Topic Conversation

In the future, we have organic machines that all fulfil the same desired purpose but differ in its material and therefore lead to diverse “harvesting” of resources.

I took this sentence, and with it all the connected topics I researched, as a base to discuss with others (non-designers). One of the persons was my mother I visited this weekend. I chose her because she has a deep knowledge about gardening in general, but also about seeding. She is also very concerned about food supply on a global scale and is politically active in these fields. This was also the point where our conversation started.

She explained me the principle of “Ernähungssouveränität”, which tries to tackle the global food supply problem and attempts to give farmers more rights against huge agriculture companies, who are not acting sustainable in the agricultural field with monocultures and genetically modified seeds. We came relatively quick to the point, that there must be made a step back to local and biodiverse agricultural production if we as a global unity don’t want to exploit the resources of our planet. We came up with the following, almost manifesto like sentence:

Diversity brings stability.

Based on that I tried to explain the vision of
growing objects with biological material, based
on human design. Since this would probably
incorporate genetic engineering we ended up in
an ethical discussion about the power of human kind having the ability to design life and therefore making nature to our slaves. What was interesting for me was the discussion about if we as humans are “slaving” nature through cultivating edible plants (which human kind does since thousands of years). My mother made here the crucial point and differentiated this to the nowadays happening genetical engineering with plants based on the matter of time; Through genetical modification, we skip evolutional processes and are therefore not able to incorporate all the consequences, such a change could have to the surrounding. Classical cultivation is in that sense different that it requires time to develop over time and is therefore much more stable because it underwent biological, evolutional “stress-tests”. I think the speed of development is a very crucial point here that I didn’t think of before in the context of my thesis.
Trying to make the link to technology and materials in our conversation, we tried to crystallise the difference between Machines and Nature. We came up with the following confrontation: