questions

Q1: How can trans-disciplinary design systems empower passive consumers into active ones, waking up our somnambulist consumptive culture?

Q2: How can trans-disciplinary design systems bring nature into our increasingly dense urban environments while at the same time focusing on the importance of our diminishing natural environment?

Q3: How do people research? What are solutions for tools and/or systems that help us sift through information?

Print and electronic media have not fully concatenated. The computer gave us a way to tap into a global network, the internet, making it a portal to just about any kind of information. It also gave us memory devices allowing us to record the information that we gather through a variety of hardware and software solutions. Additionally, books are still circulating and physical libraries still exist. Now that we have access to books, electronic media, and recorded information at the push of a button, the necessity of our own memories diminishes. The less we remember, the more challenging it becomes to sift through the vast amounts of information to get to the bits we need.

"The human mind ...operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, or course; trials that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." (Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think")

"The first aspect enshrines an opposition between, on the one hand, the accumulation of a fragmentary knowledge which becomes useless in that any endorsement of existing conditions must eventually entail a rejection of that knowledge itself, and, on the other hand, the theory of practice, which alone has access, not only to the truth of all the knowledge in question, but also to the secret of its use. The second aspect enshrines an opposition between the critical self-destruction of society's old common language and its artificial reconstruction, within the commodity spectacle, as the illusory representation of non-life." (Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 132)

"Changes in the extension of memory affect precisely that which is contained in memory." (Marshall McLuhan)

The form of containment affects the content of that which is stored. (paraphrase from Peter Lunenfeld)