Viridian Principles 1.0

A. Futurist principles

"Eat What You Kill"

It's perfectly acceptable to supersede some time-honored
tool or practice. However, you should take pains to fully
comprehend the thing you have rendered obsolescent. You
are removing some part, however modest, of the
infrastructure of civilization. You are destroying the
work of previous designers; you should offer them the
respect you yourself would hope for, under similar
circumstances. This is for your own good. You can't
comprehend your own accomplishment until you have fully
internalized and understood the accomplishment that you
are undoing.

"Avoid the Timeless, Embrace Decay"

Platonic visions of absolute reality, and Christian
visions of eternity, are very unhealthy for bipedal
mammals in a biosphere. Nothing physical is eternal.
It's very bad design to create some device which quickly
ceases to function, while its useless components persist
around us, ugly and dangerous. Entropy deserves our
respect and attention. Entropic processes such as
corrosion, rot, rust, degradation, delamination, and
disintegration should be closely studied, harnessed for
industrial use, and even aestheticized.

"Planned Evanescence"

"Planned Obsolescence" means that a product will be driven
off the market, within a known time-frame, by some
purported improvement. The Viridian principle of
"Planned Evanescence" extends this practice by demanding
that the product and all its physical traces should
gracefully disintegrate and vanish entirely.

"The Future is History -- Be When You Are"

The future is not a stage set. The past is not a sacred
myth. The past and the future are this place at a
different time. The future is advancing upon you, and the
past retreating, at a remorseless rate of one second per
second. You can seek understanding anywhere, but you can
only act in the moment. "You Own Modernity." It's easy to
get transfixed by romantic ideas of historical
inevitability: glamorous marches of progress, or gruesome
congenital declines. But your own epoch is your own
problem. If you call yourself "post" or "former," or
"neo" or "retro," you are begging for someone else's
troubles.

"History Accumulates"

The arrow of time moves only in one direction. As long
as civilization persists and our records multiply, we
have more and more history. The compost of history is
thicker for us than it was for our predecessors -- and
thinner than it will be for our descendants. We need
better ways to manage our increasing wealth of history.

B. Moral Principles

"Look at the Underside First"

Legions of people are paid large sums to promote the
positive aspects of commercially available products.
Very few people earn their daily bread by pointing out
malfunctions, bugs, screw-ups, design failures, side-
effects and the whole sad galaxy of trade-offs and
failings that are inherent in any technological artifact.
To counteract this gross social imbalance, a wise designer
and a wise critic will make it a matter of principle to
look at the underside first.

"Design For Evil"

Any innocent product which becomes suddenly genocidal in
the hands of a tyrant has been designed by a dangerous
naif. Every design process is incomplete unless it takes
into careful consideration what could be done with the
product by a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a
national economy, a secret police, and a large army.

"Design for the Old"

The median age is advancing steadily around the world.
The 21st century will have a historically unprecedented
demographic structure. Short of catastrophe and mass
slaughter, we will never see the 20th century's youthful
demographics again. The senior members of society have
their own ergonomics and anthropometrics. If you don't
design for them, you're designing for an ever-shrinking
fraction of the world.

"Superstition Isn't Inspiration"

Creative inspiration isn't a lab product, but it doesn't
come from your fairy godmother, either. There's no
effective substitute for experimental verification and
reproducible results. A tarot deck can trigger strong
feelings of creative insight, but it doesn't convey
higher wisdom. Like horoscopes and ouija boards, it uses
suggestion to allow you to tell yourself a story that you
already know. Don't mistake mystic wish-fulfillment and
the promptings of your unconscious for objective evidence.
It's a breach of taste to imagine that the vagaries of
your own imagination are more interesting than the world.

C. Political Principles

"Viridian Inactivism"

Activism is an attention hog, and very time and energy
intensive. A better approach is to find the things you
are doing that intensify the problem, and just
cease doing them. Put in less overtime. Sleep late.
Have a nap after lunch. Burn less midnight oil. Park
your car, turn off all the lights in your apartment, and
go outside in the sunshine and read a book. Spend an
hour on your mascara if you feel like it. Don't allow
yourself to be spooked into Stakhanovite overdrive; seek
command of your own life, and enjoy being yourself.

"Do Less With Less"

We're altering the climate by burning too much fossil
fuel. We should struggle valiantly to find alternative
sources of energy, but it's rather more gratifying to
simply become less frenetic. What exactly are we doing at
the moment that is worth ruining the climate for? Relax.

