Algy Falconer
Biophorm
Summary
The fundamental properties of life are safety, opportunity, and continued health.
These shared objectives have formed our model of the world: evolution has expressed a perceptual, cognitive, and behavioural proto-architecture in species’ genetic code.
This proto-architecture is evolutionarily-conserved and provides the starting blocks for individual and cultural elaboration. By exploring its behavioural implications, this project explores how evolutionarily-directed and specialised affordances ('biophorms') might be employed by design to elicit common responses, regardless of culture — perhaps even across species with kindred evolutionary histories.
Our evolutionarily-conserved interfaces with the world offer design a perspective to create preferred states across the ecosystem and nurture its resilience. This is particularly true of complex contexts where a plurality of interests exist, and where individuals cannot express those interests.
Additional info
Through workshops and participatory design, the project probes and discusses:
- The theory of evolutionarily-specified affordances in the context of inter-cultural/-specific design.
- Techniques for large-scale, cross-cultural investigation of affordances.
- Speculations about biophorms' future.
In the process, the project explores questions such as:
- If design intends to bring about a preferred future, for whom and what is this preference?
- How can we investigate affordances in a controlled context which replicates real-world, 3D interactions?
- How might this behavioural data be used in future societies?
These concepts form the basis of 'Ecological Village' (working title). This project will explore the application of evolutionary game theory to model the knowledge, strategies, and payoffs of living populations in a compressed model of the ecosphere. This intends to provide a long-term perspective into social and economic structures (communication and exchange) to aid the strategic design of value and ecosystem health.
Evolutionarily-Directed Interfaces
“...if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin...”
Darwin, 1909
Our evolutionarily-conserved interface and its affordances might provide a lens into design not just for but across the pluriverse. In this way, we could begin to understand how our shared, embryonic purpose — life — spills out into our ecosystem and complex social phenomena.
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An Ecological Veil of Ignorance
In 1971, political philosopher John Rawls proposed a thought experiment designed to counteract hegemonic modes of thought: the ‘Veil of Ignorance’.
If we knew the institutional structures which constitute societies, but not the sector of society we would be born into, how would we want society to be structured?
Our shared proto-architecture could give us a framework to (re)form hegemony through ideals shared across cultures and even species (safety, opportunity, health). This could enable empathetic design for complex environments with highly divergent stakeholders — including those with whom we cannot directly communicate.
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What are affordances?
Affordances are the behavioural opportunities provided by the environment for an individual. They are therefore an important area of research for interaction design.
"The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill." Gibson, 1979
They exist in the environment complimentarily to our sensory, perceptual, and behavioural capacity.
…it would be a mistake … to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. Gibson, 1979
These pathways develop from an evolutionary and pre-natally defined proto-architecture to allow learning through individual and cultural experience.
This evolutionarily-defined proto-architecture has features which are conserved across humans as well as other species (see Krubitzer, 2009), and seems to interact with common experience to form stereotypical specialisations after birth (see Arcaro & Livingstone, 2021).
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Investigating Affordances in 3D
An application was prototyped in Unity to probe the research of affordances in 3D space.
This was developed with a number of principles in mind:
- VR headsets enable an individuals' environment to be controlled.
- In combination with the cloud, research could be decentralised outside the lab.
- 3D space allows precise and implicit behavioural responses to be recorded.
- 3D objects allow real-world stimuli to be modelled, approaching ecological-validity.
- Using play as a tool for research engagement.
This foreshadows the wealth of behavioural data provided by augmented reality headsets. It therefore provides an opportunity to discuss the perceived risks and rewards of these data (e.g. privacy, autonomy, and the design of function/pleasure).
Unfortunately, due to lockdown restrictions, this probe was adapted for use as a desktop app instead of its intended VR format.
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Key References
Arcaro, M.J., Livingstone, M.S., 2021. On the relationship between maps and domains in inferotemporal cortex. Nat Rev Neurosci 22, 573–583. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-021-00490-4
Bao, P., She, L., McGill, M., Tsao, D.Y., 2020. A map of object space in primate inferotemporal cortex. Nature 583, 103–108. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2350-5
Chen, C.-H., Zeki, S., 2011. Frontoparietal Activation Distinguishes Face and Space from Artifact Concepts. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, 2558–2568. https://doi.org/10.1162/jocn.2011.21617
Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the pluriverse: radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds, New ecologies for the twenty-first century. Duke University Press, Durham.
Gibson, J.J., 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: Classic Edition. Psychology Press.
Hinton, A., 2014. 4. Perception, Cognition, and Affordance, in: Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture. O’Reilly Media, Inc, Sebastopol, CA.
Hoffman, D.D., 2019. The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Allen Lane.
Konorski, J. (1967). Integrative activity of the brain. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
Krubitzer, L., 2009. In search of a unifying theory of complex brain evolution. Ann N Y Acad Sci 1156, 44–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04421.x
Leben, D., 2019. Ethics for Robots: How to Design a Moral Algorithm. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, London ; New York, NY.
Livingstone, M., 2020. Keynote: The Development of IT domains: what you see is what you get.
McGrenere, J., Ho, W., 2000. Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept. Proceedings of GI 2000, 179-186.
Norman, D., 2013. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, 2nd edition. ed. Basic Books, New York, New York.
Mirza, M. B., Adams, R. A., Friston, K., & Parr, T. (2019). Introducing a Bayesian model of selective attention based on active inference. Scientific Reports, 9(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50138-8
Prakash, C., Stephens, K.D., Hoffman, D.D., Singh, M., Fields, C., 2020. Fitness Beats Truth in the Evolution of Perception. Acta Biotheor. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09400-0
Rawls, J., 1999. A Theory of Justice, Rev. ed. ed. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Zeki, S., Chén, O.Y., 2020. The Bayesian‐Laplacian brain. Eur J Neurosci 51, 1441–1462. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejn.14540
