About

overview of research project

This website archives the process and outcomes of an Australian Research Council Discovery project, Ethics and Aesthetics as Criteria for Innovation: a design research study of biological art and digital architecture. The project is led by Associate Professor Pia Ednie-Brown, with other chief investigators, Prof Mark Burry, Dr Andrew Burrow (RMIT University) and Oron Catts (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia).

Research is conducted through design research, involving workshops, speculative architectural design production, theoretical studies and work investigating other practices through texts, discussion and interviews.

The aim of the research is to investigate and re-theorise contemporary innovation in a way that becomes useful and relevant to creative design activity, with particular emphasis on their intertwined ethical and aesthetic dimensions. A key claim made here is that design practices can offer insight into innovation through focussing less on problems and possibilities, and more on how to realise, develop and manage potential. A focus on potential, understood here as a “pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies”(1), is also critical for considering both ethical and aesthetic dimensions of any activity, and vice versa.

Significant mutations of everyday life over the past 15 years have been integrally tied up with innovations in digital technologies. We can now see a similar trajectory underway in relation to biotechnologies – not as a different technological event, but one that builds on changes and capacities developed by the digital. It seems more than likely that biotechnological innovations will become increasingly intertwined and infused throughout the realm of domestic everyday life in unprecedented ways, and that this will modify the patterns and rhythms of everyday life (something very much underway). As such, how might we imagine everyday life of the near future? What ethical and aesthetic challenges are we likely to face? Might our future imaginings indicate more about hidden dimensions of the present, than of any likely future?

In a context of palpable economic, environmental, socio-cultural and political change, ideas about innovation (of how we create valuable difference) is also changing, involving a shift in emphasis to ‘open’ platforms. As Nigel Thrift has put it, this involves a move away from the idea of innovation as “a trawling for the new” and toward “the continuous process of interaction that now seems to be becoming characteristic.”(2) This trend is related to the fact that models of instrumental control are being usurped by models of emergence: decentralised, distributed modes of self-organising activity involving an absence of simple cause and effect relations. Global communities are aware that we need to innovate, quickly, in finding ways to guide future trajectories toward better rather than the worst of imagined futures. Equipped with tools for simulating complex system behaviour, we increasingly strive to innovate in preparation for the predicted, rather than for problems already known. In other words, we are finding ourselves increasingly working with problems that are still emerging, or haven’t happened yet. This leads toward claims that we might need to focus less on problems, and more on how to realise, develop and manage potential.

Pia Ednie-Brown

(1) Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke University Press, p30.
(2) Thrift (2008), Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, Routledge, p33

This research project is supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, and involves a collaboration between The School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia) and the SymbioticA Centre for Excellence in Biological Arts at UWA (Perth, Australia).

This blog is managed and directed by Pia Ednie-Brown, of RMIT Architecture, SIAL, and onomatopoeia.