Phylogenetic Futures: Big Data and Design Fiction

Abstract

This talk seeks to position phylogenetics within the broader frameworks of both big data and the design disciplines. Originating in “big data” applications of evolutionary biology, phylogenetic methods are increasingly used to reconstruct the hereditary relationships of cultural data sets in the social sciences and humanities, including textual criticism, historical linguistics, and anthropology—examples I will provide. However I frame this talk within the context of a larger project that seeks to invert the temporal orientation of phylogenetics so that its key insights can be used to imagine the future as well as reconstruct the past; and to refigure phylogenetics as a design discipline whose underlying commitments and techniques accommodate broad swathes of material culture, such as images, hardware, games, and other objects.

By “design” I have in mind not large-scale visualizations of cultural data sets, but, paradoxically, small-scale prototypes of design fictions. Coined by Bruce Sterling and further elaborated by Julian Bleecker at Nokia Design, the term “design fiction” is used to denote the mocking up of artifacts that embody our ideas about the future—what Stuart Candy has called “object-oriented futuring.” [1] Design fiction (or “tangible futures”) can be thought of as science fiction re-imagined for DIY and Maker Culture. Examples include Wired Magazine’s long-running series “Artifacts from the Future,” which approaches the design fiction space in a playful spirit (e.g., wifi-enabled, location-aware contact lenses or a mood ring that controls rather than reflects one’s emotional state); [2] and Branko Lukic and Barry Katz’s NONOBJECT, a slick coffee table book and iPad app filled with marvelous counterfactual objects of “as yet undiscovered materials, imagined manufacturing processes, and invented rules.” [3] This class of design artifacts moves the needle of humanities research away from the cultural record of the known and toward the stranger and more speculative realms of the unknown. A larger theme of this talk is therefore to argue for an Experimental Humanities and a DIY Humanities as necessary adjuncts to the Big Humanities.

[1] Stuart Candy, “The Sceptical Futuryst: Object-oriented Futuring,” The Sceptical Futuryst 2 Nov. 2008 futuryst.blogspot.com/2008/11/object-oriented-futuring.html

[2] “Found: Artifacts from the Future,” Wired www.wired.com/wired/issue/found

[3] Nonobject (MIT P, 2010) nonobjectbook.com/read