‘Broken pots’ a preamble on

Future Cities Archeology

Dr. D.W. Nicoll
FDI LUCT

Introduction

FDI at LUCT have identified the research issues they believe are both timely and
in which they have an active interest. If we consider that the objective of
archeology is typically the construction of a cultural chronology realized through
the investigation of human interventions in the natural world, its ultimate objective
is the discovery of the processes which always underlay and condition human
behavior.

Postgraduate work by students in FDI on the Future Cities Archaeology

programme will not only confront questions of form, representation, and the
meaning of objects created by homo faber, but these will be considered against a
scholarly project of projecting themselves and their product into a future, a
constructed future, a highly contrived future. They must then ‘rediscover’ and
‘reconstruct’ - ‘piece together’ their products anew in the light of researches.

In order to accomplish this, they must excavate and locate their products in
fictional time and space and relative to other fragments and detritus which has
accumulated - dead-ends to development, poor predications, poor methods,
incomplete data, competing and redundant product ideas, short lived fads and
fashions; serendipity; capricious design, the student must sift out irrelevancies
and highlight weaknesses in projection, predictions and, most importantly, in their
chosen product project.

When strategically thinking of a ‘future’, most individuals and organizations start

somehow in the present and only then move to an analysis of history – even
though paradoxically the now is conditioned and created from fragments of the
previous. Nexus as praxis embodies a process of activity, reflection upon activity,
collaborative analysis of activity, new activity, more reflection, more collaborative
analysis, and so on. Then they revisit the present, where the original problem
comes to be reframed, and only then will they consider possible futures. We wish
to first build a social and technological future, possible to probable worlds, using
available means and methods, and then work back to re-frame our present and
pre-existent design product offering.
Evaluation will focus upon their abilities ability to distill from all the forces and
influences on a future cities’ archeological site, the project's essence – the
potential durability of their own creation/s. Their social acceptance in the socio-
technical world of tomorrow with its own moral economies and panics. Situated
pedagogy attempts to challenge tradition and mass culture (Kellner, 1995) 1 by
looking for myths to explode, and, by doing so, to expose that history is dynamic,
not static (Freire, 1970/1996) 2. "A community of practice is a set of relations
among persons, activity, and world, over time [. . .] an intrinsic condition for the
existence of knowledge [. . .]" (Lave & Wenger, 1991) 3 Stephen Brookfield
emphasizes "praxis" as being at the heart of effective facilitation for critical
thinking and reflection, which he defines as "identifying and challenging
assumptions and exploring and imagining alternatives." 4

The thought here is that we can draw from our world where the precognitive tools
that allow us to navigate terrain depend on observation and intuition to explore
geo-historical layers of content and contexts (social, material, psychological,
emotional, moral, critical, economics, business models etc.) and so evaluation
will also consider if the student has comprehensively and exhaustively covered
all grounds and all perspectives with regard to possible and potential contexts. In

1
Kellner, D (1995) Media Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
2
Freire, P. (1970, 1996) Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Books. (revised
edition)
3
Lave.J and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning. Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge:
University of Cambridge
4
Brookfield, S. D. (1986). Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
(p.80)
doing so, they will invent and re-invent the story of their product, its present and
future biography.

Because stories are strategies that help humans make sense of their world,
narratives not only have a logic but also are a logic in their own right, providing
an irreplaceable resource for structuring and comprehending experience.
Narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative
fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the
inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with
language-supported stories. We would like to see evidence of convincing stories,
myths of the product project work as a ‘pole of attraction’ – linking the enhanced
design product object or building – to the exigencies that support or threaten it.
As such we consider tangible products and their supporting services as ‘texts’.
Both in a purely semiotic sense, as well as from the perspective employed
typically by Archeologists as they interpret layers as indicative of successive time
frames.

At FCA@FDI we emphasize process and method over content in the early

explorations of the student. What are the best approaches to building knowledge
of this artifact or service in a social, economic and experiential world of the
future? For instance, does it require particularized knowledge and theories of its
application or are its insights to be gained through abstraction and generalization,
knowledge that could be applied across product types and categories?

What stories can a design product tell of itself – its pedigree, its gene pool, its
past, present and future - how does ‘that which exists’ guide collective action in
production and use? How does the finished article guide collective materials,
components and ingredients, not least to say cultural and psychosocial data in
their production and use? Research students of FCA@FDI make this guidance
explicit in their written work and develop frameworks that can help organizations
acknowledge past contributions, understand turning points and explore and
nurture future possibilities.

