Our Digital Future

We are usually told how digital technology will change and impact us in the future. However, most of us are not asking ourselves what we want that technology to become. As it develops, digital technology more and more seems to literally have a mind of its own and it becomes increasingly important that we ask big questions about the ways we want to live with that technology. There is power in creating intentions for the future that most calls us: if we don’t know what we are shooting for, how will we know if we are heading in the right direction?

Last summer, we had an uneasy conversation about feeling like powerless victims facing digital “monsters’ looming on the horizon, threatening to alienate us even further from the kinds of environments, organisms, and intuitions that we find both deeply satisfying and that are evolutionarily most familiar to all humans. A world without digital tech seemed impossible. A world of increasing mechanization and the destruction of living systems seemed terrible. It was difficult to imagine futures that could be both possible and desirable.

Sitting in my (Carissa’s) backyard, eating blackberries and looking into the face an old cedar tree, we decided to take a position of greater agency and less isolation by imaginatively asking the “nature in ourselves” what tech future we/it most wants to see. The metaphoric answers we found after silence and inner journeying led to surprising insights for both of us. Most importantly: that the beautiful patterns we see in nature are more fundamental that any supposed nature-technology divide, that those patterns can inform digital technology design, and that we can all be active agents in building beautiful, digital futures in which we want to live.

The Digital Naturalness Project looks for ways that digital technology can contribute to increasing the depth and quality of life by mimicking deep patterns in nature. We start from the view that humans and all human-made technology are always-already part of nature and that there are ways we can design technology to feel even more natural. We pursue research, develop community, and train technologists and designers to investigate the value of a digital naturalness approach to technology design. After a period of quiet development, we are beginning to work publicly with biologists, technologists, designers, philosophers, wise elders, and technology users to undo our alienation from the natural world by building a more enchanted future in which nature is honored and deeply appreciated and technology helps us come more alive.

We will soon publish some of our early research and conversations and invite you to contribute.

What digital future do you most want to see?

Introduction to Digital Naturalness

In this post we outline the foundations of a “Digital Naturalness” approach to building digital technologies. It reflects the range of technical issues, methodological approaches, and philosophical questions we have so far considered and is meant to serve as an evolving guide for future applications.

Our starting point for the Digital Naturalness project was our observation that, while digital technological advancement has had many positive consequences, it also seems to be having many negative consequences. Regular use of digital technology seems to have generally increased users’ anxiety, decreased attentional control, increased stress, contributed to decreased physical activity, and dramatically altered social interactions. More fundamentally and significantly, the widespread adoption of the internet and smartphones, and possibly soon VR/AR, IoT, 3d printing, advanced robotics, and powerful AI could signal a dramatic new break from humans interacting and living within a primarily living, organic, physical, and analog environment to interacting with and living within a primarily not alive, virtual, and digital one.

A background motivation for this inquiry of course is climate change and our continuing destruction of natural environments. Although industrial  economies have largely been to blame for the destruction of ecosystems and species, digital economies sit on top of them, requiring further energy resources, materials, and industrial production. More, it is now digital economies that are accelerating our sense of alienation from natural rhythms and processes. Beyond the immediate personal and social negative health consequences of digital technology, we think that the way we currently use digital technology acts as a net obstacle to adequately appreciating and responding to these complex changes. Unless we change direction, future tech will only further this alienation.

Our aim with Digital Naturalness is to make practical steps toward a better digital future. Here, ‘technology’ refers to human made systems, especially leading edge digital software/hardware. ‘Nature’ refers to the non-human creatures and elements that give context to and interact with humans and that generally preceded our development of digital technology, as well as the ecosystemic organizing processes through which these creatures and elements dynamically maintain themselves and evolve and of which humans are a part.

Both ‘nature’ and ‘technology,’ however, are fuzzy terms that often overlap each other significantly, and in order to find solutions at the intersection of digital tech and nature one has to think that those two concepts are not irreconcilable. Yet we have often found ourselves struggling with hidden assumptions about their mutual exclusivity. In one sense everything humans have ever been or done or will be or do is natural, and to think otherwise is to use the same kind of absurd isolationist thinking that drives both ecological destruction and “leave no trace” ideology (Morton, 2018). This attitude leads to a simplifying, reductionist logic which is useful for manipulating and extracting, but not for appreciating or participating with other natural elements a fruitful way. On the other hand, it is also true that even though AI and robots are natural, we still don’t want to cut down all the trees, bleach all the coral, and subsume ourselves into increasingly virtual environments. We want VR nature to generate empathy and foresight in relation to real world nature, not satisfied apathy such that we don’t mind its obsolescence.

