Research: Current

I tend to work on several different research projects in parallel, as I find there is often “cross-pollination” from one pursuit to the next. Here are descriptions of two of my current research pursuits, one in the field of design, and the other in the philosophy of physics…

Homo sapiens to Homo faber: Design as "Making Meaning"

For some time now, I have been involved in research concerning art-making, industrial design (e.g., tool-making), and the rise of consciousness in Homo sapiens, as well as the transition of humans to Homo faber and Homo techne. What was human thinking like before there was visual art and design? Moreover, did such art and the practice of design arise as a particular tool for human beings to use — not to communicate with each other, but rather for individual human beings to communicate with themselves?

For this design project, I am carrying out research by way of a Fulbright Scholar grant in Slovakia. I have been lucky to have been hosted by Prof. Veronika Kotradyová, a professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava (Slovenská technická univerzita v Bratislave (STUBA)). She is deeply interested in how humans might have a healthy relationship with the built environment, and she, too, worked in this field as a Fulbright scholar (at the University of California, Berkeley). The local focus of my design project involves learning about craft traditions in a general sense in Slovakia, and how they have been able to survive here despite "modernisation" of the society. More particularly, I am interested in what one local scholar, Prof. Kotradyová has written on, i.e., an investigation of "what folk inspirations in design mean and whether local identity embedded in traditions can work as a brand able to interpret traditional products... and, subsequently, disseminate them by means of strategies used in design". For me, this is interesting in and of itself; despite having only limited time in Slovakia, I hope to at least have the opportunity to observe some craft production, and learn more about the different craft traditions here and how they are connected to particular regions.

My design project involves, however, placing these observations, in a larger investigatory framework, which was the core of my Fulbright proposal. In that proposal, I talk about how I intend to consider human beings as designers — that is, how humans, at a very fundamental level, have evolved to use design to understand the world around them. Klaus Krippendorff, the noted scholar of cybernetics, language, communications, and culture, defined design this way: "The etymology of design goes back to the Latin de + signare, and means making something, distinguishing it by a sign, giving it significance, designating its relation to other things... Based on this original meaning, one could say: design is making sense (of things)."

Despite this insightful definition, which dates back several decades, design often is still seen as human beings creating and using tools to manipulate the physical environment, in a strict subject-object relationship. Krippendorff's definition takes us one step beyond that: human beings, in short, use their design interactions with the environment (through tools, materials, and methods) to make sense of the world, and to create or find meaning. Design thus becomes a philosophical — indeed, an existential — undertaking.

As a teacher and researcher who has worked in design, philosophy, and the sociology of technology, then, I wish to explore this "existential" idea in my project, but also to take it much further. Today, we look for sustainable design methods, trying to find ways to interact with our environment in ways that are less exploitative, or more "natural". But we are still using up resources, still reflexively "making", still creating objects and putting them into an already very crowded world — and thus still remaining locked in that same subject-object relationship. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in her famous book, The Human Condition, "Fabrication, the work of homo faber, consists in reification"; through design and fabrication, we create objects that are distinct from us, the subjects. My project, then, will attempt to go beyond this, and explore the following questions.

1. Why did human beings, in the course of their evolution, develop the need or compulsion to "make sense" of the natural world around them? How did design arise to fulfil this need? How can the potential answers to these questions inform us as we now face critical issues of (over)production, exploitation of resources, and environmental challenges today? In this regard, too, I hope that observing and thinking about craft production — as opposed to industrial manufacture — can provide some possible answers or insights.

2. When did human beings, again in terms of their evolution, shift from a holistic way of simply "being" in their environment (a kind of natural ontological state) to believing that they were subjects or active agents who needed make tools and manipulate Nature, treating Nature as the "object"? As Arendt states, the "the birth of homo faber and the coming into being of a man-made world of things are actually coeval with the discovery of tools and instruments" — tools and instruments which give us power over, but also separation from, Nature.

