Chapter Three: The Pioneer
An Introduction from the Editor
How are boundaries being pushed forward today? and what are we confronted with when they go against the status quo?
Who stands at the vanguard, unafraid of taking risks or venturing into the unknown, driven by a desire to explore new frontiers? How do we orient ourselves toward this horizon of a preferable future?
This spirit of exploration thrives in environments of uncertainty, where the future is uncharted and unknown. Pioneers embody an unwavering hope for a better future. They are less concerned with precise destinations and more focused on the journey itself. When sailing uncharted seas, getting lost is inevitable, but it is the skillful pioneer who can recalibrate and redirect. For them, the adversity of the unknown is not a threat, but a dare to discover what lies beyond.
Designers, as early adopters of the newest tools, wield incredible influence over technological development. Historically, they have always been at the forefront of breakthroughs. The Bauhaus movement exemplified this mission, pushing manufacturing and production into forefront of design. However if we hold onto the principles of the past, we must ask: can we still truly explore? Rigid ideals of homogeneity and universality are giving way to pluralistic philosophies. Let’s see where it takes us.
with Curry Hackett
Curry J. Hackett is an award-winning transdisciplinary designer, public artist, and educator. His ongoing research project, Drylongso, explores the complex relationships between Black southern culture, geography, and land. In 2022, he was named a finalist for the internationally-recognized Wheelwright Prize, presented by the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Stephen Nohren
Sweet, looks like we’re recording. So when I was looking through your generated images, I noticed a reoccurring emphasis or themes surrounding nature. Where does that stem from?
Curry Hackett
So I grew up in the rural south, in Farmville, Virginia. But, I grew up near my family’s farmland. My mom’s side of the family, we’ve owned at least 100 acres of land since the 19th century. A lot of my current work tries to go back to that place, and holds a lot of connections with that land. Not even the floristic qualities of the land, but the land as an imaginary. It has sort of sponsored this obsession with plants, especially the ones that many of us call weeds. I’m really fascinated by black kinships with land, and with plants and food and such by extension; and also the embodied knowledge that many of my ancestors, namely, my grandma has with many of these plants. I’m at Harvard for urban design, but my grandmother could probably run circles around many of the landscape students at Harvard in terms of just sheer plant knowledge; like she could probably point out 20 different kinds of pine by sight. So essentially, the fixation on plants, nature, food sovereignty, all of that is kind of me speculating on the advocacy complex and complicated relationships that black folks have with land. I am also trying to push beyond the narrative of black relations with land as being one primarily of labor, and enslaved labor at that.
So the images are asking how we can aestheticize gardening? How do Black folks aestheticize farming? It’s been a fun dynamic for me to play with.
SN
I was reading your interview with Bloomberg and you mentioned that you are “clearly trying to create a sense of nostalgia”; Why is nostalgia important to you?
CH
For me personally, my mom always talks about memory and remembering, but she also held space for imagining. So nostalgia for me is a great starting point for me to imagine futures that are rooted in some sense of knowing. Many of the black women in my family were these kinkeepers, they were archivists, they were storytellers. You can think of them as a kind of griots of my family. And I think that was ultimately because they don’t want things to be forgotten. I also realized that the further I get away from home in my career, the more I realized that many of the stories that I grew up hearing, and embodying are , I won’t say singular, but very rare. You don’t really hear about the story of rural black folks in the south, making mud pies, start romping around the yard, squeezing mud between their toes. You don’t hear about that, you typically think about black folks in an urban context and again, from a condition of scarcity. For me, I know otherwise. So let me be nostalgic about this time and place, and that helps me stay grounded in all the other efforts that I’m doing in the current.
SN
Hmm, not wanting things to be forgotten. I mean, that’s where I positioned myself with this whole publication, thinking like five generations of the future. When we don’t know how these super intelligence AI models work anymore. How do we remember the “before times”? That’s really important to me.
