How to Build a Better Starship

Building a Better
Starship:
Scale, Humanity & Interaction Design

IXD12 Presentation, February 3, 2012
Dublin, Ireland

PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS ©2004 SCOTT NAZARIAN / STARSHIP ILLUSTRATIONS ©1970-2000 JOHN HARRIS & JOHN BERKEY

what is the starship? that miraculous vehicle that goes long and fast and deep, a sliver
in the great dark...and what of our “readiness” as a civilization- and perhaps even
species - to plumb those (inimitable) depths?

Building a Better
Starship:
Scale, Humanity & Interaction Design

IXD12 Presentation, February 3, 2012
Dublin, Ireland

NOTE ON THE SHARED EDITION: THE “SCRIPTED” FLOW OF THIS PRESENTATION HAS BEEN SOMEWHAT PRESERVED IN THE BODY OF THE SPEAKER’S
NOTES DUE TO THE IMPRESSIONISTIC NATURE OF THE VISUAL MATERIAL CONTAINED HEREIN. INSTANCES OF COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL ARE DENOTED
THROUGHOUT; CONTENT NOT OTHERWISE NOTED IS ASSUMED TO BE THE PROPERTY OF THE PRESENTER.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS ©2004 SCOTT NAZARIAN / STARSHIP ILLUSTRATIONS ©1970-2000 JOHN HARRIS & JOHN BERKEY

‘BUILDING A BETTER STARSHIP’ ©2012 SCOTT NAZARIAN

At last year’s session in Boulder, what began as a rather whimsical chat about the need
for more science fictional dialogue within the professional community, between Jason
Mesut, David Sherwin and myself, soon turned into a hue and cry for serious discourse on
the galactic fate of humanity.

I just couldn’t turn it down - the topic deserved some kind of treatment in this forum,
having already received such grand attention in the modern cinema and certainly elsewhere
in the science fiction canon..

also, thanks to John Berkey and John Harris for adorning this presentation with their
spacefaring images; few artists have captured the scale and wonder of science fiction
imaginging as they have...


So, at the risk of exposing my decidedly “extropian” proclivities: why talk about this?

Ideally, humanity at large gets to a place where we can perhaps master all of the powerful
cultural or personal feelings about this amazing notion and maybe even think practically
about it. There are lots of reasons we might want to think about a starship in practical
terms, of course, in the longer term equation.

But I think it also presents itself as a kind of organizing principle for the design
journey as well... you know, can we think of the starship in terms of its generative
potential for experience design and the design of interaction with complex systems?


This is something I’ve been attempting to piece together and I’ll share with you some
notes on that journey...and then maybe we can keep going forward, together. In 45 minutes
I’m going to get to a suggestion about what sorts of things we might want to think about
and how we might frame those things in a useful way.


Everyone thinks about the future in some fashion; but there’s a threshold that varies from
individual to individual across which they discern ‘fantasy’ beyond the pragmatism of
possibility or use. So, while the (F)uture can be a kind of awkward forcing function in
conversations about design or engineering, It can also be tremendously enabling.

EPILITHIC
‘epic’ + ‘megalithic’
;)


But if you can ground that conversation in some structure of the collective imagining -an
object so huge and impossibly “epilithic” ...

(NOTE TO REVIEWERS OF THE “SHARED” EDITION: I realize that this is, technically, an
incorrect usage of the word “epilithic”, but this was deliberate and done in “poetic”
good faith, so to speak, as I was merely attempting to mash up “epic” and “monlithic” as
characteristics of the starship itself; there is, perhaps, some small irony in that any
object or system extant for multiple millenia might actually achieve epilithic character
in the true sense of the word)

...you begin to open up some interesting perspectives. I happen to believe that the
Starship is such an object, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall, an endeavor so vast that
it seems to encompass all of human ingenuity.


of course, we've been dreaming of the stars for time immemorial...