3. Now that we see that this schism between humans and Nature has caused damage to the environment and to ourselves, can design itself seek new ways to "make meaning" or even release us as humans from this need to make meaning through active manipulation of Nature? The philosopher and educator Maria daVenza Tillmanns puts it this way: "Homo faber has gone too far in its instrumental thinking and destroyed relationship in the process. Everything has become instrumental." This is certainly a call to "move beyond Homo faber"; indeed, an extensive critique of human existence now solely as Homo faber is found in the work of the well-known philosopher and critic Byung-Chul Han. Since schools still teach design — notably product design and industrial design — all over the world, might we re-examine our design education methods, and build a new philosophical context for both design practice and design pedagogy?.

By an interesting coincidence, as I was preparing my "Project Statement" for the Fulbright Scholar grant, I was contacted by a former graduate student, Prof. Dominic Muren. He was interested in cooperating on a very similar aspect of this investigation, best defined by these questions: What are we teaching design students and why? If we are to make things, how can we create "elegant" objects that have "beautiful and/or poetic entanglements" which can then give those objects — unlike mass-produced things — that acknowledge their location, celebrate their material past, and "suggest a hopeful material future"? I think that Muren's questions perfectly coincide with craft traditions, and the idea of living in a world that moves well beyond the fantasy of maintaining mass production while teaching students "sustainability".

Models and Empirical Methods in Studying the Nature of Time

This research concerns models of spacetime, and is taking the form of a book currently under contract with the publisher De Gruyter. In particular, I am working on assembling several distinct models to describe spacetime in a way that could yield new insights into both the nature of time and temporality. In terms of the nature of time, my focus is on the experimentally-verifiable aspects of time, notably the results of Special Relativity. In terms of temporality, I am interested in why we perceive time as a series of events and how this can be connected more directly to the actual nature of time itself. The first model is one that I label "Time as 'Events'". For this model, I draw from the work of the physicist Julian Barbour. In his book The End of Time, Barbour argues that time as we perceive it — as a flow, or in a linear passage — is an illusion. He argues that there are, rather, distinct sets of moments, which he calls "Nows". These are fixed events, and Barbour further argues that in fact there is no such thing as motion or change. Barbour has also published a selection of academic papers outlining various aspects of this model. While this concept of a timeless universe is problematic, it is a very useful starting point in a new discussion of time and temporality.

In particular — although Barbour's work does not make this direct implication — his concept spatializes time in a particularly firm way, so that time as a geometrical identity can take full form, and be explored (in mathematical and physical terms) much in the same way as space. Barbour alludes to this in his characterization of Leibniz's model of motion as simply relational locations. This is Barbour's idea of independent events or moments — the "snapshots". They become ordered through what Barbour calls "the presumed continuity of the changes of the relative configurations" that allows, "a unique ordering of the sequence". Interestingly, Barbour does not use this depiction to provide a model of temporality, but it is possible. In my study, I hope to investigate the related concept of mathematical ordering as a possible origin for our sense of "time's passage", or temporality.

The work of Tim Maudlin, a philosopher of science at New York University, includes an approach to time that can be connected to Barbour's concepts. Although Maudlin's areas of specialty are metaphysics and quantum theory, he has also written on the nature of time. In his 2012 book, Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time, Maudlin uses a geometrical approach to explain Special Relativity, in contrast to the usual methods of coordinate systems or "reference frames". In my model of time as a set of "events", I hope to synthesize Barbour's general conception with the more specific geometrical structures of Maudlin to create a way of talking about Special Relativity in terms of a complete temporal setup. In this new model, I will articulate temporality as resulting from perspectival perceptions of events in four-dimensional structure, alluding to the potential role of a kind of parallax phenomenon in creating apparent passage of time.

Another model of time that I have devised for this study is completely digital: in such a model, time is no more than a dataset. That dataset is a fixed compilation of encoded information that is structured in way comparable to the data in a storage medium such as a computer hard-drive. The information therein not only contains the coded "events" in time, but also contains the subcodes that dictate how the data should be accessed and read. This model provides a clear way of understanding how temporal events are read by, for example, human consciousness in a particular manner and in a particular order. Temporality in this model, then, is the reading of digital data through the form of an interface. This model, too, will be examined in terms of how it handles the results of Special Relativity, particularly time dilation.

However, the ultimate question remains: Why is time as the object of scientific study so problematic? As noted, above, there are models of time and temporality, but how can these be connected in a productive way with empirical findings? In turn, the following question must be asked, a critically important one: “Is there a way to generate more experimental approaches concerning the nature time?"