DESIGN BLOCKCHAIN

Figure 1

Provenance.  Authenticity.  I kept thinking about these concepts as I read the interesting and funny article by Nick Paumgarten in the 22 Oct. issue of The New Yorker, which discusses blockchains.

The article focuses on the developers of Ethereum, which is a blockchain established to transform the world.  Don’t know what blockchain is?  Given that it is completely open ended and open source, nobody can really say, exactly, what one is.   But, as the article states, a common example is the industry of title insurance.  This industry is dedicated to the verification, the determination of the authenticity, of who owns what.  When you buy a property, you pay someone to verify that you are buying it from the entity that says they own it.  This is expensive and wasteful, and with blockchain, would be eliminated.  The distributed knowledge of who owns what property would instead be instantly and irrefutably known, because that knowledge was distributed across the digital ether.

Figure 2

So one way to understand blockchain is that it eliminates any entities that are in the middle of knowledge transactions.  Banks would not be needed.  Definitely not lawyers.  No accountants.  Eliminate much of the healthcare infrastructure.  The elimination of these middle entities provides, then, a direct connection between those who are offering  knowledge and those who are wanting knowledge.

One thing the article did not address is design.  So, below, I try, with my infinitesimal knowledge of blockchain, to determine if it can map onto design.  The greatest benefit would be the verification of the authenticity of the design and the elimination of arbiters.

AUTHENTICITY
The capacity to verify the provenance, the authenticity, of a design, of a solution, will be the future design currency.  One thing blockchains are good at is attestation. An authentic design will, by use of blockchain, be able to be irrefutably verified.  Blockchain will remove the mediocre mish mash of most of what is built.  By giving a currency, a value, to provenance, a design world will be revealed which we never thought possible.  Right now, there is no design currency; there is no universal design valuation.  Right now, the most powerful arbiters of what is good design are the middle entities:  historical mavens, print editors, digital amalgamators.  With the application of blockchain to design, there would be attestation, and there would be irrefutable universal design currency.

I can also imagine that there will be categories to authenticity.  The attestation that is most relevant to Transparent Drawing is human authenticity.  It is without question that machines will get better at providing design solutions.  It will be valuable to some that the design is 100% human;  the design blockchain will provide that human attestation.

Figure 3

ARBITERS
Another thing blockchains do is remove the middle entities.  So which middle entities would re removed in design world?  Arbiters of taste.  Magazine and book editors.  Anyone who says that this is good and this is not good.  Anyone who is simply amalgamating without doing the hard work of creation.  Which, as it turns out, is a hell of a lot of people.  Gone would be the mediocre cultural arbiters who dictate and rule what is good and what is bad.  Instead the code would give validity to proof of work.  And this, because it has the highest value, dictates what gets built.

Figure 4

In a meager attempt to demonstrate, via drawings, how blockchain would map onto design, I can only offer another of my Drawing from Drawing iterations.  In this guise, each drawing, and subsequent iteration of a drawing, would be entered into the blockchain.  Figure 1 was inspired by sculptures of Oteiza.  Then, Figures 2 thru 4 are Drawing from Drawings:  each drawing was done using only the previous drawing as a visual reference.  The last drawing, Figure 4, results in an Almost Ready To Build form.

So, if each drawing in a design process was entered into a blockchain, the provenance of the design solution would then be attestable.  The code of the machine would verify the authenticity of each drawing.  The Figures above should demonstrate the transformation from unbuildability to buildability.  Each step was analogue.  Each step was attestable, which makes the drawings authentic.  And the subsequent design, which was knowledged via a linked series of drawings, would be attestable.

Authenticity will be the only currency.  Design Blockchain might get us there.

1.  Paumgarten, Nick. “The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of.” The New Yorker.  October 22, 2016. Print P 62