NickBlack.com

Intelligent Design, as a phrase, has had a bad time recently since being hijacked by Creationists as a way to describe their er…“scientific theories.” Well, with apologies to the Lord, we need it back. For despite the glossy advertising and general glitziness of so much that passes for modern technology, most of it is pretty primitive. We’ve wasted the vast majority of the first trillion barrels of oil because of the way we operate. We spend vast quantities of oil and gas heating houses and businesses that are hilariously thermodynamically inefficient. It’s so bad that the new paper “Home Truths” from Oxford University suggests it’s possible to increase efficiency by 80%! If all those ideas were implemented it would very nearly halve Britain’s domestic energy consumption. The same is true, and probably more so, for the States.

What I mean by Intelligent Design is really two ideas. The first is to embed intelligence in most of the infrastructure that’s pretty primitive right now. We heat inefficient homes. We use a road and rail system that is unable to let us know how traffic conditions will affect our journey. We have designed a throwaway culture based on cheap plastics. Those plastics aren’t cheap, they only appear cheap if you allow the companies producing them to keep the waste products out of sight.

So suppose we begin to design everything with an understanding of the interdependence of everything and the massive advantages that can be made by including artificial intelligence in products – specifically to minimize energy and resource waste, both during manufacture and use. Obsolescence is obsolete. Designers need to take all aspects of the product cycle into account from an ecological perspective, that includes initial design, production, use, maintenance and eventual disposal. From this point of view the designer and architect have a fundamental responsibility to provide a sustainable infrastructure, a built environment, and the products that we use everyday.

Currently design is a function of least possible cost, rather than long life and environmental effectiveness. Perhaps what we’re looking for here is a general application of Bionics, not simply in the medical sense of implants and prosthetics, but in the more general sense of using natural systems as the basis for engineering and design. The work of Julian Vincent at the University of Bath is an example of the kind of thinking I mean: “Animals tend to do things using as little energy as possible but to maximum effect. That’s not always the way humans think, so it’s a great way to achieve a novel design.” It’s a pity that more ideas like this aren’t commonplace in the design world. But then maybe necessity will be the mother of all inventors once again.

Despite the bust in Bali and the ongoing avalanche of data that lets us know all our models have woefully underestimated the speed of climate change, we may have time to get this kind of new intelligence into the built environment. But to be realistic, we don’t have 3 decades either