"There's No One So Green As the Dead"

Zealous moralistic arguments about who is more-Green-than-
thou are very counterproductive. We're all adding to the
global CO2 load as long as we continue to breathe. Dead
people are the ultimate Greens (trumped only by people
who never existed in the first place). If you feel
helpless with guilt because of your bad environmental
habits, pause and think of the very brief time in which
you employ the earth's resources, and the long, long eons
in which you'll be just raw material again.

D. Principles of the Avant-technogarde

"The Biological Isn't Logical"

Design tends to follow the leading technical products of
its period; in an age of aviation, even pencil-sharpeners
are streamlined. Given this longstanding trend, the
coming bio-genetic technical revolution should produce a
biomorphic epoch in 21st century design. But the living
world was not designed by a teleological, rationalist,
reductionist process. The living world grew irrationally
through non-systematic, genetic exploration of niche
possibilities, pruned back by natural selection and
occasional massive disasters. So if you're building
distributed networks, learn from crabgrass.

"Augment Reality: Aestheticize All Sensors"

From the age of desktop calculation, through the age of
networking and bandwidth, computation/communication will
progress toward omnipresent, on-chip sensors, the
"intelligent environment" or "augmented reality." While
calculation is mathematical, and bandwidth is highly
technical, sensors must interact with the human sensorium,
and are therefore a strong aesthetic challenge. Sensors,
instrumentation, and mediated monitoring systems of all
kinds are the next aesthetic frontier.

"Make the Invisible Visible"

Our primary advantage over previous generations of artists
and graphic designers is that we can see much better than
they could. We can manipulate, store, create and analyze
graphic imagery with historically unprecedented ease and
power. This trend should be recognized, advanced, and
artistically exploited. Advances in instrumentation can
be used to change the zeitgeist. If carbon dioxide were
blood-red, our skies would look ominous indeed.

"Less Mass, More Data"

Physical resources should be replaced with information
when possible. If you always know where something is, you
don't have to chain it up. If it can see stress coming
and duck, it doesn't need to be sturdy. If it pops up
and vanishes repeatedly on signal, it doesn't have to take
abuse.

"Tangible Cyberspace"

The obverse of "Less Mass, More Data" is "Tangible
Cyberspace," introducing computer-generated artifacts and
processes into the basic texture of the physical world.
This transcends mere CAD-CAM, in that it seeks for a
profound new interrelationship of the computational and
the environmental. We seek to make the screen permeable,
and to turn "computers" into worldly, sensual entities.

"Seek the Biomorphic and the Transorganic"

"Nature" is over. There's not a liter of seawater
anywhere without its share of PCB and DDT, and an altered
climate will reshuffle the ecological deck for every
creature that breathes. A 21st century avant-garde must
deal with those consequences and thrive in that world.
We have already painted flowers. We want to know what a
flower means when a flower has onboard processing, amped-
up genetics, and its own agenda. Thus a central Viridian
aesthetic dictum: "A Rose is No Longer a Rose."

"Datamine Nature"

"Seeking Truth From Nature" was a rhetorical and
ideological support of the Pre-Raphaelites and Art
Nouveau. It worked well twice and can work again. Since
our understanding of natural processes has advanced so
hugely, there is a wealth of aesthetic novelty to be found
in previously invisible aspects of nature, such as
cellular metabolism, noninvasive medical imaging,
hybridomas and chimeras, artificial life entities, and
chemosynthetic life forms.

"Grow Complexity"

It is now absurdly simple to create graphic patterns of
any level of busy-ness and complexity. Without human
esthetic intervention, this art is puerile and ugly. A
Viridian aesthetic looks for patterns that are both
tasteful and previously impossible.

E. Research Principles

"Walk Through the Walls of Knowledge Guilds"

The boundaries that separate art, science, medicine,
literature, computation, engineering, and design and craft
generally are not divinely ordained. The most galling of
these boundaries are socially generated entities meant to
protect the power-interests of knowledge guilds. This is
not to say that that all research techniques are
identical, or that their results are all equally valid
under all circumstances: quantum physics isn't opera. But
there exists a sensibility that can serenely ignore
intellectual turf war, and comprehend both physics and
opera. You won't be able to swing a grant or sing an aria
by knocking politely at the stage door. They won't seat
you at the head of the table and slaughter the fatted
calf. But you can take photographs, plant listening
devices and leave. If you choose, you can step outside
the boundaries history makes for you. You can walk
through walls.