We have asked two questions:

1. How can digital technology be built with the patterns of nature in mind to improve humans’ aliveness, wellbeing, and the beauty of our lives?

2. What digital technologies could contribute to nature being sustained and made ever healthier, directly and/or by improving humans’ ability to sense, appreciate, and positively participate with nature?

Digitally natural products should help users experience more beauty, wellness, and aliveness and contribute to greater beauty, wellness, and aliveness in surrounding ecosystems. These three principles were originally chosen intuitively and have guided our choice of fields of study, of exemplary technologies, and of potential new applications. In time and with help from collaborators we hope to formalize these principles into useful metrics for digital technology developers. Each of these principles are complex and broad in their own right; our goal is to distill specific aspects of each that could be used to inform digital technology development.

To attempt to answer our questions, in such a way that could immediately inform the development of digital naturalness applications, we drew from the fields of natural computing, biomimicry, biophilic design, ecophilosophy, ecopsychology, the cognitive sciences of perception of complexity, human computer interaction, and ecological economics.

In posts to come we imagine multiple possible futures, define the three principles including key insights from relevant fields, give examples of currently existing digitally natural technology products, describe a perception centered, process-design methodology by which technology developers could make it more likely that their products accomplish the principles, and sketch potential applications. We always welcome feedback, collaborations, and suggestions for improvement.

Reference
- Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Future Civilizations

In this post we give broad visions of alternative futures to lay the foundation for the importance of asking digital naturalness-type questions now, at an apparent inflection point in the history of the human species...

Contemporary civilization seems to be breaking down at the edge of our current stable state, poised to move through a chaotic transition toward a new stable state. What that new state looks like in much detail is impossible to predict. However, there are a few fault lines that seem central to these different possible futures. Given that how we collectively address the issues along these fault lines now could have enormous consequences in the near and far futures, they may be some of the most important ethical considerations of our time.

One of these fault lines is the relationship between ‘technology’ and ‘nature.’ As mentioned in previous posts we think that both of these terms have fuzzy boundaries, often overlap each other significantly, and that taking them too seriously has definite negative effects on our ability to think about their relationship accurately and and act effectively on the problems at hand. However, as pointers to our original motivation and the real tensions humans feel today, they remain relevant. Basically what we mean by ‘technology’ is human made systems, especially digital technologies including leading edge software/hardware. What we mean by ‘nature’ is all the non-human creatures and elements that give context to and interact with humans and that generally preceded our development of digital tech, as well as the ecosystemic organizing processes through which these creatures and elements dynamically maintain themselves, again overlapping and in relationship with humans.

Digital technology has transformed our lives, and there are serious predictions that new digital tech including blockchain, 3d printing, VR/AR, internet connected devices, AI, and advanced robotics will radically transform both our economies and governments. Some experts even expect AI and advanced human-computer interfaces in the next few decades to irrevocably break down the last significant boundary between humans and machines - our skins. Several companies are now seriously attempting to build consumer grade direct interfaces between computers and our brains. In the background to all this is climate change and our our continuing destruction of nature. It is our contention that digital life currently acts as a net obstacle to adequately appreciating and responding to these changes in nature.

In this context two extreme futures are worth considering. The first we’ll call Machine World. In Machine World humans become cyborgs or are replaced by AI. Cities become hyperdense and filled with machine intelligences. The transformation of ‘natural resources’ into energy, production materials, and waste accelerates further until hardly any natural ecosystems are left. Eventually there are no rural or wild areas left at all. Machine World sustains itself by recycling and repurposing old machines, by continuing to mine metals on earth, and eventually by mining metals in space. Second is the World Without Civilization. We are currently changing earth chemistry so dramatically and so rapidly that there is real concern that we will cause regional or global environmental collapses to such an extent that industrial civilization will no longer be possible and humans will, like other animals, face mass die offs. Humans will live in small semi-nomadic groups of varying sizes surviving by hunting, farming, and harvesting materials from the old, no longer used equipment from cities. We will creatively re-create and maintain some modern communications but overall technological progress will stop for a significant period of time (if not forever).