CH
If you look at indigenous worldviews, there is a concern for deeply thinking into the future and deeply into the past.
I forgot what the phrase is, but there is a knowledge model where any significant decision gets made in consideration of the 13 generations into the future and 13 generations into the past. So what does it mean to go about life with this concern for deep time?
SN
So a little out of left field, Do you think one day AI will have a level of sentience?
CH
The short answer is yes. I don’t know that it’s going to be like what we see in the movies, but I think at some point along the way, humans are going to be comfortable with adopting or expanding a new or an emergent definition of sentience and knowledge; and I suspect AI will then be included in that. I don’t know that it’ll take over the world and do all these things. But the short answer is we don’t know. But I do think it will structure our lives so differently in degree as to be different in kind. For all intents and purposes, well probability consider it as being sentient.
SN
What do you think the role of a designer will be when AI has surpassed us in every fathomable way of intelligence?
CH
I mean, I don’t know. To me, it becomes more of a human question. I don’t know what role disciplinarity will play at all in that future. In a way, it doesn’t even make sense to talk about design. There’s so much that’s written on design, and there’s so many examples of design that can be trained on models. I think it really comes down to what sort of lives we want to lead in better coexistence with this technology. I don’t think about professionalism at all in that future.
SN
I’m with you there. I mean, part of this project was me experimenting with redefining our field. Like look at industrial design itself… the time is ticking on that. What if we started thinking of graphic designers as like misinformation interpreters? Yeah, that’s a question I’ve seen a lot of people squirm around.
CH
Well, because designers won’t be special in that world. Maybe in the short term you can make the case that we’ll be maybe better editors of, you know, of content. I think a lot of people will be using these generative technologies, but that just means we’re gonna get a lot of trash outputs But there’s still going to be people that have to be smart to interpret when something is wrong, or how to how to code these things, how to shape them.
SN
So what advice do you have for design students who are currently receiving education, and now have access to these tools?
CH
I think first is if you don’t have a sense of it already, discover a narrative or a story that you want to tell yourself about the kind of designer that you want to be because that will give you some sort of North Star that will help find use cases for these tools in your own work. I think different people are gonna be using these tool in different ways. The whole reason i started putting these images together, putting things that don’t seem like they belong, in settings that they don’t seem like they belong; It’s because I was having a lot of fun for years using collage as a way of world building, and image making. So now we’ve come full circle where I’m using AI to create assets that I then will chop up into collages, like one of one collages because I am not using found material. So that’s one way in the span of just a short eight months I have been trying to find new ways of validating existing workflows or tested tactics as a designer. So I think that was a design student, I say, just get in there. Be Messy. Keep trying. I think there are also some hidden lessons using these tools because it’s a relentless project of compromise and surprise. How committed are you to the image that you want to get out of the model? That probably means you have to look at other disciplines outside of your own,outside of design; to push yourself to think differently and interact with with these machines more effectively.
SN
Any advice you have for fellow educators?
CH
I think a lot of that can be folded into that last statement. I think educators especially, don’t be afraid to try this stuff out. If anything, look internally and think critically about what are some ways that you can improve as an educator that AI will be expose here soon? What sort of pain points or vulnerabilities do you have in your career or pedagogical style that these tools make more frictionless? Yea, I think that I just want everyone to be messier [collective chuckles]. I don’t think being critical or being rigorous has to be mutually exclusive from having fun and from being messy.
CH
How about administrators?
SN
I think the idea of crafting a story about the kind of designers that you want to be can be scaled up to that of the school or the institution. What kind of school do you want to lead? How might these tools impact for better or for worse, that vision and the journey to that vision? How do you address your own discomforts and whatever disruptions these tools might cause, again, for better or for worse, and then holding that in with how you lead and the protagonists that you engage in your administrative career. Similar to the note about giving up on disciplinarity, that might also include certain power dynamics between administrators, instructors and students. So as an administrator, what does it mean for you as someone that presides over an institution to not only anticipate, but to prepare for and build on emergent flows of knowledge that are going to be different than the top-down structure that we’ve been used to for the last few hundred years?
