liver Bishop-Young

brief#1

How revealing will the fossils of our technology be?
‘Never has there been a time of such drastic and irreversible information loss… Science historians can read Galileo’s technical correspondents from the 1590’s but not Marvin Minsky’s from the 1960’s… Digital storage is easy; digital preservation is hard.’
page 84, The Clock of the Long Now

Is our re-use of objects in design a conservation (library) of the past; or, is it changing the format of the information/object, requiring a program to access that information?
Digital media puts us into a false sense of security. It potentially has the power to store all current and future information. Historians of one thousand years henceforth would simply search through a pin-head size USB drive, containing all information of a previous decade; and retrieve any piece of information, image, video, diary, calendar, receipt, NHS record, blog, game etc. Perhaps Apple’s Time Machine will be all a researcher needs. But the truth is, we are loosing data and relying on media with a very short life and temperamental nature that doesn’t age gracefully to store the rest. Instead, it, like its system of on’s and off’s (1’s and 0’s) either works or doesn’t work. Even when it works, technology is such, that formats become out of date. DVD, CD, Zip disks, Floppy disks, Cassettes, what power will our children posses to decipher them, what will be left to decipher?
Tejo Remy, committee design… have all produced work by re-appropriating materials and objects that already exist. The new forms often comment on the negative (often damaging) effect the objects have on our environment. I am intrigued by the impact sustainable design of this kind has upon designs evolution.

We need an evolution, not a revolution to put right the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Evolution suggests incremental progress, backed up with a detailed library of successful processes that came before. But will they exist? Will our fossils contain the information vital to prevent us causing our own destruction a second time?

‘Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide. It does to cultural continuity- and hence safety- what destroying species and habitats does to nature’s continuity, and hence safety. Burning the Amazon rain forest burns the worlds richest library of species. The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. Revolutions cut of the past. Evolution shamelessly, lazily repurposes the past. Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time.’
page 75, The Clock of the Long Now


In short I aim to:
• Continue my exploration of objects as design tools. One object through many life’s
• Fossilize technology. What will fossils of hardware and software be?
• Incorporate information (such as the making process) into objects
• Excavate the meaning of ‘fossil’.
• What are our design libraries? Landfill?


This brief is heavily influenced by the book, The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand. I hope to refine it through both experimentation and literary research.