Paradoxymoronic

Writing on John Thackara's In the Bubble, William Blaze identifies that essence of humanity - the ability to maintain a contradiction - as a fundamental aspect of the design world:

A designer navigating a complex world inevitably needs to pick their focus, pick where their hypocrisy lies. Environmental architects rely on high speed computers filled with toxins to build zero emission buildings. Solar engineers suck massive power off the grid in an effort to build technology that ends it.

And so it is with emergent systems - the endless designer-driven modulation and refinement of an ostensibly automated process, the carefully hand-constrained parameters of a so-called open-ended search and optimisation problem. With simulation of embodied agents too, we are presented with a contradiction in terms by agents which are given life by a coherent reality whilst never escaping the virtual.

Food for thought, and an interesting article (via Matt Jones).