid, having a strong past, but not having seen this as a very heavy burden on their shoulders. So I come to the three examples, the three observations that I did. One very marginal observation before the others is the first metaphor that brought to my mind the idea of having a light sense of solidity, is that in the place where I was in Mexico they have flowers all over the year and this is exactly what I mean with a light sense of solidity. The idea of the flower is a very temporary idea: like in Japan where they have the flower party when they have the cherry blossoms, they have two days of celebration of the event of flowers growing. Well, in Mexico, at least in the place I was in, they had solid flowers all over the year.

But apart from this story of solid flowers and flowers forever, the first real observation I wanted to do was about ruins in Mexico. As you know when the Spanish went into Mexico they tried as much as possible to destroy any sign of civilisation that was before them. And as you know the signs of civilisation before them were quite strong. And what happens today is that most of the large buildings built by the Spanish are built over the ruins of the previous buildings. And some bizarre things are happening in the sense that during the earthquake some very old Spanish buildings were falling down only on the side that not had the foundation over the old pre-Hispanic building. So in some way having tried to cancel a civilisation, gave a solidity to the new civilisation. Then again they took stones from the previous buildings and the stones very often had icons or 'glyphs', as they called them. Pieces of information are into the stones on the building, on the roads, and sometimes small pieces of information that are relating to a totally different civilisation, so you have some bites of information that come from totally different situations.

And so the first notion that I would like to take out from this is the 'permanence of knowledge', that I believe is somehow related to the concept of speed. After visiting this place, if I return to use my computer, what I see is that my word processor is not even able to keep track of different releases of documents. So it does not even have the most poor way of tracing the history of information of civilisation that lays in my memory. And in some way I conceive that in this case my computer is more violent with information, than Cortez the Killer was violent against the Mexicans.

The second consideration is that in Mexico they paint billboards on the road by hand. So you do not have printed large perfect billboards with Coca Cola and so on, you just have everything painted on the walls. This of course changes a little bit the corporate identity of the company. So if Coca Cola sees the perfection of the writing done by hand by a painter and the colour they use they will not be so satisfied. But this observation introduces the second key word that I wanted to introduce which is 'human imperfection in transmitting information'. The idea of repainting, of interpreting, of changing the colours of Coca Cola, usually in a better colour, is very much related to the fact that in the history of civilisation man repainted and reinterpreted information. Information was not produced in series. Then again, in my computer every piece of information looks always the same. There is no growth, there is no imperfection, there is a perfect aseptic idea. The same, is my impression, also happens with the information that lays on the web.

The third notion that I would like to introduce is related to the fact that when I was in Mexico I was working with some craft persons. In their work they are doing their job perfectly, which is to continue to (re-)produce (in this case) sandals -- almost in the same old way, but always adding something. It is the perfect contribution to design. In some way they slowly sediment the shape of the object. It changes according to a long process of sedimentation. This is exactly the third key word that I would like to introduce: 'sedimentation'. Then again, if I try to make a parallel to what happens in our computers, even if we work with other people, even if we work over our information, information does not show any way of sedimentation. The computer is in some way our place of work, but it is not ours and it is not a real place.

So in some way, if we try to include these three key words, if we can, in the world of information technology, that is permanence, human imperfection and sedimentation, we could eventually move the idea of information technology or information society to another idea that we would call a building of a real knowledge. The difference between the two is that knowledge is a building of a collective package of information in time. This is why I think it is relevant to speak about this in a situation that deals with speed. So as a conclusion The introduction of these concepts (they are not guidelines -- there is not even a utopia of really reaching or continuing stability, and it is, I hope, not a romantic view of ruins) could be just the building of the consciousness that we are in a collective process of building knowledge in time. They include the concept of introducing some slowness after the fast exchange of information.

Finally to really conclude -- I told you I have not a romantic view of the past, so I can take the risk of sounding a little romantic anyway -- I would like to add a kind of guideline prescription in the end, which is a little provocative: no matter how slow or fast, please leave a human permanent trace of your work.