Both of these extreme trajectories - one in which nature is converted into machines and one in which technological progress pulls the rug out from under itself leaving mostly nature - are unlikely. However, they help us bound the space of the future and flesh out our imagination of more likely and more desirable alternatives. More likely is that the two trends described above interact with each other in complex ways, as they are already doing today. There are several examples where digital technology is contributing to the establishment of more sustainable world system. Solar photovoltaics have in many places become as cheap or cheaper than oil and natural gas. 3d printing is empowering local, distributed manufacturing which will cut down drastically on the energy used to transport products.

The Digital Naturalness Project is an attempt to look at the fault line between digital technologies and nature and try to find areas where they might mutually benefit each other in such a way as to steer the overall direction of both in healthier, generative directions rather than unhealthy, destructive ones. Our fundamental questions are: How can digital technology be built with the patterns of nature in mind to improve our aliveness, wellbeing, and the beauty of our lives? And, what digital technologies would contribute to a future in which nature is sustained and made ever healthier and more complex? Asking these question while standing in that fault line between digital technology and nature leads to deeply exciting, terrifying, sometimes even seemingly perverse possibilities, but exploring them is necessary to find the best alternative worlds between Machine World and the World Without Civilization.

Digital Naturalness Principles - Wellness, Beauty, Aliveness

The Digital Naturalness project starts with the experience that much of what we find most fulfilling in life comes from or is heightened by by our connection to nature. The second foundation is that so much of our connection to digital technology doesn’t seem to have the same impact on us. It’s a simple starting place: if nature contributes to so much of what we love about life and the future is going to include digital technology that has a more and more powerful impact on our lives, let’s try to learn what we can from nature and see if we can find a way to design our technology so that it has those same deep, positive impacts on us as nature does.

In particular there are three basic qualities we feel we get in relationship to nature that are most basic, and most important for good human lives: increased wellness, increased beauty, and increased aliveness. Is it possible to learn from nature and design tech that also increases our wellness, our experience of beauty, and our sense of aliveness? And, even better, is it possible that the tech also contributes to greater wellness, beauty, and aliveness in the ecosystems it and we participate in?

We came to these three principles - wellness, beauty, and aliveness - intuitively.  Then, after continued reflection and dialogue, confirmed them as potent aspects of our experiences of nature that support deep human health. We then conducted a literature review to see what the relevant science had to say about the way nature supports our beauty, aliveness and wellness. Our ultimate goal is to distill specific aspects of each in a way that can be applied, technically and concretely, to the design of digital products.

The following is a very brief outline of some of our findings from the literature review confirming that nature supports our wellness, beauty, and aliveness.

Wellness

The holistic definition of health put forward by the World Health Organization is a useful starting point: “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.” (WHO, 1948)

The following examples are wellness benefits we receive from nature physically, mentally and socially.

Physical Wellness: in nature, we experience physiological changes including lower pulse rates, reduced cortisol levels, and improved immune functioning (Ulrich et al, 1991). Studies have also shown faster recovery rates from illnesses and overall benefits on long term health (Velarde et al, 2007).

Mental Wellness: In nature we experience “attention restoration” (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1995) as the rich sensory stimuli present there engages our involuntary attention, giving our minds a rest from directed, focused attention. We may experience changes in our emotional state, including an increased sense of play, elation, and a reduced “fear arousal” (Ulrich, 1979) as well as fascination and a sense of mystery (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1995).

Social Wellness: We experience a feeling of deep social connection with nature through 'biophilia,' our “urge to affiliate with other forms of life” (Wilson, 1984). E.O. Wilson believes this to be an ancestral desire based on patterns of attraction to certain forms of nature that were also important for survival. For example, certain flowers indicate the presence of food, so we evolved to become deeply attracted to them. We may also feel more social towards others while in nature. Zhang et al. (2014) found that people exhibited “pro-social behavior when viewing aesthetically pleasing nature, such as increased perspective taking, empathy, generosity and trust with other people."

Beauty

Beauty is defined by Merriam -Webster as “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit” (“Beauty”). Preferences for beauty have both individual and collective patterns, such that some principles may be universal while others reflect specific values and perspectives (Mo et al, 2016). This is also true when experiencing beauty in nature.

Associations of an aesthetically pleasing landscape have come to be known as “scenic beauty” and include water features, plants in bloom, and winding pathways. Similar patterns of scenic beauty appreciation have been identified across cultures and are thought to be universal. In specific cultural and individual contexts, scenic beauty can arise from one’s values, attachment to a landscape, sense of identity, and sense of care towards a particular landscape (Gobster et al, 2007).

