What is Ontological Design?
And why is it important to survive the digital floods of the 21st cenetury
Ontological design is the design discipline concerned with designing human experience. It does so by operating under one essential assumption: that by designing objects, spaces, tools and experiences, we are in fact designing the human being itself. And the ability to design human beings is going to be central to survive the technological shifts of the coming decades with even a semblance of agency.
In the age of 4th generation warfare there is a pressing need for a design discipline geared towards ontology. Reality tunnel design is a competitive struggle; memes are weaponised, and the autonomous movement of the non-living is threatening to engulf us within its machinic desire. Belief is a technological problem bound to be solved — first by talented curators, the magically inclined and technomancers, and eventually by advanced neural networks and autonomous flows of capital.
History is the genealogy of this singularity, the event in whose threshold we now stand. Technologies have co-evolved with us and have led us to the edge of an abyss. What will happen to the idea of the “individual”? Sense-making is already in unsalvageable disarray, and it doesn’t stop there. What will happen to basic ontological functions like “time”, grammar, and even the distinction between “life” and “death”, when autonomous AI partners up with the markets, capital and the war machines, to curate optimum human reality? To technologically solve phenomenology?
This is a question we must answer, not only philosophically — but practically. And it will be inevitably answered.
It is my intention to outline a design methodology that empowers its practitioners in such a panorama.
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This is a methodology and a toolset, not a style. Styles inevitably get recuperated by the market and become a parody of themselves. To solve this question and not fall in the trap of becoming "superficial decorators" as opposed to proper architectural (operational) thinkers we need to go meta.
We should think about styles (from metal to art nouveau) as shareable tools that enable processes of being; ontological infra-structure. For example, it's more interesting to look at Pinterest as a platform where one pins rather than at what picture collections people actually pin. That is a glimpse beyond marketable aesthetics and towards process, towards situationism. Beyond the message, innovating the medium. Reyner Banham wrote about architecture for the first machine age, we should look towards the fourth. What are the new processual infrastructures?