Fabricating the Future
Fabricating the Future Summary
It's hard not to walk away from Bruce Sterling, Blaine Brownell and Alex Steffen without at least a little smile about the "touch and feel" of our future. All three thinkers and designers are asking us to look a bit more closely at our materials, not to reject them but rather to refine them. Sterling calls for a new vocabulary with a fabulous new collection of words to describe our experiences with technology. With this new language, will our experience of the mediated world change? Brian Eon suggests that art allows us to know our experiences. Sterling's words then allow us to describe our experience to ourselves.
Brownell, on the other hand, wants to get to the down and dirty and tactile. Let's not talk about these things, he seemed to be saying; let's remake them. He offered up a stage full of the world's most innovative materials encouraging new green design and a heightened interactivity with the material world. How would life change for a contractor were he to carry around the handy Dutch tool with environmentally useful information? How many of our decisions in life are made with outdated information simply because we don't have easy access to something more accurate? Like Sterling's new words for our world, Brownell's new objects offer up a paradigm-shifting way of surrounding ourselves with materials. 
This material interactivity is in service of a new mindfulness and consciousness. Change is only possible if we surround ourselves with material objects that call attention to what we are doing and who we are. Steffen posits that drive better when we interact with designs that encourage better gas mileage and efficient car sharing. We live better when we look for products in our life that fit us. And we feel better when we experience an object in our lives as meaningful.
The entire session was a dialogue between the intangibles of a dematerialized existence and the joys and responsibilities of our materialist world. Yes, Mr. Steffen, we all want to have our affluence without feeling guilty so how do we negotiate our material world without being submerged in its pleasures and evils?
The solution seems to exist somewhere between the spheres of meaning and action. Can we live in the material world and delineate between objects that are meaningful (Granny's pillow?) and objects that are harmful (the Hummer). If we create this delineation, how can we continue to encourage Steffen's call for dematerialization? The less meaningful we make our car, the less it needs to exist in our lives in a material way. It can be transformed from an object like Granny's pillow to a dematerialized service object like an airline pillow. It is this exorcism of meaning that will allow us to let go of the materials that are killing us. If cars don't mean anything to us, we won't need to show them off. We can share them and let them go and pick them up again without ever revealing anything about who we are. Yes Mr. Steffen, it is what we do and now what we own that gives us meaning.