The benefits of viewing aesthetically pleasing nature are closely tied to the wellness benefits of interacting with nature, largely because our interactions are significantly (but certainly not only) visual. In fact, some research on viewing images of aesthetically pleasing nature suggests that spending time physically in nature is not required to experience its wellness benefits (Vincent et al, 2010).

The experience of beauty in nature also has important implications for our sense of connectedness and in turn our wellness.  Zhang et al (2014) suggest that “connectedness with nature only predicts well-being when individuals are also emotionally attuned to nature's beauty.” Therefore, the emotional impacts of experiencing beauty in nature may be critical to receiving wellness benefits.

Aliveness

Aliveness can be defined in two senses, as an absolute quality distinct from being not alive, and as a continuous value positively correlated with our sense of energy and vitality (“Aliveness”). There is an extensive gradient between simply being barely alive and flourishing. Experiences in nature broaden our understanding of what is alive and heighten our vitality.

Alive/not Alive: General intuitions overlap significantly about what is “alive” and “not alive," though edge cases are not universally agreed to, nor is there a hard and fast definition of “alive” in academic biology or other fields. Sometimes “aliveness” is implicitly or explicitly grounded in having consciousness. However, there is even less consensus about how to know whether something is conscious or not (Muehlhauser, 2018). In both cases, however, we use nature and organisms in nature as our shared foundation for determining what is alive or not alive and in nature we interact with a diversity of life and the cycles of life and death much more than we do in urban environments.

Vitality: Similarly, the view that there are degrees of aliveness and consciousness is fairly widely held, though we have no precise theory of either of these spectra. Due to a combination of features of nature including increased sensory complexity, increased mystery, and decreased controllability compared to less natural environments, we experience heightened levels of sensory awareness and feelings of “aliveness” (Demares, 2000). Heightened sensory clarity is a common feature of peak experiences, cultivated and spontaneous, which often occur in nature (Roy, 2018). Feelings of nature connectedness influence our subjective sense of meaning, vitality, transcendence, and awe (Capaldi et al, 2015). Finally, nature is also a place where our basic feelings of safety and danger are heightened. Paradoxically, touching our own mortality also increases our sense of aliveness. In general, increased sensory richness, sensory clarity, emotional intensity, alertness, and connectedness are all enhanced by natural environments.

It is not difficult to see that human wellness is augmented when we are in nature or touched by nature in some way. By contrast, beauty, wellness and aliveness seem noticeably absent from our experiences interacting with digital technology. Human wellness decreases from long hours of sitting at a computer while staring at a screen; our experience of beauty decreases as we look at objects that are not built from the patterns we are evolutionarily disposed to appreciate, and our sense of aliveness lessens as we increasingly interact with nonliving systems.

And, we think this may not have to be the case. In our next blog we’ll start to lay out some specific ways of translating these three principles into technical terms that may be useful for designing technology that mimics the deep qualities in nature that generate them.

References

“Aliveness.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aliveness.

“Beauty.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beauty.

Capaldi, Colin A., Holli-Anne Passmore, Elizabeth K. Nisbet, John M. Zelenski, and Raelyne L. Dopko. “Flourishing in Nature: A Review of the Benefits of Connecting with Nature and Its Application as a Wellbeing Intervention.” International Journal of Wellbeing, vol. 5, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1–16., doi:10.5502/ijw.v5i4.1.

Demares, Ryan. Human Peak Experience Triggered by Encounters with Cetaceans. Anthrozoos, vol. 13, no. 2, 2000, pp.89-103, doi: 10.2752/089279300786999914.

Gobster, Paul H., et al. "The shared landscape: what does aesthetics have to do with ecology?." Landscape ecology, vol. 22, no. 7, 2007, pp. 959-972.

Kaplan, Rachel, and Stephen Kaplan. The Experience of Nature: a Psychological Perspective. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Mo, Ce, Tiansheng Xia, Kaixin Qin, and Lei Mo. “Natural Tendency towards Beauty in Humans: Evidence from Binocular Rivalry.” Plos One, vol. 11, no. 3, Jan. 2016. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150147

Roy, Bonnitta. “Awakened Perception: Perception as Participation." Integral Review, Vol. 14 No. 1, August 2018. https://integral-review.org/awakened-perception-perception-as-participation/.

Ulrich, Roger S., Robert F. Simons, Barbara D.Losito, Evelyn Fiorito, Mark A.Miles, and Michael Zelson. “Stress Recovery during Exposure to Natural and Urban Environments.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 11, no. 3, 1991, pp. 201–230, doi:10.1016/s0272-4944(05)80184-7.

