[ongoing]

The Center for Design and Geopolitics, 2009-present

[10.2009]

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D:GP The Center for Design and Geopolitics an interdisciplinary think-tank based at Calit2 and the University of California, San Diego that works to articulate and prototype speculative responses to  emergent geopolitical complexities posed by planetary-scale computation and ecological governance.

D:GP's focus is less on applying design at a geopolitical scale, than on understanding the domain of the geopolitical as itself a design problem. Global institutions of governance, economy, infrastructure, language, and ecology are inherited from earlier modernities, and not only can be redesigned but cannot not be redesigned. The Center's policy program advances that a viable alter-globalization and a multipolar cosmopolitanism depend on how we design, how we design depends on how we govern, and how we govern depends on the models we invent.



Total Design (& the Design of Totalities)
Early in the 20th century, the Bauhaus encountered the industrialization of the world with a program for a total art that would incorporate architectural, graphic and industrial design. Now as the discovery of computation absorbs the natural and human sciences under a shared rubric, rearranging biological, technical and political domains into new systems. D:GP's position at UC San Diego is to consider another, renewed total design based in these convergences. But whereas high Modern interest in total design was predicated on more linear notions of progressive history and futurity, D:GP's is located instead in a much more fraught atemporality and amodernity. The "creation of the world," as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it, is at stake, but without the alibi of futurity.

Think Tank
D:GP is an interdisciplinary technology transfer & systems design initiative that draws upon the publicly-funded scientific research developed at the University of California to provide social value in unique ways. D:GP collaborates directly with our network of researchers, designers, enterprises, policymakers, citizen-stakeholders and grassroots advocacy groups to model and identify resilient, resourceful, ingenious, and unexpected responses to some of the most complex and pressing problems facing California and the polities in which it is situated.

Ambient Interface Design
D:GP's design program draws the ambient interface design model developed by its Director, Benjamin H. Bratton, that seeks to account for physical interface systems (architecture, cities, transportation) and virtual interface systems (cloud, ubiquitous computing, augmented reality) with a shared language that will allow for a more integrated design and analysis.

Design Geopolitics
D:GP presumes that we are very early in the historical arc of Moore's law and that other perhaps equally significant exponential arc (such as the efficiencies of energy production and storage technologies) will intertwine with the growth of computing capacity and efficiency to force new hybrid economies. The results will form the rudiments of unforeseen social, economic, cultural and scientific demands. Some will be disruptive and others will reinforce existing structures, or even resurrect older ones. D:GP's interest is in openings for the redesign of geopolitical systems that these will allow for.

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"We begin with 'California as a design problem,' a jurisdiction reliant upon infrastructure so maladapted to the future that it is creating for itself that no one discipline or position could account for the pattern and nuance of its condition. We take 'California' as a case study model   for geopolitical design, policy and theory experimentation more broadly."

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Core areas of research include:
--Network sovereignty/ State sovereignty and geopolitical analysis
--Ecological monitoring and systems visualization
--Regional-scale interface and interaction design
--Heterologic models of cosmopolitical infrastructure
--Cyberinfrastructure and cultural tradition & transformation
--Multi-decadal planning and policy based on advanced and emergent computing applications
--Urban, architectural and network multi-scalar programming

Core methodologies include:
--Critical geopolitical policy models
--Speculative design visualizations and artifacts
--Multidisciplinary art and aesthetic models
--Granular policy analysis, projection and development

Design as Governance/ Governance as Design
D:GP is headquartered at the UC?s CALIT(2), one of the premier institutes for interdisciplinary core and applied research in infrastructural-scale information and computing technologies. There we collaborate closely with other researchers from multiple disciplines.

The D:GP Consortium composes researchers and research plans from a wide range of disciplines, each contributing their unique and important expertise. These include: Architecture, Computer Science, Economics, Cognitive Science, Electrical, Civil and Materials Engineering, Interaction Design, Ethnography, Data Modeling and Visualization, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, Political Science and Legal Studies, Visual Arts, Public Health Policy, Philosophy of Science and Technology, Information and Network Science, Industrial Design, Transportation Design, Sociology, Urban Planning, and others. In the context of DPP?s problem-focused methodology, each discipline becomes a position from which design policy can be made. DPP consortium is comprised of many of California?s most important private companies, large and small, who have launched technologies that shape the contemporary world. They support DPP by financial sponsorship and by making available their most talented people and their resources to contribute to our work, and by welcoming our contributions to theirs.

D:GP's research programs instigate and focus deep qualitative research in human and urban-scale interfaces, and, drawing on CALIT2's resources, develop high-risk/high-gain models and prototypes of the cultural, economic and ecologic transformations that define the immediate future of California. 

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"Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up
 to  the final moment."  --Buckminster Fuller 

Tags: architecture, interfaces, center for design and geopolitics, UCSD

Published: 10.04.2009

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