...and I’m not going to focus here on any one component of the undoubtedly marvelous
armature of said “starship”…


and by the way that's that's "starship" not "spaceship"...

one orbits the earth and then shoots the moon, which is like swimming in the shallow end
of the pool (all respect to our astronautical brothers and sisters...you know, soft-
landing a multi-billion dollar robot on another planet several million kilometers
out...really easy stuff 0_o)


yeah...and to that point, let's not forget that we've already mastered a fair amount of
the actual technical complexity on our way so far:

so, from a tactical perspective, it's only partly a "technical" problem...


as an aside ...

(there’s actually a great conference, ‘the DARPA sponsored ‘100 Year Starship’ Symposium,
covering the more technical aspects of actual starship strategy and design, of which
another speaker here with us today is a keynote there, one Ariel Waldman (‘Hacking Space
Exploration and Science’, up next today I think…)

yes, its the mini space-track this morning...

SYSTEMIC


ok, so, rather, what I would like to try and do are three things:

RELATIONSHIPS


o establish that there is a profound interrelationship among the current systems of
our great world AND THAT THIS CAN HELP US THINK INTO THE FUTURE OF SUCH
RELATIONSHIPS AND HOW THEY MAY EVOLVE.

CHARACTER


o describe the character of kinds of systems throughout human tenure on this planet,
civilized or otherwise; understanding the “systems imprint” of humanity throughout
history might be a useful tool for hypotheses about our future?

DISCOVERY


o suggest that the “starship” is a kind of technocultural red herring for several
deeper and perhaps even counterintuitive questions around how we, as a species will
solve some of our more intractable problems and, indeed, design our (and for our…)
future. In other words, the starship may not be the THING we ultimately design but
it’s presence as an imaginitive epic embodiment may drive discovery of other kinds.

There’s vocabulary ahead that we’ll pause in one or two places to catch our breath
and review.

data

power


so let’s wax poetic about systems and their RELATIONSHIPS in the world.

It's worth spending a few minutes of our allotted time with a completely personal -and
terrestrial - anecdote which may offer some clarity around how I Come to Jesus about the
scale of interaction among certain mega-systems in the world; perhaps not big news to all
the systems engineers in the room but for *this* designer, an awakening:

it’s a story about data + power...


Over the last two years or so I have been involved in several projects with our clients
that attempt to "reform" the somewhat rustic interaction and indeed overall ux practices
of previous eras. While this has been primarily a software design effort, a good deal of
the infrastructure we’ve impacted has actually been physical.


The first set of engagements had to do with the contemporary disposition of mainframe
systems and their attendant (or even, in many cases, totally absent...) interfaces. Now, I
won't belabor description of the many interesting design pattern potentials our teams
found here; designing a better GUI for the mainframe, while certainly non-trivial on a
deep infrastructural level, presents somewhat low-hanging fruit at the front-end
affordance level...


No, the real moment of epiphany came from our exposure to the scale of data that was being
stored, processed and provisioned. During an extensive research phase we visited dozens of
data-centers across all the sectors of human enterprise you might imagine; and let me tell
you: there is ALOT of data out there. Think "healthcare" to the square root of "federal
taxes". x42.

DATA DATA DATA DATA


So, Big Realization #1: Data Data Data All Day Long; and not just the meta kind I had
interacted with at the "persona" level of user research and interaction modeling.

And, of course, most of us know this phenomena as simply, ‘Big Data’…


Now, as if the staggering calculus of Big Data wasn't enough, there's more to this story.
About a year later we were working in the industrial sector, looking at how to integrate
cutting-edge digital communications across globally distributed factory, joint-venture and
other corporate operations. Two conversations of note occurred during yet another
significant global research stint.


The first, with a lead exec in the field of Power Generation in the US. I was similarly
relating my fascination with the extent of Big Data in the World when he brought to my
attention that the very same data-centers I had indicated actually had their localized
and emergency power needs being met by his company's power-gen units. In the basement!


Well, my first thought on hearing this was, "Holy crap! it really *is* just turtles all
the way down..!" I could feel the chicken-and-egg dichotomy turning into a super-protein
omlette right then and there: "energy" and "data" had been having this relationship that
was...that *is*...fundamental to our civilization.