SN
That’s all great advice. So thank you.
by Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), an American theoretical physicist, is best known for leading the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons. A brilliant scholar, Oppenheimer’s early work in quantum mechanics set the stage for his pivotal role in World War II. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb that would then be responsible for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, an infamy that ended the war but initiated the nuclear age. Oppenheimer wrestled with the ethical implications of his work, advocating for nuclear arms control post-war. His complex legacy reflects the intersection of scientific innovation and moral responsibility.
All history teaches us that these questions that we think the pressing ones will be transmuted before they are answered, that they will be replaced by others, and that the very process of discovery will shatter the concepts that we today use to describe our puzzlement.
It is true that there are some who profess to see in matters of culture, in matters precisely of the arts and sciences, a certain macro-historical pattern, a grand system of laws which determines the course of civilization and gives a kind of inevitable quality to the unfolding of the future. They would, for instance, see the radical, formal experimentation which characterized the music of the last half-century as an inevitable consequence of the immense flowering and enrichment of natural science; they would see a necessary order in the fact that innovation in music precedes that in painting and that in turn in poetry, and point to this sequence in older cultures. They would attribute the formal experimentation of the arts to the dissolution, in an industrial and technical society, of authority, of secular, political authority, and of the catholic authority of the church. They are thus armed to predict the future. But this, I fear, is not my dish.
If a prospect is not a prophecy, it is a View.
What does the world of the arts and sciences look like? There are two ways of looking at it: One is the View of the traveler, going by horse or foot, from village to village to town, staying in each to talk with those who live there and to gather something of the quality of its life. This is the intimate view, partial, somewhat accidental, limited by the limited life and strength and curiosity of the traveler, but intimate and human, in a human compass. The other is the vast view, showing the earth with its fields and towns and valleys as they appear to a camera carried in a high altitude rocket. In one sense this prospect will be more complete; one will see all branches of knowledge, one will see all the arts, one will see them as part of the vastness and complication of the whole of human life on earth. But one will miss a great deal; the beauty and warmth of human life will largely be gone from that prospect.
This great map, showing the world from afar and almost as to a stranger, would Show more: It would show the immense diversity of culture and life, diversity in place and tradition for the first time clearly manifest on a world-wide scale, diversity in technique and language, separating science from science and art from art, and all of one from all of the other. This great map, world-wide, culture-wide, remote, has some odd features. There are innumerable villages. Between the villages there appear to be almost no paths discernible from this high altitude.
Here and there passing near a village, sometimes through its heart, there will be a superhighway, along which windy traffic moves at enormous speed. The superhighways seem to have little connection with villages, starting anywhere, ending anywhere, and sometimes appearing almost by design to disrupt the quiet of the village. This View gives us no sense of order or of unity. To find these we must visit the villages, the quiet, busy places, the laboratories and studies and studios. We must see the paths that are barely discernible; we must understand the superhighways, and their dangers.
The frontiers of science are separated now by long years of study, by specialized vocabularies, arts, techniques, and knowledge
from the common heritage even of a most civilized society; and anyone working at the frontier of such science is in that sense a very long way from home, a long way too from the practical arts that were its matrix and origin, as indeed they were of what we today call art.
The specialization of science is an inevitable accompaniment of progress; yet it is full of dangers, and it is cruelly wasteful, since so much that is beautiful and enlightening is cut off from most of the world. Thus it is proper to the role of the scientist that he not merely find new truth and communicate it to his fellows, but that he teach, that he try to bring the most honest and intelligible account of new knowledge to all who will try to learn.
