Designing a great big fat hole in the ground is harder than it sounds.
Onkalo means cave or cavity, which is appropriate because I certainly felt like a great big hole appeared where my happiness once was while watching ‘Into Eternity’. Into Eternity is a movie about Onkalo, a place where spent nuclear fuel goes to crawl up and die incredibly slowly. It’s such a depressing film. The monotony is awkwardly interrupted by the occasional to camera pieces by the director. In complete darkness, lit only by a match held inches from his face, with more pretence in his voice than a hipster in a cereal cafe. The major shortcoming of the movie, however, was the ridiculous choice of the director to not end the movie with ‘Fin.’
I’m probably being a bit harsh, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. But it definitely does not deserve the 100% it has on Rotten Tomatoes. And in fairness, I guess it is supposed to be melancholy. The film is made as if it talking to someone in the future, someone hundreds of thousands of years into the future. It asks what their life is like, what language they speak, whether they have any idea what is in Onkolo. That’s one of the things that made it pretty irritating to watch for me, but it’s trying to make an interesting point.
The concept that struck me was this idea of designing into the future. Onkalo is designed to last beyond civilisation as we know it now. It cannot depend on the what happens on the surface. It must be able to deal with world wars, major earthquakes, catastrophes of all kinds. It needs to be safe. And so it needs to warn people who might accidentally stray into it, not knowing what language they might speak. Perhaps a language that doesn’t yet exist. And it needs to keep out intruders who may go hunting for it for sinister reasons. There are so many complicated problems that need well thought-out solutions.
Designing for the future is still very much user centred design, just we don’t know who the user is. It’s difficult to predict who might come upon the site in 100, 1000 even 100,000 years. Is it safe? For them? It’s so easy to consider the immediate consequences of our design, but what about far into the future? And what about situations today where we just don’t know who the user might be? Designing for unknowns is tricky but essential. When you design a road you don’t know exactly what will drive on it. When you design a car you don’t know exactly what roads it will drive on. But we have to think about what reasonable constraints to design for. It would be ridiculous for every little back lane to be able to withstand a tank, but maybe not that crazy to design it to withstand a fire engine even though that’s hopefully not the usual traffic it would receive.
It’s probably healthy in thinking about the future to have a sprinkle of pessimism on top of the knickerbocker glory that is your design constraints. It’s much better to have designed something better than it needs to be, than have to redesign something that’s failed. But the pesimism is really optimism in disguise- because we are using it to design a better future.