Ulrich, Roger S. “Visual Landscapes and Psychological Well‐Being.” Landscape Research, vol. 4, no. 1, 1979, pp. 17–23., doi:10.1080/01426397908705892.

Velarde, M.D., G. Fry, and M. Tveit. “Health Effects of Viewing Landscapes – Landscape Types in Environmental Psychology.” Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, vol. 6, no. 4, 2007, pp. 199–212., doi:10.1016/j.ufug.2007.07.001.

Vincent, Ellen, Dina Battisto, Larry Grimes, and James McCubbin. “The Effects of Nature Images on Pain in a Simulated Hospital Patient Room.” HERD: Health Environments Research and Design Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, 2010, pp. 42–55, doi:10.1177/193758671000300306.

Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Harvard University Press, 1984.

Zhang, Jia Wei, Ryan T. Howell, and Ravi Iyer. “Engagement with Natural Beauty Moderates the Positive Relation between Connectedness with Nature and Psychological Well-Being.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 38, 2014, pp. 55–63, doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.12.013.

Zhang, Jia Wei, Paul K.Piff, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Dacher Keltner. “An Occasion for Unselfing: Beautiful Nature Leads to Prosociality.” Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol. 37, 2014, pp. 61–72, doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2013.11.008.

Technical Correspondences - Coherence, Fractality, Autopoiesis

In the last blog we described three foundational qualities digitally nature products would support:wellness, beauty, and aliveness. Products should lead to greater levels of each of these in users in addition to performing their objective functions. To do this, we also need to know what features or characteristics of digital products would contribute to them. Digital Naturalness is interested in discovering these characteristics at all levels of the digital technology stack. Digital interfaces users engage with are only a thin layer of this stack - the hardware components of a laptop, the software tracking location on a smartphone, high-frequency trading algorithms, the protocols for data exchange between your solar panel and the electric utility, satellites tracking climate patterns and material resource flows, etc. are all mostly hidden from their users direct view. In order to have as much positive impact as possible, one question Digital Naturalness asks then is: are there technical design principles for digital products and features that increase wellness, beauty, and aliveness over a broad range of use cases and at many layers in the technology stack?

The following section takes a step in that direction. We propose three possible principles: coherence, fractality, and autopoiesis respectively, that might build a bridge between the relatively subjective and messy, but more meaningful, qualities of wellness, beauty, and aliveness to relatively objective and generalizable, but not overly simplistic measures which could guide digital design. Each concept was chosen somewhat at first intuitively, although informed by research connecting the paris, as well as because each can be used to describe organisms and natural systems as well as software and digital design. It may be that as wellness, beauty, and aliveness are linked subjectively, coherence, fractality, and autopoiesis may be linked mathematically to form a single whole. Developing a more rigorous mathematical description of coherence, fractality, and autopoiesis, and using this as the foundation for measuring the relative degrees of each in a digital technology product will be one of the primary objectives of the next stage of the Digital Naturalness project. Once we have a tool to measure coherence, fractality, and autopoiesis, we might be able to predict the expected impact on users’ experiences and compare products against each other. We discuss this further in later blogs.

Wellness - Coherence 

There are several disciplines that have defined coherence somewhat differently - from the physics of coherent waves (Britannica, 2011), to Antonovsky's subjective Sense of Coherence (Antonovsky, 1987), and Ervin Laszlo’s system coherence (Laszlo, 2017). 

A theme among the different definitions is a sense of complex interconnectedness. Ervin Laszlo, a Hungarian philosopher of science, systems theorist, and integral theorist with a background in physics, makes a distinction between two types of coherence:  intrinsic and extrinsic.

• Intrinsic coherence means that the parts that make up the systems are finely tuned together, so that every element is responsive to every other element.


• Extrinsic coherence means that the systems are coherently connected to other systems around them.

Laszlo suggests that coherence in a system occurs when all the elements are in tune and operating in concert with each other, thus maintaining “one non-equilibrium dissipative system.” He suggests that living systems - from molecules to cells and organ systems - resonate at compatible frequencies and interact with precise correlations. Laszlo attributes this to quantum-type entanglements in addition to biological interactions. 

There are several principles that Laszlo associates with coherence - for example, a coherent system does not only repeat structures but repeats them fractally along with some novelty at each level. He also suggests that coherent systems do not grow indefinitely. At a point of critical size and diversity, they will either de-cohere and return to stable components or they will join with other systems to create higher levels of complexity.