This is one reason—it is the decisive organic reason—why scientists belong in universities. It is one reason why the patronage of science by and through universities is its most proper form; for it is here, in teaching, in the association of scholars, and in the friendships of teachers and taught, of men who by profession must themselves be both teachers and taught, that the narrowness l’of scientific life can best be moderated, and that the analogies, insights, and harmonies of scientific discovery can find their way into the wider life of man.
In the situation of the artist today there are both analogies to and differences from that of the scientist; but it is the differences which are the most striking, and which raise the problems that touch most on the evil of our day. For the artist it is not enough that he communicate with others who are expert in his own art. Their fellowship, their understanding, and their appreciation may encourage him; but that is not the end of his work, nor its nature. The artist depends on a common sensibility and culture, on a common meaning of symbols, on a community of experience and common ways of describing and interpreting it. He need not write for everyone or paint or play for everyone.But his audience must be man; it must be man, and not a specialized set of experts among his fellows.
Today that is very difficult. Often the artist has an aching sense of great loneliness, for the community to which he addresses himself is largely not there; the traditions and the culture, the symbols and the history, the myths and the common experience, which it is his function to illuminate, to harmonize, and to portray, have been dissolved in a changing world
In an important sense this world of ours is a new world, in which the unity of knowledge, the nature of human communities, the order of society, the order of ideas, the very notions of society and culture have changed and will not return to what they have been in the past. What is new is new not because it has never been there before, but because it has changed in quality. One thing that is new is the prevalence of newness, the changing scale and scope of change itself, so that the world alters as we walk in it, so that the years of man’s life measure not some small growth or rearrangement or moderation of what he learned in childhood, but a great upheaval.
What is new is that in one generation our knowledge of the natural world engulfs, upsets, and complements all knowledge of the natural world before.
The techniques, among which and by which we live, multiply and ramify, so that the whole world is bound together by communication, blocked here and there by the immense synapses of political tyranny. The global quality of the world is new: our knowledge of and sympathy with remote and diverse peoples, our involvement with them in practical terms, and our commitment to them in terms of brotherhood. What is new in the world is the massive character of the dissolution and corruption of authority, in belief, in ritual, and in temporal order. Yet this is the world that we have come to live in. The very difficulties which it presents derive from growth in understanding, in skill, in power. To assail the changes that have unmoored us from the past is futile, and in a deep sense, I think, it is wicked. We need to recognize the change and learn what resources we have.
These then, in rough and far too general words, are some of the things we see as we walk through the villages of the arts and of the sciences and notice how thin are the paths that lead from one to another, and how little in terms of human understanding and pleasure the work of the villages comes to be shared outside.
The superhighways* do not help. They are the mass media—from the loud speakers in the deserts of Asia Minor and the cities of Communist China to the organized professional theatre of Broadway. They are the purveyors of art and science and culture for the millions upon millions—the promoters who represent the arts and sciences to humanity and who represent humanity to the arts and sciences; they are the means by which we are reminded of the famine in remote places or of war or trouble or change; they are the means by which this great earth and its peoples have become one to one another, the means by which the news of discovery or honor and the stories and songs of today travel and resound throughout the world. But they are also the means by which the true human community, the man knowing man, the neighbor understanding neighbor, the school boy learning a poem, the women dancing, the individual curiosity, the individual sense of beauty are being blown dry and issueless, the means by which the passivity of the disengaged spectator presents to the man of art and science the bleak face of unhumanity.
For the truth is that this is indeed, inevitably and increasingly, an open and, inevitably and increasingly, an eclectic world. We know too much for one man to know much, we live too variously to live as one. Our histories and traditions—the very means of interpreting life—are both bonds and barriers among us. Our knowledge separates as well as it unites; our orders disintegrate as well as bind; our art brings us together and sets us apart. The artist’s loneliness, the scholar despairing, because no one will any longer trouble to learn what he can teach, the narrowness of the scientist—these are not unnatural insignia in this great time of change.