But the really galvanizing moment of truth came a month or so later while on the ground
in western India. As we moved about the region doing our interviews and facility tours we
began to notice that these very same power-gen units were actually on something like
every other street corner or visible in lots behind big buildings and so forth. And when
we asked about the ubiquity of these units the reply was, "Well, have you noticed how
frequently the power goes out?"


Well, of course that was it: the primary energy grid wasn't up to par. And that's when
all of my pat assumptions about this digital age we live in - ubiquitous data,
communications infrastructure, displays everywhere and so on - just about went right out
the window.

ATA DATAENERGYDATAENERGYDATAENERGYDATAENER


At that moment, I perceived that "energy" was "data" and "data" was "energy".


Not metaphorical/ theoretical "information media" force-lines but tangibly intertwined
bits and bolts, making the world, supporting the contemporary veneer of all sophisticated
human enterprise.


...so, at this point that chicken/egg omlette i mentioned a few minutes ago becomes a
slightly larger soufflé... Again, maybe not hugely profound for some, but the connection
has inspired me to think a bit more deeply about the interconnection of systems, at
large...

If “data” and “energy” are expressing synergy in this sort of loop, what other kinds of
relationships might emerge as “fundamental” to the overall human enterprise?

stable

relationships


The point, of course, is this: without the maintained stability of this particular
relationship, there's a potential problem...

look

further


...Not with our survival, per se, but rather with our ability to look further into the
empirical patterns of the world.

grokking unaided


Let's face it, whatever Luddite fantasies may exist about abolishing computers and other
corruptable modern conveniences, there are an almost infinite number of crucial patterns
in this universe that we just aren't capable of grokking - let alone seeing - unaided.

data

discovery


from this era forward: No data technology, no discovery.

biotic potential


Look: increasing our overall "biotic potential" in the universe… the identification,
classification and deployment of greater and greater resource pools is the grindingly
simple point of (most) human technological endeavor.

“ﬁre” / “tachyons”


It was true for "fire", it will remain true for "tachyons".

As beloved or abused as our own "starship earth" may be, we SEEM TO BE after alot more
territory than this, on an evolutionary scale...

to do: generate use-model of the known universe


in order for us - as a species - to individually and hopefully, collectively see further
and deeper into the cosmos and our place within it, we need to be able to imagine and make
use of a much more expansive experience / use-model of the universe.

The starship, thought of as a general target for the embodiment of future systems, offers
an entré to that universal use-model: to simplify, it’s success as a functioning system is
a gestalt of both familiar systemic phenomena and future technologies:

sublime

states


- the steady migration of explicit technological interaction towards a more implicit - or
even “sublime” - kind of ubiquity...

- the persistent increase of systems ‘complexity’ that likely arises from this fidelity
with the human environment

- the ever changing human perception of ‘scale’

- the human expectation of (technological) ‘state’ within the frame of both complexity
and scale (which could include a number of expressions, the most presently familiar of
which is probably “ visual display”...)

or maybe I’m over-complexifying this...

"Science explains the world, but only
art can reconcile us to it."
- Stanislaw Lem


Another way to articulate this is perhaps to say:

“In the future, we can expect our technologies to increase in complexity as they increase
in “fidelity”. This increase in technological parity could make us more open to a broader
scale of meaningful interactions. These interactions may be perceived along dimensional/
physical, emotional/spiritual or logical/intellectual axes.”

To summarize this line of thinking:

FIDELITY


fidelity:

when technologies, embedded or otherwise, approach the threshold of apparent visibility
and become part of the intuitive landscape of human assumptions/expectations about how the
world “is”. (Kind of a “Kleenex” moment, i suppose...?)

COMPLEXITY


complexity:

is the constant; as interaction designers one of the first things we awaken to is the
infinitely nested nature of the world about. as interactions become more implicit, this
“weave” becomes tighter and tighter. Our challenge becomes manifold: retain the veneer of
simplicity. period.

complexity is a given: it’s more useful to ask what the character of that complexity will
be and how can we address it?

STATE + SCALE


state + scale:

...are kind of an irreducible pair...