The human experience of wellness in nature could be related to coherence. We experience wellness when our internal systems are communicating effectively with each other and working well together, and when we perceive meaningful information from the surrounding environment and respond appropriately to them. Also, various dynamic systems in our bodies may also resonate with frequencies found most commonly in natural environments.

Beauty - Fractality

A fractal is developed through an iterative pattern in which the magnified version of the pattern is basically indistinguishable from the unmagnified version. Examples of fractals found in nature are tree branches, snowflakes, broccoli, pineapple, mountain ranges, shorelines, clouds, peacocks, lightning strikes, leaf patterns, and vein patterns in the human body.

Research into the aesthetics of fractals has been growing and has included elements such as the roughness of shape (curved versus linear) and visual complexity (Taylor et al., 2011). There is some research to suggest that people tend to prefer “mid-range fractal patterns” (Street et al, 2016) meaning a mid-range of complexity. Research has shown that at this level of complexity, the brain is better able to produce alpha brain waves, a “wakefully relaxed state” (Taylor et al, 2011). The same study further emphasized the link between our perception of fractals and our wellness: participants in his study recovered from stress 60% better when looking at fractal art.

Perceiving beauty in nature is deeply interconnected with our sense of wellness. Taylor et al suggest that the reason fractals support our sense of wellness is that our visual cortex is hardwired to view the world in a fractal pattern, and when we view nature or images with fractals, our visual cortices can operate with most ease and efficiency. 

Perception of beauty is also connected with our sense of care for nature. Ruth Richards (2001) offers a somewhat poetic way of tying together the concepts of beauty, fractals, and care for nature. 

Beauty offers us conscious awareness and resonance with deeper life patterns. We sense our interconnection and the “bounded infinities” of potentialities related to chaotic “strange attractors.” Beauty can open up our vision in an endangered world—while yielding intimacy and delight, not isolation and fear. Caring can become natural for the greater whole we all cocreate. (Richards, 2001)

Aliveness - Autopoiesis

Autopoiesis is the ability of an organism to self-organize at a level of complexity that is greater than the complexity in its environment. Autopoietic systems producing their own boundaries and coordinating the interactions among their internal components leads to the emergence of novel capabilities which none of the components have by themselves.

Autopoiesis has an autonomously regenerative capacity. This is described in the following original definition of autopoiesis by Chilean neurobiologists Maturana and Varela: 

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana, 1980)

The eukaryotic cell is one of the more well known examples of autopoiesis in living systems (Zeleny, 1982). The eukaryotic cell is made up of several components, such as a nucleus, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus, vesicles, and has a definite boundary that separates it from its environment. The components have specialized functions which lead to transformations within the cell, enabled by exchanges of energy and molecules with the environment. This leads to the production of new components that continue to maintain the bounded nature of the cell (Zeleny, 1982).

Autopoiesis has been considered one of the necessary conditions of life (Bitbol, 2004). When in nature, just as we experience our own coherence with organisms and elements in nature, the autopoietic character of organisms and ecosystems, their renewal and regeneration, ‘reminds us’ of our own autopoietic capacities. Interacting with autopoietic systems may stimulate our own capacities for maintenance and renewal.

It may be possible to discover generalizable, technical characteristics of systems which contribute to increased wellness, beauty, and aliveness in the living organisms which interact with them. If so, using these principles in design processes for principles for digital products and infrastructures could go a long way toward making digital systems that have a much more deeply positive impact on us and on the natural environments with which they interface.

References

Antonovsky, Aaaron. Unraveling the mystery of health. How people manage stress and stay well. San Francisco: Josey-Bass Publishers, 1987. 

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Coherence.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 23 Nov. 2011, www.britannica.com/science/coherence.

Laszlo, Ervin. The Intelligence of the Cosmos: Why Are We Here?: New Answers from the Frontiers of Science. Inner Traditions, 2017.

Maturana, Humberto R. and Francisco J. Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1980.

Richards, Ruth. “A New Aesthetic for Environmental Awareness: Chaos Theory, the Beauty of Nature, and Our Broader Humanistic Identity.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 41, no. 2, 2001, pp. 59–95., doi:10.1177/0022167801412006.

Street, Nichola, Alexandra M. Forsythe, Ronan Reilly, Richard Taylor, and Mai S. Helmy. “A Complex Story: Universal Preference vs. Individual Differences Shaping Aesthetic Response to Fractals Patterns.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 10, 2016, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00213.

