Emerging technologies - some strategies for a future of design and the formation of somatic experience

This brief paper highlights some of the issues that have arisen in a research that emerging from the experience of attempting to extend design analysis and criticism into those student projects which engaged with ‘incorporated technologies’ such as nanotechnology, virtual and augmented reality, DNA computing or implant augmentation. The research itself will take the form of a number of narratives intended to explore and invite discussion of ideas drawn from philosophy and science, posited as a means to initiate discussion among designers. This paper particularly explores how this process of dialogue arose from the discussion of complex and ‘uncertain’ ideas with student designers and emerged from the experience of developing curricula for the undergraduate ‘design futures’ course at the University of Wales. It is suggested that issues emerging from this research may have some impact upon the design of future pedagogies for design education and upon the future of industrial design conceptualisation. Questions are raised of the methodology of those designers who claim to model users experiences through metaphoric or comparative allusion to antique models of mechanical processes or through social interactions conceived to bear comparison with established human rituals. The paper describes how a speculative method of dialogue is being designed in order to explore the potential of an extensionist philosophical model. The dialogic method, whilst still in the process of construction, is centred upon a process of ‘story-telling’. It is anticipated that these stories will go some way towards the embodied, inclusion of emerging uncertain and unorthodox ideas of ‘extension’ in philosophy, biology, ecology, psychology and neuroscientific into the schema of industrial design conceptualisation.