Technology Naturalized: A Challenge to Design for the Human Scale

Gunther Anders was speaking for the age of nuclear weapons when he noted that technological capabilities exceed human comprehension. Genetically modified organisms, pervasive computing in smart environments, and envisioned nanotechnological applications pose a similar challenge; powerful technological interventions elude comprehension if only by being too small, or too big, to register in human perception and experience. The most advanced technological research programs are thus bringing about a curiously regressive inversion of the relation between humans, technology, and nature. No longer a means of controlling nature in order to protect, shield, or empower humans, technology dissolves into nature and becomes uncanny, incomprehensible, beyond perceptual and conceptual control. Technology might thus end up being as enchanted and perhaps frightening as nature used to be when humanity started the technological process of disenchantment and rationalization. Good design might counteract this inversion, for example, by creating human interfaces even with technologies that are meant to be too small to be experienced.