! ...state is always scaling, in some direction;
! ...scale is how we perceive change;
! ...scale touches every aspect of the interaction schema, from the natural to the
synthetic, from the emergent, chaotic wild to the ordered and mannered
! ...state is the ultimate expression of the system - however sensual or logical - both
pre- and post-interaction

CONTROL + TAXONOMY


as interaction designers we:

! - assign a set of controls to all human addressable access points around this
interplay of implicit + explicit, critical or casual, static or dynamic, physical or
digital...

! - and then give them a name...

...control + taxonomy


- there are many interrelated systems in play, of course, and some of this work already
stands upon the shoulders of giants as it were... meaning there are already some familiar
frameworks out there...

USER INTERFACE

APPS

CLOUD

SERVICES

OPERATING SYSTEM

MIDDLEWARE

COMPONENTS

FORM


- in the technology landscape, many of us may be familiar with the technology “stack"
that describes the various components of device-based user experience...

the explicit touchpoints of interaction experience here are usually at “form” and “UI”,
with the other elements in the stack expressing varying degrees of transparency depending
on the overall product or system strategy...

but, overall, there are fairly proscribed or predictable ways in which these elements
cooperate to produce certain kinds of experiences...

ART / FASHION

COMMERCE

GOVERNANCE

INFRASTRUCTURE

CULTURE

NATURE

‘BUILDING A BETTER STARSHIP’ ©2012 SCOTT NAZARIAN / DIAGRAM ©ARUP

but underneath such device and software ecologies there are of course other forces at
work...

this “world” or “civilization” stack is borrowed from ARUP’s Total Design methodology and
allows us to perceive at a glance the encompassing factors of our civilized surroundings

what is more, as technologies "sublime" with the everyday (as they become more and more
embedded), the technology stack becomes less discernible, the digital and the physical
may blur... the technology stack is actually interwoven with this one...

and so too do we find that the elements in the civilization stack become intertwined: i
can think of at least one rather successful business model in which art + fashion,
commerce and infrastructure all share the same heartbeat. There’s ALOT of combinatorial
potential here to say the least...both categorically and at the intersections.

“CIVILIZED” RESOURCE ECOLOGIES

POST-TECH + 1000 YRS

INDUSTRIAL - ECONOMY
- ENERGY SOURCE + OUTPUT
- HEALTH
STATUS - MATERIALITY TIME
- INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES
- INTERDEPENDENCY INDEX
DEVELOPING - PROJECT PLANNING METHODOLOGY

PRE-DATA - 1000 YRS


where this gets even more intriguing is when you start thinking about the expressions of
these stack/matrices and the impacts of scaling complexity over time...

...add to this the exponent of “resources” (intellectual capital, financial stability, and
so on) from pre-data to what i’ll simply call post-tech...

...and amidst the interchange of nation-state status...

...there emerges an interesting matrix for exploring past, present and future
determinisms...

STARSHIP POST-TECH

FABRICATOR / PARTICLE ACCELLERATOR INDUSTRIAL

( ECONOMIC STABILITY + ACCESS TO NATURAL RESRCS ) STATUS

UTILITIES / FILTRATION DEVELOPING

SAILSHIP PRE-DATA


illustrating each resource categories’ likely ability to produce stuff and / or various
things, we see where the chips might fall...i’m being somewhat deliberately blunt about
these examples: of course there is intersection here as well, more specifically within
the present / historical conditions and shifting interrelationships of the industrial and
developing worlds...

but perhaps these examples try to get at the height of each resource pool’s output...

"There ought not to be anything in
the whole universe that man can’t
poke his nose into - that’s the way
we’re built and I assume that there’s
some reason for it."
- Robert A Heinlein


So, with this somewhat better understanding of this “civil ecology stack”, let’s take a
step back for a moment and briefly consider the character of systems past, present and
future…

ELEMENTAL


so, PRE-DATA:

- fire? War? structural engineering/building? chemical?

- the pyramids...the cathedrals...the orchestration of material resources, sometimes over
centuries

- call them, perhaps, systems of elemental mastery

DATA-CENTRIC


OUR DATA SATURATED PRESENT:

- most of us are probly familiar, databases, delivery/provisioning, infrastructure...

