Istanbul Design Biennial 2016: Review

Mood: The overarching theme of Are We Human? investigates the hardships that humanity faces and how to possibly overcome them by attempting to redesign design.

Key innovator: MEMEX, a collaborative project by Marshmallow Laser Feast, Analog, FBFX and Duologue, is a 3D study of mortality that uses a new photographic process for film-making in the virtual reality environment.

Ones to watch: Two research projects, The Connectome: A New Dimension of Humanity and 1 Brain, 100 Billion Neurons, 100 Trillion Connections, take centre stage as they uncover neuroscience’s next greatest challenge: mapping the connectome.

Homo Cellular

By the end of 2018, roughly 84% of the world’s population will be using mobile technology, according to market research house The Radicati Group.

In this new Homo Cellular era, Madrid-based architect Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation sought to define the impact this has had on us as humans.

‘Since its emergence in 1983 the mobile phone has radically changed human biology and mentality, reshaping language, social as well as work life and becoming an integral part of our sense of self,’ explained co-curator Beatriz Colomina, speaking as a member of a panel on designing the body.

Similarly, social media has opened the gateway of the creation of an alternative self in a virtual world – a phenomenon LS:N Global first explored in The Sharded Self.

Design in 2 Seconds, by the architecture school of Princeton University, gave perspective on the meteoric rise of social media with a presentation made up of projected images depicting the timeline of social media from its birth in 2000 to Snapchat.

Using the standardisation of the body issued by German architect Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre and The Measure of Man by American industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, Are We Human? reveals that design, long before social media, dictated the conceptions of self to humanity.

Similarly, Enclosed by Mirrors explored the idea that before social media people were not so dismissive of privacy or willing to be under surveillance. Now the selfie craze highlights the individual’s obsession of ‘looking at itself’.

Welcome to the Anthropocene

For the curators there is a radical need to refocus on humanity’s role in design. After all, as Wigley points out: ‘The human is the designing animal.’

To address this they invited artists, designers and architects, as well as NGOs, labs, research centres, institutes and scientists to the biennial in order to stimulate a new kind of conversation about design that can address themes explored in The Dislocated World.

‘The Earth of the 21st century is warming, overcrowded, partly deforested and more toxic and more interconnected than ever,’ explained the makers of Welcome to the Anthropocene, which explores the first time when human activities have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s geology and eco-systems.

Similarly, the Center for Spatial Research, in order to draw world attention to the Syrian crisis, shared its data on how the civil war has damaged the urban fabric of Aleppo.

Using satellite images, the project goes beyond mapping the human-on-human conflict, and showcases Aleppo in the time frame of two seconds, two days, two years, 200 years, 2,000 years and even 200,000 years.

Yale architects Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis’s urbanism project City of 7 Billion uses its geo-spatial model to convince viewers that the only way to solve the problems our urbanised planet faces is to examine the interconnections between cities worldwide.

Human-centred design

Most works featured throughout Are We Human? argue that design has led to the redesign of the human being, which itself is an unstable artefact that is continually reconstructed, from the unique way our hands work to the latest research on the brain. Every dimension of the human is continuously adjusted, augmented or replaced.

This provocative idea is addressed in Objects of Daydreaming by Istanbul-based Pattu Architecture, which exhibited a range of primitive tools that evolved with the nature of humanity.

These objects, as the primary form of design, existed even before language. The project demonstrates that before speech and communication between our species, thought could be externalised into a form of an object.

Also on show were Seung Lab’s 3D reconstructions of the neural connections in the brain, which are helping researchers uncover new theories about what makes us human and shedding light on how we are designed.

‘Design radically expands human capability,’ says Wigley. ‘Design asks radical questions about our humanity, and that’s our main point, to think about humanity through design.’