John Maeda with Juan Enriquez
Juan Enriquez was the inaugural speaker for the Rhode Island School of Design's three-part Presidential Speaker Series, "Shared Voices," which kicked off this past Thursday evening. The series is intended to provide a forum for artists, designers, activists, scientists, and other scholars to come to RISD and engage in thought-provoking conversation that will hopefully influence and inform their own work.
At RISD Enriquez spoke about the possibilities and challenges involved in the latest frontier in design – Designing with Life Code. Just as the language of digital code fundamentally changed how we make, use and share drawings, paintings, sculpture, music, photos, video and film, another vast new programming language – that of life – is becoming increasingly available and widespread. Now that we can read, copy and re-code life, how will this fundamentally change the way we think of and execute design?
The chairman of Biotechonomy LLC, fondly profiled as "Mr. Gene" by Fortune, Enriquez seemed like an unlikely presenter at the art and design school. Following a campus tour led by John Maeda, however, Enriquez said he saw parallels between the average RISD student and a pre-med student in the "sheer intensity of the work, single-minded determination, and focus on discovery." The urge to discover something that people haven't seen or discovered before was something he saw in both fields, a path that required experimentation, numerous iterations, focus, and "a degree of arrogance." Specifically, "the process that you are using here is 90% incredibly hard, focused work, and 10% incredible creativity and inspiration doesn't look to me very different from what a bio lab or a physics lab or a chemistry lab does."
Enriquez gave a wry-humored and compelling lecture on the state of code today and how that would impact the world of design. Showing a map of the initial human genome, Enriquez told the audience that while the image might not be what they instinctively see as 'design,' it had been described as 'the most exciting map humans had ever made' and would be the language driving most design going forward. From cave drawings to Egyptian hieroglyphs to binary, Enriquez gave a brief history of code and spoke of how it differentiates human beings from all other animals, in their utilization of it to transmit data across time.
Envisioning a world where a music student could conceivably carry every song ever written with them and a literature student every book ever printed, Enriquez painted a picture for the audience of a rapidly changing world that they had best take advantage of, or risk ceasing to exist like other cultures who had failed to adopt new technologies throughout history. With digital code guiding 3D printers, he predicted that soon code would also dominate 3D space. "As you think of those transitions and how powerful they are, it gives you a whole series of structures and ways of thinking about design that may seem very odd at first, but transitions like this really matter."
To drive his point home, Enriquez showed a photo of some very similar looking cows. "A lot of the cows in Argentina look pretty similar," he said. Their genetic make up looks strikingly similar as well, but these cloned cows aren't just any cloned cows; Lines changed in their gene code allow them to produce the medicine needed to treat cancer in their milk. This programming of life code, Enriquez told the crowd, will revolutionize design and production "for an absolute fundamental reason, and it is going to be faster and more powerful than the digital revolution for one simple reason, this software produces its own hardware. No matter how you program a computer, you won't have a thousand computers when you get up in the morning. When you program in life code, the software produces its own hardware."
A video of the presentation is forthcoming, and we will repost it when it becomes available.
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