I’m reading Charles Eisenstein’s “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.” I was drawn to it’s title that is similar to a phrase I use a lot – that our brief is to “design a world we would love to live in”. Though it’s a little long on new-age polemic, it contains thought-provoking insights into a different way of being. It points to what it might take to achieve this ideal state – culturally, intellectually and spiritually. It only hints at how it might come to be designed

I wrote this piece as a margin note to a chapter titled “Scarcity”. Eisenstein relates the poverty of architectural quality in American suburbia to the many ways in which feelings of scarcity are embedded in our culture. ”Scarcity of attention. Scarcity of play. Scarcity of listening. Scarcity of dark and quiet. Scarcity of beauty.” He argues that we insert faux expressions of intimacy in places that we yearn for but are unable to get connection. For example, pornography is a substitute for emotional and physical intimacy that we need but find elusive. The former he calls “ugliness”, the latter “beauty”.

He poses this question, “How much of the ugly does it take to substitute for a lack of the beautiful?”  I wrote:

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“Magic is a bridge that allows us to cross from the visible world to the invisible world”. I heard Paulo Coelho make this remarkable declaration and it stopped me. I have often said that design is magic and Coelho announced the formula. For design is how we make the invisible world of our minds visible and tangible.

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There exists a designerly way of thinking and communicating that is both different from scientific and scholarly ways of thinking and communicating, and as powerful as scientific and scholarly methods of inquiry when applied to its own kinds of problems.

 L. Bruce Archer

Every day we design the world. Every day we have the opportunity to make it better or worse. We give form to our best and our worst human impulses. We create heaven and hell.

We are an imaginative form-giving species intent on adapting our environment to our needs and whims. We invent tools and technologies. We build structures. We create meaning. Design is the magic by which we give the tools and technologies we make form and meaning.

Design is a story that needs to be told. It arises from deep inside our consciousness – of our bodies, of the world around us, and of whatever lies beyond. For we situate ourselves in the world by what we create. We can no more stop designing than we can stop breathing, or thinking.

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Adaptation by Design

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his monumental work “On the Origin of the Species by Natural Selection” with which he forever shifted our understanding of the creation of life. Darwin’s breakthrough did not lie in the assertion that life has evolved from simple to more sophisticated and specialized organisms, but in outlining the process by which it does so – natural selection. He argued that nature evolves by a series of tiny mutations from one generation to the next; random changes in form.  Only those changes that result in a more functional adaptation to their environment survive for they give the organism or animal which hosts them advantage over those with which it might compete for survival. Thus the photo-synthesizing cyanobacteria that emerged three billion years ago from the primordial soup has become homo creator, the first species to circumvent the lengthy process of adaptation by natural selection in favor of the much quicker process of adapting our environment to suit our needs and limitations.

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Design and Language

You might say that we wandered out of Eden some 80,000 years ago. Our Homo Sapiens ancestors lived in small bands in caves along the coast of southern Africa where they had been pushed by a warming trend. Mega-drought in Africa drove them almost to extinction, leaving, some researchers say, just a few thousand people surviving. It may be that stress triggered a dramatic shift in human capacity – for at some point our already powerful brains took the leap to symbolic thinking. Language and design followed closely. Not that humans hadn’t communicated before or created remarkable artifacts. Our new capacity for symbolic thinking allowed us to create connections between objects and constructs of our own invention, ideas, laws and stories that we organize our social life around.  Symbolic thinking opened the door to the ultimate tool in the human tool-chest – our fertile, restless and limitless imaginations. Not just any old imagination, but one that is constantly seeking to organize the world into new forms and structures that fit the contours of the human mind.

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