Taylor, Richard, Branka Spehar, Paul Van Donkelaar, and Caroline M. Hagerhall. “Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Jackson Pollock’s Fractals.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 5, no. 60, 2011. 10.3389/fnhum.2011.00060

Zelený, Milan, and Kevin D. Hufford. “The Application Of Autopoiesis In Systems Analysis: Are Autopoietic Systems Also Social Systems?” International Journal of General Systems, vol. 21, no. 2, 1992, pp. 145–160, doi:10.1080/03081079208945066.

Examples of Digital Technologies that Incorporate Natural Principles

The Digital Naturalness project is not entirely novel. There is a long tradition, even within computer science, of using inspiration from nature to guide the design of digital systems. Additionally, there are many already existing products and design methodologies in varying stages of development which follow a similar spirit as the one guiding Digital Naturalness. In this blog we offer an incomplete survey of some of these other efforts, to contextualize Digital Naturalness within a wider movement of people and organizations experimenting toward the healthy integration of nature and digital technology.

One helpful way to think about approaches to natural digital design is that they fall into two broad categories: overt and subtle. Overt approaches make a clear and obvious link between the user and nature, often through the visual UX of the product or feature. Subtle approaches draw from nature or makes the users’ experience something like being in nature, but the user may not be aware of this connection at all. Making office buildings feel better for the people who work in them by filling the office with plants and pictures of natural scenes and by encouraging people to make their computer background a natural scene are good examples of the overt approach. Reducing glare on computer screens by learning from the way the microscopic structures of moths’ eyes refract light is a good example of the subtle approach. These approaches are not mutually exclusive.

Both approaches can make our technologies more nature-like. Both approaches may also predispose the user to connecting with nature more deeply because the patterns and structures of their everyday life reflect the patterns and structures in nature. It might be that subtle approaches have a stronger impact in this way because they embed deep structures in the technology, which constitute it from the “ground up,” rather than more simply putting nature “on top.” However, overt approaches have an additional advantage over subtle approaches in that they consciously reinforce people’s awareness of nature and encourage them to reflect on its value for humans’ wellbeing.

The following list is a brief survey of design methodologies and digital products that draw from nature; it is not at all comprehensive.

Design Methodologies

There are currently two major processes used to develop technologies using natural principles. One is biomimicry, which involves the mimicking of nature, either partially or fully, to resolve a design or architectural problem. The other is biophilia, which includes the intention of enhancing connection with nature in the design process and product. The following describes ways that these frameworks have been applied to the development of digital technology. 

Biomimicry

There is a rich history of design inspired by nature. One of the earliest examples is the artificial neural network developed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943 to imitate neuronal behavior (McCulloch and Pitts., 1943). In the late 1950’s, Otto Schmitt coined the term “biomimetics” and focused his research on mimicking the electrical activity of a nerve (Harkness, 2002). The term “bionics” was coined by Jack Steele in 1960 to describe a way of solving engineering problems using biology (“Bionics”). In 1997, Janine Benyus coined the term “biomimicry” to describe “innovation inspired by nature” in a book that brought biomimicry to the forefront of green design (Benyus, 1997).

Biomimetic TRIZ

TRIZ is a compilation of principles used to solve problems and resolve contradictions across multiple disciplines (“TRIZ Methodology, Tools, Articles and Case Studies”). TRIZ was originally developed to solve problems in physics and chemistry, recent efforts are being made to apply it to information technology and software development (Beckmann, 2015). Biomimetic TRIZ is a recent development of the program which incorporates biological solutions to problems in its database. It is not clear whether the Biomimetic TRIZ database has yet been applied to digital technology. 

Technobiophilia

Biophilia is a term coined by E.O. Wilson as “the innate attraction to life and lifelike processes” (Kellert and Wilson, 1993). Biophilic design is intended to replicate human experiences in nature and to create spaces that reinforce that connection; it is a way to improve health and wellness. For example plants and photos of natural scenes are used in interior design, courtyards, natural lighting, and water elements are implemented in architectural design, and parks and greenways connect humans to nature in urban design. Technobiophilia is the “innate attraction to life and lifelike processes as they appear in technology” as coined by Sue Thomas (Thomas, 2013). Technology developed with technobiophilia in mind helps increase our connection with nature while online. 

