Ken Hollings

“A lecture on Design and Modern Thought”

Wednesday January 26^th

“The most difficult maze to free yourself from

is the one you don’t know you are in”

Ken Hollings began the lecture by speaking about the “Dawn of the living dead”Discussing the omnipotent terror that exists within the film. While discussing the sense of panic that the main characters find themselves in Hollings began to make comparisons to our present state of affairs the sense of panic that our technological advances causing.

Our digital regime, man made networks as brains, a landscape without an interior, engineers building labyrinths and getting trapped inside their own creation.

In essence Hollings posed the questions,What if our technology becomes smarter than us? What if it is?Microsoft has already asked the question “Where do you want to go today”The answer is a little scary “Wherever I want”Wherever you want to go? Do the places we go have a life of their own?

Our comings and goings are also controlled and monitored within non – places. The airport for example, on arrival you become a bar code .Within this regime of security, you may desperately hope no one has planted anything in your bag or game over, a sense of panic can exist when you see a guard dog even if you are innocent. What if the dog is wrong? You, against the security regime. Hard places and soft places exist within airports and the less you try to concentrate the better you will navigate your way through them.

Hollings rounded up his lecture by discussing social networks, facebook and the six degrees of seperation, the “Human Web”, how everyone, on average is approximately six steps (connections) away from another person on earth.

I enjoyed the lecture but it gave me a sense of unease afterward.If it is so easy to be connected to people why are we building networks that keep us so far away?