What is design and does it project?
What is design? Every culture in the world has its own definition. In Russian design translates into “proectirovanie” roughly translated as a projection. It is a projection of one’s subjective or collective vision of reality onto the physical world. Nothing more or less. We all due to our inherent personal and cultural characteristic differences see the reality differently. We project ourselves into the real world and expect it to conform to our empirical predictions of its multiverse reality. We approximate this image hoping that it would fit the “collective real”. These politics of the collective real on the other hand follow the reality of power, economy, social organization that are beyond our understanding and more so control. Thus, the design is an ephemeral approximation of ourselves and the realities we construct. I can cheaply substantiate this thought by a quote from Nietzsche: … value of an action lies precisely in that which is not intentional, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible or “sensed” in it, belongs to its surface or skin — which, like every skin, betrays something, but conceals still more?
Let us for the productivity’s sake abandon the philosophy and look at what can be delivered to the physical world in a measurable timeframe. Anyway, we cannot deal with objectivity without the data it requires. Postmodernistically, even data is not enough, as Pedro Cruz explains via his data caricatures, where certain data serves to substantiate a design by “improving recognizability”. Thus illustrating that even with data human mind has to exaggerate in order to recognize the relevant patterns. Even most sophisticated digital tools of today, such as Urban Sim, have to approximate city in 150 by 150-meter chunks and exaggerate it in order to be useful for human analysis. Therefore, we can conclude that only complexity can grasp complexity, only computer algorithm can analyze the “big data”. However, even this algorithm must be approximated by a human brain, creating “chicken-egg” paradox, and making us wonder what bootstraps what.
The third reading on the role of virtual reality in master-planning of a “smart city” is definitely less contentious. VR technology is relatively well developed, cost-effective, and popular. The question, however, is whether it is going to facilitate the interaction between designers and clients, or simply serve as another gimmicky tool of approximation, exaggeration and straight out bedazzlement. I would argue that it is a step in the right direction in terms of representation of urban space. In the information age, we should not solely rely on a typical physical model due to its top-down view and reduced scale essence. If the physical model is a crotch in the representation of volumetry of urban setting, perspective rendering is a pure bedazzlement that could sell any space to an interested party regardless of their spatial qualities as long as it is picturesque and well-choreographed visually. Returning to the projective nature of design, VR allows a client to project himself into the future reality rather than simply following a projection of a designer. Single point perspectives is a device better suited for the Renaissance Italy than the modern urb with its pluralistic and democratized design. For good or worse, VR is a new paradigm that is going to transform our cities one way or another.