As such this exercise must consider that all objects have places of origin - when
they leave them, whether yesterday, one hundred, or five thousand years ago -
they begin to lose specific traits. All objects come to have and occupy spaces;
many of these are the home, the habitat. Here they meld with the territory, they
become domesticated and invisible, or they perform daily function, unnoticed
until they breakdown.

Replacing progressive and linear theories of

stylistic change, the anthropological art historian,
George Kubler argued over 40 years ago in his
seminal The Shape of Time (1962) that an art
object “points to the existence of some problem
to which there have been other solutions and
that other solutions to this same problem will most likely be invented to follow the
one now in view.”5

This adroit analysis of the history of ideas and art objects suggests the problem
at hand – is it possible to project forward with any degree of certainty with a view
to working backwards to the present? The accumulation of material and
ideological culture alone survives to represent the evolution of humankind. This
point may be self-evident to the archaeologist. We hold that this represents a rich
scholarly exercise which has vast intrinsic value to design practice and study.

Slow design and the long now

Design is typically, always done with some ‘future in mind’. This is most
noticeably immediate, i.e. lust for result in creating the prototype, or it may be the
consideration of a longer process taken from sustainable design practice and
ideas is Fornitore”s Terra Grass Armchair. A ‘subtle merging of man and
nature… reminiscent of an iron age burial mound.’ A biodegradable cardboard
frame allows grass to encompass itself, eventually lending a seat.

5
Kubler, G. (1962) The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things New Haven: Yale University
Press, p.33.
The process of a slow design is comprehensive, holistic, inclusive, reflective and
considered. It permits evolution and development of the design outcomes. The
dynamics underlying coherent change practice are as systemic as the natural
process of photosynthesis. Understanding these patterns is a key to good design
and personal design mastery. It may be For instance, the designer may build,
adapt and maintain views of the situations and environments where the product
will exist; will be used; how it will weave into the fabrics of the users’ everyday
life.

However we rarely ground our projections by research, or even research this

extensively or properly, nor do we instill data from such studies in our designs,
not that we may we wish to, nor may it be relevant or even worthwhile doing so. It
may simply not be possible to ‘imbue’ the product with anything of these
researches. Rather we often adopt a more conservative attitude which has us
complacent that our creation today is destined for the realm of the classic
tomorrow. But while we may not all capable of creating the classic, can cogently
argue regarding what will be classic tomorrow?

In the future, non-classics, neo-classics, non-durable products,

like potteries in orthodox archeological excavations are
forgotten, it is forgotten also who made them, when they were
made, how they were used. Can artifacts and ideas whose
origins in the future spring from foreign cultures or distant times
actually be germane today? Can we project forward in an informed
way in order to work our way back to the ever
present now, the long inescapable, infinite,
indivisible essence of ‘now’? Early art that is
articulate speaks to us because it is attuned to current necessities. Can we for
the purposes of study and investigation turn this around? Can the future product
speak to us only in limited articulations? What are the lacunae in our knowledge
of future sociabilities, technologies, and who can dictate how needs and wants
will arise and be answered?

It certainly appears that in our conceptual and material sophistication we are not
so naïve that we were at the advent of cinematic and literal proposals of ‘the
future’ 6, nor those of events held to praise and celebrate modernity such as the
World Fair in Chicago, in 1935 or the Festival or Britain in 1955, or Disney’s
venture into town creation and planning - ‘Celebration’ Florida. Our common
humanity explains both our need and our ability to draw insights from the
creations of others. The Modern mind is a hybrid composite of an Episodic Mind,
a Mimetic Mind, a Narrative Mind (with its Mythic Culture), and the Modern Mind
extended by external static symbol systems (with its Written/Theoretic Culture).
No matter how dispersed the origins, objects coalesce as pertinent answers to
perennial, duplicative questions. Replacing progressive and linear theories of
stylistic change, the modern configuration of traditional practices and everyday
routines embraces objects clustered closely in meaning but diverse in material,
cultural, and temporal origins. This dynamic grouping is legitimate because
human character and biology change far more slowly—if at all—than do
technologies or economics. We are far closer to our historical or foreign brethren
than we usually imagine. We share a
remembrance of our common destiny of
death, our equivalent senses of hunger and
satiation, and our inescapable emotions of
joy and sorrow.