This is no new problem. There has always been more to know than one man could know; there have always been modes of feeling that could not move the same heart; there have always been deeply held beliefs that could not be composed into a synthetic union. Yet never before today has the diversity, the complexity, the richness so clearly defined hierarchical order and simplification, never before have we had to understand the complementary, ‘mutually not compatible ways of life and recognize choice between them as the only course of freedom. Never before today has the integrity of the intimate, the detailed, the true art, the integrity of craftsmanship and the preservation of the familiar, of the humorous and the beautiful stood in more massive contrast to the vastness of life, the greatness of the globe, the otherness of people, the otherness of ways, and the all-encompas-sing dark.
This balance, this perpetual, precarious impossible balance between the infinitely open and the intimate, this time—our twentieth century—has been long in coming; but it has come. It is, I think, for us and our children, our only way.
This is for all men. For the artist and for the scientist there is a special problem and a special hope, for in their extraordinarily different ways, in their lives that have increasingly divergent character, there is still a sensed bond, a sensed analogy. Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it; both always, as the measure of their creation, have had to do with the harmonization of what is new with what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order in total chaos.
They can, in their work and in their lives, help themselves, help one another, and help all men. They can make the paths that connect the villages of arts and sciences with each other and with the world at large, the multiple, varied, precious bonds of a true and world-wide community .
This cannot be an easy life. We shall have a rugged time of it to keep our minds open and to keep them deep, to keep our sense of beauty and our ability to make it, and our occasional ability to see it in places remote and strange and unfamiliar; we shall have a rugged time of it, all of us, in keeping these gardens in our villages, in keeping open the manifold, intricate, casual paths, to keep these flourishing in a great, open, windy world.
This, as I see it, is the condition of man; and in this condition we can help, because we can love one another.
By Saadia Quddus
Sadia Quddus is pursuing her MFA in Media Art at UCLA Design|Media Arts (D|MA), and holds a previous MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and a B.Arts in Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research and praxis centers upon Islamic mysticism, anti-colonial practice, resistance through radical reimaginings, and rethinking planetary and artificial intelligences. Her first graduate thesis, Otherworldly Gestures, was completed at RISD in 2023, and is available to download on her website.
the OtherWorld is shaped and governed by lessons derived from the sea and the cosmos, from mystical journeys and spiritual encounters, from coming face to face with the darkness within and emerging through rebirth, from cyclical time orbiting the gravitational center of the soul and unlearning and relearning through continuous reinvention.
the OtherWorld is for those who have been othered, who claim edges as their center of gravity, who dismiss seats at the table they never built and instead throw picnics in the wild with fellow Others, who pursue alignment between their souls and the soul of the universe, the Beyond. The inhabitants of the OtherWorld can be referred to as Seekers.
in the OtherWorld, gender is understood across a spectrum. There is no right or wrong, there is no power associated with one that is not equally present in another. There are as many genders as there are people, because gender is the unique expression of the individual. It is a dynamic balance of energies, and it is not the business of anyone to decide this for anyone else. No matter what stage in the journey of understanding oneself the Seeker may be on, they are ultimately always valid, always themselves.
the OtherWorld is a world of possibility. There is no limit to oneself. No imposed constraints to trap one’s exploration and expression of identity. In the OtherWorld, dreamspace is real space.
in the OtherWorld, light and shadow coexist, and are equally important. Instead of denigrating the dark, Seekers understand the shadow space as a rich and generative space for enlightenment, strength, discovery, and understanding
in the OtherWorld, no generation is expected to uphold the dreams of the previous generation. No generation bears the burden of healing the traumas of another. No generation is subject to the cruelties, judgment, or whims of another. Each strives to learn from the cultural and social creativity of the other with respect and compassion. In the OtherWorld, social norms are actively evolving. Seekers are encouraged to consider how to make the world a better place. Social structures are not defensive and attached solely preservation of history,but self-reflective, critical, and future-oriented.