- centered on the crafting of DATA into SERVICES...

CAPACITANT


Future: designing for CAPACITANCE

Aviv Bergman and Lynn Marguilis talks on evolutionary biology and software design several
years ago while I was at the Sun Labs in Menlo Park...it’s a hunch that arises from
thinking about the transformations of time and distance at the epic scale...

these are systems that will “remember” and maintain historical, cultural and mnemonic/
learning and perhaps indeed even genetic continuity between millenial distances among the
stars where humans may not.

We begin to find the seeds of this kind of system sensibility even now as computation goes
to ground in the built world around us...if we set our minds to thinking about not just
“place” and memory in the immediate environment...and apply the notion of “duration”

* ASSUMES CURRENT 1 - 100 Magnitudes
VALUE EXCHANGES

TYPE LEAD TIME BUILD TIME ECONOMICS ( COST ) COMPLEXITY INDEX DEFINING TECHNOLOGIES

STARSHIP 25 yrs 5 yrs 5-10 Trillion* 50
CAPACITANT

[ PARADIGMATIC DESIGN + MATERIAL SCIENCE SHIFTS] - POST TECH UX

LHC 10 yrs 6 yrs 6 Billion 12 QUANTUM

FAB 12 10 yrs 4 yrs 4 Billion 11 CHEMICAL

TITAN CPU 8 yrs 1 wk 100 Million 9 DATA

INTERNET 60 yrs n/a Variable 10 DATA

SKYSCRAPER 5 yrs 1 yrs 800 Million 4 STRUCTURAL

TANKER 12 yrs 2 yrs 120 Million 3 DISPLACEMENT

777 JET 12 yrs 2 yrs 240 Million 7 DISPLACEMENT

it’s also helpful perhaps to look at a slice of our more recent “civilized ecology” to
gain perspective on how some of these types of systems have expressed through design...

here i’ve just thrown together a few qualitatively imaginitive metrics to show where the
level of effort might fall...

the notion of defining technologies in this matrix is somewhat non-comprehensive but has the
interesting effect of causing us to wonder about just what a CAPACITANT system might look and
feel and behave like...

...because by and large we’re at least passing familiar with the others. Also, I may be
taking licence with my categorizations here for the sake of illustration...

TITAN CPU 8 yrs 1 wk

INTERNET 60 yrs n/a

SKYSCRAPER 5 yrs 1 yrs

TANKER 12 yrs 2 yrs

777 JET 12 yrs 2 yrs

AUTOMOBILE 2 yrs 3 mo 12

TABLET PC 2 yrs 3 mo 30

elemental (building, propulsion, etc) + service (data...) ecologies are highly evolved and
evolving...

the emergence of a holistic capacitant system is likely additive of these as well as
exponential (since realistically we don’t know what we don’t know...

TYPE LEAD TIME BUILD TIME

STARSHIP 25 yrs 5 yrs

[ PARADIGMATIC DESIGN + MATERIAL SCIENCE SHIFTS] - POST TECH UX

LHC 10 yrs 6 yrs

FAB 12 10 yrs 4 yrs

TITAN CPU 8 yrs 1 wk

INTERNET 60 yrs n/a

...about the evolution of certain components throughout this overall ecology, in material
science, cognition and medicine... for instance;

* ASSUMES CURRENT 1 - 100 Magnitudes
VALUE EXCHANGES

TYPE LEAD TIME BUILD TIME ECONOMICS ( COST ) COMPLEXITY INDEX DEFINING TECHNOLOGIES

STARSHIP 25 yrs 5 yrs 5-10 Trillion* 50
CAPACITANT

LHC 10 yrs 6 yrs 6 Billion 12 QUANTUM

FAB 12 10 yrs 4 yrs 4 Billion 11 CHEMICAL

TITAN CPU 8 yrs 1 wk 100 Million 9 DATA

INTERNET 60 yrs n/a Variable 10 DATA

...those could all very well be game changing triggers for key directional/deterministic
events on the way to...what DEGREE of capacitance ultimately emerges...)

