The Future Isn't What It Used to Be

Many designers are trying to make the design process more systematic, scientific, and predictable, as well as computercompatible. Their attempts to rationalize design by developing rules, taxonomies, classifications, and procedural design systems are extreme examples of trying to provide design with a respectable scientific-sounding theoretical background or, at least, a theorylike structure that smacks of science. Their approach stands for reason, logic, and intellect, but such a method leads to reductionism and frequently results in sterility and the sort of high-tech functionalism that disregards human psychic needs at the expense of clarity. Other designers follow feeling, sensation, revelation, and intuition. This is often called "seat-of-the-pants" design. Their work is not reductionist but is stifling in its rich romanticism, substituting sentimental passion for responses to human needs. Rather than attempting a synthesis between such divergent views, this article will show that both groups neglect important new insights that are being developed in other domains and will demonstrate that there is an enormous amount of data available about how people relate to their environment esthetically and psychophysiologically. Much of these data are still unknown to designers, architects, and planners as the data come from such diverse fields as ergonomics, ecology, archeology, psychiatry, cultural history, anthropology, biology, ethology, and human geography. The first part of this paper, "The Microbes in the Tower," describes some of this information that leads to new conclusions about human responses to an increasingly technological environment. The second part, "Toward a Biotechnology of Communities," presents several observations on community planning, arranged in a somewhat kaleidoscopic manner.