Neri Oxman: preference

Transcript context

…Do you think of emergence as the loss of control? When you’re thinking about these capsules and then the things they create, is emergence of things not a desirable conclusion? I love that question because to some of us, the loss of control is control. In design, we’re used to extreme levels of control over form and the shape of a thing and how it behaves and how it functions. And that’s something we’ve inherited from the industrial revolution. But with nature, there is this diversity that happens without necessarily having a reward function, right? This is good or bad. Things just happen and some of them happen to have wings and some of them happen to have scales, and you end up with this incredible potential for diversity. So I think the future of design is in that soft control, is in the ability to design highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control. And creativity is very much part of this because creativity is all about letting go and beginning again and beginning again and beginning again. And when you cannot let go, you cannot be creative and you can’t find novelty. But I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment, agency, creativity, emergence, and they’re all connected. They sort of associate themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable. A good friend of mine shared with me elegant definition of fate, which is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be. Ratio of who you are, who want to be.…

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