So, again, “capacitance” in the sense I am using it here is the propensity for an organism or
system to store and release NOT ENERGY... but memory, context, feeling...

...essentially systems that allow us to “reconstitute” experience

SPIRITUALITY

ART / FASHION

COMMERCE

GOVERNANCE

INFRASTRUCTURE

CULTURE

NATURE

MEMORY


and the emergence of capacitant systems also likely adds some layers to the human stack we
looked at before...increasing / boosting the overall combinatorial potential significantly...

could we add, say, - and i’m just making a suggestion here - “spirituality” as a meta-
component to the civilized ecology as technologies become more and more part of the fabric of
the world? Would we need to design a new religeon, for instance, in order to enable or
empower us to make the necessary technological leaps...

does “memory” - again, a suggestion - in fact go deeper than “nature” - as a kind of
metabolic, sub-component - in that we would need to include it as a critical parameter in the
design of capacitant systems...?

"The ships hung in the sky in much
the way bricks don't."
- Douglas Adams


so, what makes it possible for such an eminently "civilized" system to emerge onto the
human scene...


a CAPACITANT TECHNOLOGY, in fact, this starship...

inventing new grammars to describe VERY abstract sets of data...

...what kinds of problems are these?

CAPACITANT UX


...ARE THEY REALLY NEW new categories or are they evolutions of our current problem space?

...And how do we get cultural, business, engineering and design intelligences aligned AROUND
THEM?

CONTINUITY
FITNESS
EMPATHY
IMPROVISATION
ECONOMY
PROCESS


So, there's ...as I see it...there's some tenets to consider at the foundation of
designing for the capacitant experience as the following “psycho-graphic” relational
diagrams may support:

CONTINUITY

context

self
what are the
interactions to be
designed here?

world

time

prediction
continuity

will we need to design through time? will predictive context support software become
necessary on super long voyages…? mitigating disorientation?

our interior sense of time? ship time? sidereal time...?

FITNESS

consciousness

environment
language
what are the
interactions to be
FITNESS
designed here?

LANDSCAPE

senses
competition

cognition


fitness
it could also be that starships are not hulking metal containers at all but rather
symbiogenic (thank you, Lynn Marguilis) "slices" of our own biosphere - world shells, or
"platforms" - that are essentially "home-in-a-box"? what do we design then? and what are
those so called extra-solar planets doing out there, eh? world-ship, anyone? ;)

How can software be like the voyage we will undertake? both a companion and a compass…making
our journey more bearable, in and out of consciousness… environmental softwares...predictive
matrices…and engage human cognition to the max…

if independence from the biosphere is in fact the next step in human evolution, we're going
to need more than simply expert systems to keep us alive "out there"…our frame of reference
has been "geological" forever - what happens when i can fit the solar system behind my thumb?
or the local spiral arm?

what are the psycho-spiritual implications of this?

EMPATHY

philosophy

science

what are the
interactions to be
skills designed here?

history
world
language

faith


empathy
and what of Post-earth humanity? And if we go even further than this and consider so-called "embryo ships" (thus
far one of the more materially radical notions I've heard of), will we need to design a species-scale common
sense computing net (thank you marvin minsky) that humans likely born born into a hyper-mechanical crèche might
appropriate our language and fundamental practices AS a species…?

The kinds of human-machine partnerships we will certainly need to design for are various. But all these efforts
seem to be focused on creating EMPATHY within that feedback loop. How can we get machines to tap into and grok
our sense of "reflection": be ontologically sensitive? what are Affective, Sense-making interfaces, between
emotion + cognition? (And that's already a familiar challenge to everyone in this room, I think.)

EMPATHY

philosophy

science

what are the
interactions to be
skills designed here?

history
humanity
language

faith


empathy (+ spirituality…?)

it's also likely that we WILL need to invent or at least modify certain existing systems of BELIEF… to accommodate yet
another "power of 10", moonshot moment. And what does this new narrative form do to our experience and engagement with/
of TIME?

And I think, again, it's a matter of scale: we are designing a home away from home, an environment that "understands"
us…in both mechanical…improvisational ways.

IMPROVISATION

ACTION
USE FLOW
what are the M2
M3
MECHANICS
interactions to be
designed here?
M1
M1 REPRESENTATION
MEANING

METADATA
USE

M2
CONTROL M3
MASTERY

AFFORDANCE


improvisational agency

and a more tactical consideration...

navigating the mysterious reaches of the galaxy is going to require some serious flexibility
around computational and visual systems...

can we design expert systems that behave improvisationally? what kinds of new control
relationships will be necessary? will use-models radically alter or will they remain constant
despite technological innovation?

ECONOMY

MONEY ACCESS

INDUSTRY INDUSTRY
what are the
interactions to be
designedPOWER
here?

USERS CONTENT

AFFORDANCES

INDUSTRY


Economy

There is also an economic bootstrapping aspect to this effort as well: by accessing that
greater pool of resources you might feed, exponentially, an ability to go even farther…
towards that hypothetically vast interstellar commonwealth of our (collective) dreams…

PROCESS

A1
[ CONCEPTING ]

B1 what are the
interactions to be C2
CONCEPTING CLIENT INPUT
designed here?3
A
[ INTEGRATE ] [ COLLABORATION ] [ TEST ]

PROTOTYPING CLIENT DEV
B2 C1

[ PROTOTYPING ]

A2


design process morphology

How do these long term challenges ultimately impact the iterative design mentality? It
certainly adds new meaning to to the notion of the "epic" (for those familiar with
Agile… ;) ). So, there is thinking to be done around new design process and the synthesis of
form.

CONTINUITY
FITNESS
what are the
EMPATHY
interactions to be
designed here?

IMPROVISATION
ECONOMY
PROCESS


ultimately, these are not unfamiliar considerations throughout a wide spectrum of
professional practice

to designers, however, they may represent a reframing of certain relationships within the
existing design continuum

and I’d like to suggest that they are useful target areas when considering the design of
future - capacitant - systems


So, while i’ll cop to having used the “starship” a kind of back-drop to a more expansive set
of ideas

...truly, in this grand dream of reaching the stars, experience and interaction design indeed
have roles to play...


... in crafting not only pragmatic, systemic affordances but human relationships - from the
enabling organizations to the individual frameworks for understanding the very story of our
“uplift” as a species...

EVOLUTIONARY
AFFORDANCE


...this is impact on an evolutionary scale and the work, frankly, of generations (like those
cathedrals of olde...), enabling human-kind to slowly re-frame its relationships within the
larger cosmos...


...the relationship between big-data and the energy-grid represents a boot-strapping
opportunity: we need an ever more stable dichotomy here and if designing for the long-term,
this almost certainly means “green”...


...and from that more stable, base-line energy / data ecology, we can continue to evolve and
optimize the variously “stacked” imprints of human enterprise...

CAPACITANCE

SPIRITUALITY

SUBLIMITY

HUMANITY

DATA

ENERGY

( TURTLES )


and these stacks will continue to shift and recombine and evolve to varying degrees of
optimization as we move into the future, moreso than I can illustrate here...

if “capacitant” systems truly are in our future, they will allow us to understand ourselves
and our own intricate relationship with the universe in new ways.

The challenge for designers? engender the awareness of interconnections in the world about
and thereby prepare for a world in which the “intangible” may become technologically
commonplace.

“Our ﬂight must be not only to the stars
but into the nature of our own beings.
Because it is not merely where we go, to
Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what
we are as we make our pilgramage there.
Our natures will be going there, too.”

- Philip K Dick


Past (or perhaps amidst) all the scale and complexity lies an opportunity to participate in
the design of the human condition.

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR COMING.

Thank You

@dsnazarian
scott.nazarian@frogdesign.com

note on the shared edition: I will be giving this talk and variations of it over the course
of the next year and beyond. I welcome (!) productive critical review. Please reach out with
suggestions, corollaries, ambiguities or general commentary as you will. Thanks again.

PS: lesson learned? “no one reads the brief”! :D

How to Build a Better Starship

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