Domestication and habitat

6
Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Weiner and the Hudson Institute, wrote the definitive Futurology book:
"The Year 2000" (New York: Macmillan, 1968)
The essential boundless and primordial energy that design work embodies may
be what prevents many projects from being built in the first place, for capturing
something so ephemeral within the solidity and fixity of architectures and
knowledge ‘structures’ – such as taxonomies - seem almost impossible. Plasticity
and mobility, the ideas and concepts, takes on completely new nuance when
placed against the grid, the matrix or network and the digital. Like the fickle and
felling emotions, the waxing and waning of interests in everyday life.

Conceptually putting people and their experience at the centre of our attention,
as it was during the time of the renaissance and the enlightenment, is a simple
way of organizing and integrating ideas about design expressions of multiple
kinds. While cannot possibly be expected to control people’s subjective
experience, they can adjust design expressions - the formal and behavioral
qualities of design - to influence emotions and experience appropriately. The
relation between objects and ideas becomes ever more fluid? As Jean
Baudrillard has it: "The simulation of something which never really existed" or
Umberco Eco when he refers to: "the authentic fake." Even exhaustive
knowledge about a Cézanne distillation of Mont Sainte-Victoire or a Jackson
Pollock flung-pigment painting does not permit our experience to match the
artist’s. The Rorschach ink blot, our musings on the ‘meaning’ of a foreign
language or ritual, a painting in a waiting room, the look on someone’s face can’t
help but invoke our powers to create patterns of meanings where none exists.

Human beings are incorrigible pattern makers and seekers. Even if makers are
known, as with documented self-taught or Art Brut artists, their conceptual
system still may be impenetrable. Yet the art remains extraordinary and
compelling. We seem destined to stitch together, as seekers, glimpses of each
story; we learn about other times and places; we interweave our own immediate,
personal, and vibrant relationships. Art is always moving away from its origins,
suffering an inevitable loss of context. However, beneficially, the accretion of time
permits related objects to be newly grouped, bridging time and geography in new
fusions. As Cyberpunk author William Gibson states: “…the future’s already
here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” Shreds of pottery, bits of jewelry,
reconstructed whole vessels are not transparent windows into the past, but
membranes that express their own properties and qualities. They were once
cherished as possession and as useful. They were close. They were networked
to our being-in-the-world.

Future sociability – co-shaping and plasticity, configuration and

reconfiguration

We would like to believe in the potential of computational technology as a

material interwoven seamlessly to support into everyday life – our modern being-
in-the-world. We would like to believe in such well designed visions of the future
as those proposed by Philips, where devices are not personal because they take
up personal space but because they support flexible and open styles of to
support the flows of our evolving lifestyles.7

The nodes, the junctures of ‘idea’ and ‘object’, ‘actor’ and ‘actant’ are hashed and
recycled, deconstructed and reconstructed, mashed and rendered. The virtual
bites back and influences and reconfigures the tangible, the visceral, and the
embodied. Psychology is the physics of the virtual. The virtual, the possible, is
the physics of the psychological. The mimetic, pre-linguistic human mind
encoded knowledge in replicable, even rehearsable, action. Further this mimetic
knowledge could be idealized and socially shared. Appreciation is not simply a
matter of aesthetic intuition, though intuition is an essential sensibility.
Comprehension is also an accretive educational process of connoisseurship.
Determining virtuosity partly emanates from comparisons and references within
the universe of known artifacts and design products. What carries forth my
passion in future archeological ‘digs’ is that is a ricocheting energy between each
product’s will contributes to its overall aura and the nuances of inventive phrases
freshly spoken. Densely handled rims, textured and whorled patterns, and
sculptural necks are all fecund, provoking dreams and gestations of new
recombinations, reconfigurations within personal motifs. Quoting Kuhler (p.17):

"Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant

between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through
time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the
revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the

7
Vision of the Future, Philips Design and V+K Publishing, The Netherlands, 1998.
 interchronic pause when nothing is
happening. It is the void between
events.”

When we move our tutored thoughts to the

future and then work our way back through
sediments and layers we discover new
artifacts and work out a new discourses
relating to their existence. Because
technology, for instance, does nothing on its own, we discover something of
ourselves in the excavation. As the wartime British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill had it: "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape
us.” In Western cultures that have separated art from daily life, the seam of
duality and duplexes, that of shaping whilst being shaped - is prone to being
ripped apart.

