My proposal presentation for the Norman Foster Foundation Digital X Workshop. 15th January 2018. I was lucky enough to be selected as one of 10 students to spend the week musing on the digital, architecture and urbanism with Norman Foster, Farshid Moussavi, Rafael Moneo, Nicholas Negroponte, Hugh Herr, Kent Larson, Benedetta Tagliabue, Greg Lynn and Amanda Levete.
1. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Supported by
Presentation by Tim Tompson
Ph.D. Candidate at the City Futures Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia
2. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Anticipating the future
Are we authors of it?
or are we subject to it?
or is this a false dichotomy?
3. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Technology
Are we authors of it?
or are we subject to it?
or is this a false dichotomy?
4. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Nature
Do we control it?
or are we subject to it?
or is this a false dichotomy?
5. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Dominant Western ideas define how we think about
these things
Future: we can think about it and imagine it, it is distinct from
the present and past, time is linear, there is one future and reality
Technology: we can control it, yet also has its own agency
(determinist), it is separate to us
Nature: we can control it, it is separate to us
Scientific and
Cartesian
Rationalism
René
Descartes
One truth
The Bible
6. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Pragmatism as a way out of western ideological
dilemmas
Forget about what could be said to be true…what are the
practical effects of holding such ideas?
Charles Sanders Peirce
William
James
John
Dewey
Richard
Rorty
7. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Beyond digital
Can we change the ways we talk about the
future, technology and nature so we can
create anti-fragile futures?
Pragmatist social theory has given
us some clues for redefining these…
Bruno
Latour
Madeleine
Akrich
John
Law
Nassim N.
Taleb Albena
Yaneva
8. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Reflexive modernisation an extended now…
renren.EE#i
,
#@
future
-
c- -
, -
'
T.la#yhEki
Designer
in context
We inhabit the solutions to
yesterdays problems…
Can we change the contexts
that we design with?
Shape the
design world
Donald Schön
Ulrich Beck,
Scott Lash,
Anthony Giddens
9. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
An extended now…
The future is socially constructed
but so is the present,
as continually informed by a socially constructed past (memory)…
(& they all exist in multiplicity)
The stories we tell ourselves define how we think of ourselves and
our futures Daniel
Dennett
10. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Smart Cities
Are limited by many aspects of western thinking…
• Thinking in states not processes
• Cartesian dualism in terms of social or technological
interpretations
• Technologically determinist
12. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
I am interested in telling different stories about what
cities are and how cities are made…
In doing so, open up our futures to far more potential variety…
“In order to deal properly with the diversity of problems the world
throws at you, you need to have a repertoire of responses which
is (at least) as nuanced as the problems you face.”
Law of Requisite Variety
Ross AshbyDan Lockton
13. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
We need practices that fit better with our times
“Fitness is a relation of mutual
acceptability between [form and context].
In a problem of design we want to satisfy
the mutual demands which the two make
on one another.”
Christopher
Alexander
Our western thinking (form) does not fit with the context of
perpetuating ecological disaster
14. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
It is prudent to adopt other epistemologies…
Towards the post-anthropocentric city
What is the city but the people?
The city is much more than people…
We need some a new poetry of cities that are fit for our times
William
Shakespeare
15. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
The post-anthropocentric city
Multi-species/techno
feminist theory
Donna Haraway
The Cosmopolitical
- politics of the
cosmos
Isabelle Stengers
16. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
From
Humans make cities
To
Cities, water, people, pigeons, carbon
dioxide, signs, policy, documents,
trees destinies are entangled.
Our futures will become together…
17. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
These stories are pragmatist and they change what it
means to do design.
• They tell stories about a world in an unknowable multiplicity
of realities
• They are concerned with the practical effects of our ways of
thinking: intervening in design practices before design
• Relational processes (flows) not products (states)
18. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
Learning to live and die together on a fragile earth
• Sympoiesis (making together), not autopoietic (self-making)
• Complex, emergent, unknowable
• Intervening to transcend the paradigms that shape cities
Leverage
points in a
system
Donella
Meadows
Donna
Haraway
19. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
A reassembled urban cosmos…
(Where we a cognisant of all agencies and their relations over time)
Pigeon
#121983z
Snail
#9a889as
Person
#sf98912as
Water molecule
#98932o4i
Wind gust
#090s-d0s99
Brick
#--as372j
Phone
#as90asas
Bicycle
#82323j
Sign
#1212oal
Policy
#7373&11
CO2
#98ahjsyw
Tree
#912891-2232
20. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
How can we script and perform these relations
over time?
Albena YanevaBruno Latour
21. Norman Foster Foundation
Norman Foster Foundation Workshop
Digital X
How can we tell different stories about the past, present
and future that are more useful for our contexts of
making for the 21st century city?
It matters what thoughts think thoughts.
It matters what knowledges know knowledges.
It matters what relations relate relations.
It matters what worlds world worlds.
It matters what stories tell stories. Donna
Haraway