the OtherWorld is porous and unbounded. Membranes offer protection, shelter, and containment, as well as opportunity for puncturing and osmosis. Boundaries are intentional and individually selected, subject to evolution and adaptation.
in the OtherWorld, language does not limit communication and connection. Language is a conduit for feeling and truth.
in the OtherWorld, time is understood as subjective and relative, unrolling at the pace best suited to the Seeker’s growth. Time is cyclical and generative.
in the OtherWorld, death is not an ending. It is simply a transition beyond a Veil to another world. Death does not cut you off from one another, it simply asks that you listen for deeper signals, emotions, and expressions, traveling from further beyond the Veil.It asks the Seeker to develop a new form of communication. Death and birth and rebirth are unfixed points on a cyclical timeline of Becoming and Being.
in the OtherWorld, the individual and collective are equally important. One is not honored at the expense of the other. The interiority of an individual is sacred and critical; when the needs of the interior self are met, the individual can come together with a collective of diverse, resilient, confident individuals to form a sustainable rhizomatic network that can care for one another, generate radical visions, and go further together than any individual alone. Through empathy and respect for different perspectives, forged from internal stability, the collective grows strong and birth and rebirth are unfixed points on a cyclical timeline of Becoming and Being.
in the OtherWorld, sex is free of shame. Sex is disentangled from reproduction, and celebrated in all forms. Sex is for deep connection, for self discovery, for enjoyment, for distraction, for fun, for love, for grief. Sex is hard and soft, fast and slow, gentle and painful; it is anything but shameful, forced, or weaponized. Desire is individual, unique, rich and celebrated. There is no shame in the sensory or sensual, no shame in desire.
in the OtherWorld, the body is malleable, porous, multifaceted and multidimensional. The body is subject and material, a substance that can be shaped to reflect, express, communicate, protect.
the OtherWorld celebrates the fact that it exists parallel to infinite OtherWorlds. It does not center itself, or exploit its neighbors, or dominate others. It learns, communicates, listens, and exists in harmony.
the OtherWorld welcomes the punks and rebels, the artists and makers, the quiet resisters and slow transformers. It welcomes Seekers of all kinds, those who believe in their imagination, who respect prophetic vision, who care little for external validation and focus on interior self-hood. Those who empathize, those who critique as a form of love, those who reject injustice and control, those who do not fit and create space for others who do not fit.
the OtherWorld honors the speculative and the imaginative, the indigenous and the surreal, the spiritual and sacred. The OtherWorld celebrates the cosmic. It honors the ghostly and magical, the angels and demons and aliens, the strange and monstrous. The OtherWorld is for beings of all denominations and species, shapes and sizes and material and forms, for the digital and organic, for the hybrids and the cyborgs and the elementals.
the OtherWorld pushes beyond the surface and seeks essence and soul. Surface is not applied,but emergent. The interior, the gesture, the essence, the spirit, informs the layers that grow and extend and stretch beyond it
the OtherWorld is in a state of constant Becoming. The OtherWorld refuses normativity. It is messy and unruly and beautiful. It is scrappy and scruffy and learning every day. The OtherWorld honors the rebirth of self-discovery, the refusal of the heteropatriarchal timeline and lifeline,the multiplicity of the self and the chaos of personal growth.
in the OtherWorld, the built world and natural world are symbiotic. Architecture and nature fuse and flow seamlessly, each responsive to and always learning from the other. In the OtherWorld, our technology is in symbiosis with the natural, ecological, and biological. We are taught by plants and animals and our own bodies, we co-create with and for plants and animals and one another. Our progress and our prowess is not exploitative or extractive; we move forward and upward and non-directionally when we move together. In the OtherWorld, no species or being is considered of a higher order of sentience or intelligence.
In the OtherWorld, dualities and paradoxes are witnessed, celebrated, and accepted.
in the OtherWorld, there are as many different valid faith practices as there are Seekers. The Seeker trusts their timing, their search, and trusts that those around them are pursuing authentic journeys of their own.