There are art historians whose perceptions are limited to pots as “merely physical
containers,” anthropologists who treat pottery solely as data reflecting cultural
interchange, even art critics who assess strictly in terms of purified formal
aesthetic qualities such as color, volume or patterning. As in the ancient Indian
parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” all are exploring only one isolated
aspect of a complex creation. Clearly, a house, or any other product is a
multifaceted thing. But the equation house = home, mobile device = my social
continuum is the product of a vast range of discourses ranging from purely
matters of material and engineering and applied mechanics, to aesthetics,
compliance with local statutes on building control and city planning, to emotional
dimensions such as security, privacy and comfort. Planning and strategy
becomes design and design becomes organization, coping, compromise and
understanding. These are ‘mashed’ upon the physical structures in order to
create human meanings and value which are dynamic and changing.

One may wonder how Churchill’s co-shaping notion applies to the planned, the
designed, the contrived, such as Disney’s town ‘Celebration’ in Florida, U.S.
Roughly following principles and overt ideologies captured in ‘Main Street’ – it is
a ‘quintessential’ American town. Like other straw men, myths such as the lone
inventor, a ‘golden’ age where people were happier, the utopia offered by Web
2.0 what was and will be is always open to critical appraisal. Tasting the essence
of future products ideas requires memory excavations; retrievals of patterns
formed by using and seeing countless other objects, man-made and natural.
Elements are not necessarily harmonized, as in discordant but emotive music.
Disentangling may begin, perhaps, with the city’s character.

Design; in its infinite manifestation, its myriad forms develop a bewildering

system of relationships and functions of tangible and intangible elements when
considered as a whole. The constellation of the tangible is continually under
threat from the kaleidoscope of cognitions, ideas and reinventions of meaning,
reformulations and ‘tipping points’ which can challenge and interrogate their
existence, their contexts there fixity in relation to other tangibles and intangibles. 8

It brings attention to various surfaces, particular fixities and obduracies - in both

material and social nature, the stretched rectangular shapes of the building, or
the taxed and excessive features and functionalities which lie beyond the
abductive smart or responsive interface seem to consult with the crevices and
angular surfaces of the logical topography of artificial artifacts. Perhaps if we
conceptualize pottery surface as skin we can convey the essentialness of surface
markings. Skin is indispensable to life, the central mediator between our internal
nature and the external natural environment. Treatments to each vessel’s skin
are integral to these forms. Even when symbolically unfathomable, these clay
skins are reminiscent of body markings, wood carvings, textiles, braided ropes,
and animate creatures. The guts of this beast, this complexity, are not exposed
to the unwitting user. Assumptions within this design topography are rife. Logics
and common-sense between the exigencies and practices of production and
design are not that of appropriation, consumption and use. As such this tension
requires the ‘domestication’ of objects and devices into the fabric of quotidian life,
much in the same way that people ‘domesticate’ in and within habitats and the
built environment.

8
Philip Rawson’s treatise, Ceramics, the only in-depth inquiry in English to delve into pottery’s
aesthetic grammar, explores the symbolism of the many physical aspects that compose a vessel.
Philip Rawson, Ceramics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971). “we have to make the effort
imaginatively to put ourselves in the place of the users, seeing the symbols as having not the
content we might see in them…but as elements in a vivid life of sensation and emotion.” All
patterns “must have been meant…to add value and spiritual effectiveness, through their
evocative overtones, to the ware in the eyes of its user” (pp.161-165).
Celebration does not have a main street. Concordant with local state statutes
whereupon towns cannot have the same street names, Disney could not employ
its use in its design. Also, in opposition to criticisms of the ideological dimension,
more recent commentators have remarked how the residents, simply by virtue of
living there and ‘using’ the town, have domesticated it, made it less ‘Disney’ and
more like any other functioning townships and community. It will always be so as
people make things their ‘own’.

