Understanding Symbiosis in Design
By: Kiki Ogawa
Tags: Biology, Science, Biomimicry, Symbiosis, Evolution

In biology, using less technical terms, symbiosis is the act of living together in mutually beneficial relationships with seemingly different world of organisms with characteristics potential for merging together for further coevolution and hybrid vigour.

Symbiogenesis — symbiosis leading to new kinds of evolution. It’s all plant, animal, fungal and protoctal cells, that is all life on earth that is not bacteria, is a product of symbiogenesis. It means different sorts of organisms coming together to make a new kind of being.

I have integrated most of these concepts into my artistic processes long before I watched this documentary. In my previous paintings and drawings I had the opportunity to visually explore these ideas fluidly and without limitations with the help of my limitless imagination.

Being an artist and painter has made me more aware of the ‘viewer’ and the ‘audience’ as observers and participants of the work. Every time an artist creates a flat 2D image, it is a representation of the artist’s mind which allows the viewer to journey into a portal for further imaginative exploration. Art is a form of communication that is visual, non-verbal however it can be associated with more text to make it increasingly meaningful. Art today is multidimensional, in that it involves the internet, being able to record and slice information in order to create new combinations that were never thought of.

As Lynn Margulis states in this documentary, that is what biology does, it creates new combinations, which creates new offspring that evolve into varying environments that allow it survive and thrive effortlessly.

“Information is flowing from the environment and there is feedback to the genome” ~ Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Earth (2019)

What I see really emerging from our new information era of technological systems is that our information in the form of data, binary 0s and 1s is, the dual states of existence — 1 meaning existence and 0 meaning non-existence, or at least it is being coarse-grained into those minimum states… is in fact defining our civilisation, the way we process information, understand reality and take prescriptive actions that determine the trajectory of humanity.

When one reads an article on an online newspaper, one is taking in the biases that the journalist has instilled into their words, but all these words are merely 0s and 1s. The search bar, the heading and colours that determine the layout of the text all affect our psychology as they translate subconsciously into our brains which are themselves central information processing units for the information it carries into our nervous system. How we design products or systems directly and indirectly affect our states of consciousness, whether we consciously choose to read an article or simply skim through a horribly designed website, designed to affect your emotions and stir up motions of panic and anxiety.

We design our environment and our environment designs us, it is a continuous feedback loop of information that is inescapable. That is called ontological design.

With that being said, there were a few other revelations that emerged upon watching this documentary, and that was the distinction between DNA and the cell as it continuously produces itself for further regeneration. That is autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) ‘self’, and ποίησις (poiesis) ‘creation, production’) which is the process which allows a system to maintain and renew itself.

“Life is not a thing, life is a process, it’s a process that makes itself and as far as we know it’s always based on cells. Cells maybe as small as a millionth of a meter which is a micron, and these things wrap themselves into structures of their own making and intrinsic to life is the propensity to grow, to grow, to excrete and to exchange material, and to grow, and to grow, and this is life. Life is a way of behaving. If you have a bull, and he’s fighting the bullfighter, this is life. 5 minutes later, the bull is dead. There’s no life there, the DNA is there, the carbon is there, the water is there, but the bull is dead. What has been lost? What has been lost is the process, and what is the process? It is the self-making process, where components from the environment are taken in and moved around, and changed chemically to make more. Life is expanding, always making more of itself.” ~ Lynn Margulis

Here, Lynn disputes the prevailing neo-darwinist point of view that the DNA molecule controls the organism and that genetic determinism in inescapable.

What seems to be the case is that humanity as a living system is interfacing with a world that still feels so otherly to us, almost alien, and that is the cyber and virtual world. Life in itself is taking over the cyber world as information flows effortlessly across the planet, and we are self-making in these virtual spaces. The internet runs itself, therefore it is alive.

There is still so much aversion to the cyberspace because it is still immature and very raw. The most we can interact with it is through our mobile and laptop browsers, where all we can really do is type, send, download, broadcast and connect in realtime with humanity. The point of interaction still gives us a feeling of ‘enoughness’ because of its design limitations and lack of multidimensionality.

Although, new technologies such as Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and the Spatial Web is definitely emerging into the cyber realm, we can perceive these innovations as our willingness to extend our lifeforms into domains that help us evolve into the civilisation that is a highly symbiotic and technologically advanced superorganism with a nervous system (the internet) that senses danger and feedbacks to support the healing of various individuals and communities around our planet.

The internet is humanity’s information and nervous system which processes in feedback loops that is similar to our body’s nervous system which also processes in feedback loops. We take action whenever we make sense, and so will humanity as one collective superorganism.

“DNA by itself doesn’t do anything, it can only be replicated and it can only be expressed.” “Cells are actually in charge of their DNA, cells control the reading of the DNA, access to different parts of the DNA, express the data of the different parts of the DNA.” ~ James Shapiro, Professor of Microbiology, Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Chicago

A revolutionary approach to design

According to this axiom, there would be many ways to approach the new information era, and that is to follow this principle to let us define how we begin to design our information technology systems. These principles involve perceiving the software and information paradigm as genetic codes for humanity’s flourishing. But like what we have gathered in this blog post so far, we design our environment and our environment designs us.

To design with living systems, we must think in terms of designing with feedback loops, in mutually beneficial relationships with entities of varying domains that interact to infer and recombine, creating evolutionary paths that are possible.

More to come soon.

A.O