Humanlity

Today, design is increasingly understood more in terms of the human capacity to

plan and produce desired outcomes; can we reengineer these intentions and
assumptions? Significant design practice and processes reveal an extraordinary
rapport of form and surface image. What is admirable about these good designs
is not the result of a particular technical flourish, stylistic rarity, technological
accomplishment, or royal provenance. Esteem is due to an intense
expressiveness of material and usability. The
ineffable is real but not fully describable. The
physical-cum-abstract use of pottery is
ongoing. The compelling nature of the future
cities archeology lab lies in its interest to
understand the human dimension – the
humanality - involved in the selection of
materials and the application of technology
and science in the performance of
communication, products, and environments.
As such it is the study of the design of
cultural objects and environments as if
viewed in retrospect, from the humility some
future vista.9 In this case they can be a story
which is sung and recorded, carved in stone,
painted on cave walls, found on bodies or
captured in artifacts and spaces as they move through time and the dimensions
of the use and lifecycle processes. Why is a double-necked water jar from the
Mambila (Cameroon), a satin black Zulu ukhamba for brewing beer, or a softly
bent-necked pouring bottle from the Matakam (Chad) so evocative? Why do they
persist while all around may change? Do they create barriers, or do they anchor
and facilitate ‘departure points’ for other technologies, other ways of being, other
ways of seeing and doing things?

9
Cultural objects have been described as shared significance embodied in form (Griswold, 1986).
Some futurists describe science fiction as the archaeology of the future.
In a world of intensifying digital network capabilities, and of new kinds of
responsive materials, bound to a new generation of people used to new kinds of
networking, sociability and interfacing with knowledge of the world there is a
need for exploration of the junctures where artifact, knowledge, environment and
people interlink in unique, novel, meaningful and valuable ways. For instance,
where will they link to create delight, entertainment, positive healthful
experiences, and technological innovation? How will they form and inform in the
future? Which will be dead links, redundant avenues, and become obsolete, cast
away forming the detritus of endeavor, inspiration and application? This is critical,
as new modular forms, new kinds of plasticity, new definitions of ‘public’ and
‘private’ open, new kinds of mobilities and dynamism are enabling and
influencing all creative and design arts from architecture to furniture design to
web-based multimedia. Have we finally future-proofed media? Julian Dibbell's
book My Tiny Life (2001) explored the prospect of whether a ‘virtual’ rape in a
virtual world was a ‘real’ crime. A more recent addition extending this issue is
raised in Synthetic Worlds by economist Edward Castronova, who began
studying the exchange rates of token money in these games, analyzing the
emerging prices as powers and characters were sold on eBay. His conclusion is
that these games have robust economies as large, and as "real" as many real
countries. When USA Today revealed that Second Life participants were making
‘real’ money selling ‘virtual’ real estate, a Klondike started with participant
numbers escalating, a boast to the virtual and ‘real’ economy. ‘Participation’
seems a key idea here, not only with digital networks and technology but with
other people using channels of communication with deep modifications to self
and being. We are literally just at the beginning of understanding how the social
graph will change every web application. What is emerging is the identity and
social subsystem of the future internet operating system.” The internet and digital
technology linked to mapping and to GPS and RFID systems is providing unique
windows on the social world which can change our perceptions and alter our
behaviors.

This is significant. It amounts to what the designer and futurist Bruce Mau has
termed unabashedly ‘Massive Change’. This he defines as; “a celebration of our
global capacities but also a cautious look at our limitations. It encompasses the
utopian and dystopian possibilities of this emerging world, in which even nature is
no longer outside the reach of our manipulation.” 10

Conclusion

At FCA@FDI we should recognize the speciousness of any claim that the

genesis of another culture’s material objects does not involve any individually
chosen aesthetic decisions. Recent scholarship has begun to correct for these
myopic views, documenting in Africa, for instance, the wide creative latitude
10
http://www.massivechange.com/about
exercised by specific individual makers creating within sophisticated cultural
traditions and needs.

The potency of this exciting new programme for designers lies in its resolution of
dual realities. There is the obvious sphere of physical use: the realms of filling,
pouring, carrying, or perhaps communicating. Then there is the sphere of
abstract use: the metaphorical realms of sustenance offerings, status delineators,
emotional containers, or vital funerary accoutrements within a given cosmology.
The student’s work in this area will continue to evolve and will helped catalyze a
growing field of practice which is trans-cultural and trans-generative. A focus
upon process and method will engender students with the mental flexibility,
mobile intelligence, and agility required ensuring tomorrow’s products relate in
novel, delightful and respectful ways to their public and private users.

For design products this duality of abstract and physical use confers
irreplaceability—no other medium can take its place—and indivisibility—the
utilitarian, spiritual, and aesthetic are forever intertwined. We should never
replace our ignorance as to the utilitarian-aesthetic-symbolic life of an object with
the belief that no such complex creative nexus exists. Nor should we mistake our
inability to discern who actually made an object with the assumption that the
object was somehow, somewhere anonymously or autonomously generated.