Products

Natural Computing

The field of “natural computing” or “bio-inspired computing” is decades old with some techniques already widespread and having a significant impact in applications today. The field takes three broad approaches: taking inspiration from nature to build hardware and software that solve problems uniquely or more effectively than previous methods, building digital systems that emulate life or are themselves alive, and building rudimentary computation or production machines from biological material or even living organisms. Perhaps the most well-known of these applications are artificial neural nets, which are the foundation of current artificial intelligence tools. Other examples include:

• Slime mold computing: Slime mold can solve linear programming, network, and path optimization problems (Straszak and Vishnoi, 2016). It has inspired routing protocols for wireless sensors (Li et al, 2010) and been used to build living logic gates (Adamatzky and Schubert, 2014).

• Generative design: Inspired by the diverse functionality that natural selection gives rise to, generative design lets algorithms iterate their own designs over hundreds or thousands of generations modified by predetermined constraints and goals. The results are often better than those humans have designed by themselves.

• New distributed applications architectures are directly inspired by the coordination of organisms in ecosystems. Holochain’s “agent-centric” holographic storage architecture mimics ecosystemic “memory.” Individual agents record personal transactions that other agents can validate as correct, and no agent maintains an official record of all transactions in the system (Harris-Braun et al, 2018). 

• At the intersection of software design and biological engineering,startups and researchers are engineering bacteria and even whole cells to deliver targeted gene therapies or other interventions to treat or prevent human disease (Conde, 2019).

Digital Art

• Fractal screensavers: Beautiful and compelling precisely because they embody the structural patterns we have evolved to be surrounded by and of which we ourselves are composed. This is an example of a technobiophilic product.

Biofeedback with Natural Frequencies

• Flux: A program that changes the color of phone and computer screens depending on the time of day to rebuild the bridge between our circadian rhythms and the cycles of the sun.

• Pranawave: A biofeedback tool for matching one’s breathing frequency with one’s baroreflex frequency. Breathing in this way increases vagal tone and may have several significant health benefits.

Empathy with Nature

• Rainforest Connection: This company installs acoustic monitors in rainforests and alerts authorities when chainsaws, motorcycles, trucks, or guns are heard. Their app allows users to listen to the actual sounds of rainforests in real time from anywhere in the world.

• Plant/animal identification and tracking apps: These can be used to develop relationships with plants and animals by learning their characteristics and functions while in nature.

• Tree Sense: A VR experiment out of MIT in which the user becomes a tree in a VR world. Haptic sensors on users’ hands and arms allow them to move and feel squirrels crawling on “their” branches.

Digital Naturalness is part of a long lineage of research and development to understand how to integrate the “code” of ecosystems and organisms into the digital product design and to use digital products to deepen humans’ perception and appreciation of the natural world in which we are embedded. In coming years, the development of this field will necessarily accelerate in order to solve for the destructive insensitivity of modern design and production methods while continuing to advance the power of computational tools.

References

Adamatzky, Andrew, and Theresa Schubert. “Slime Mold Microfluidic Logical Gates.” Materials Today, vol. 17, no. 2, 2014, pp. 86–91., doi:10.1016/j.mattod.2014.01.018.

Beckmann, Hartmut. “Method for Transferring the 40 Inventive Principles to Information Technology and Software.” Procedia Engineering, vol. 131, 2015, pp. 993–1001., doi:10.1016/j.proeng.2015.12.413.

Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry Innovation Inspired by Nature. Harper Perennial, 1997.

“Bionics.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 May 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionics.

Conde, Jorge. “What Is a Medicine?” Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz, February 7, 2019. a16z.com/2019/02/07/what-is-a-medicine-jorge-conde.

Harkness, Jon M. “In Appreciation ¶ A Lifetime of Connections: Otto Herbert Schmitt, 1913 - 1998.” Physics in Perspective (PIP), vol. 4, no. 4, Jan. 2002, pp. 456–490, doi:10.1007/s000160200005.

Harris-Braun, Eric, Nicolas Luck, and Arthur Brock. “Holochain Scalable Agent-Centric Distributed Computing Draft ALPHA 1) – 2/10/2018.” Holochain, 2018. https://github.com/holochain/holochain-proto/blob/whitepaper/holochain.pdf

Kellert, Stephen R., and Edward O. Wilson. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, 1993.

Li, Ke, Claudio E. Torres, Kyle Thomas, Louis F. Rossi and Chien-Chung Shen. “Slime Mold Inspired Routing Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks.” Swarm Intelligence, vol. 5, no. 3-4, Oct. 2011, pp. 183–223, doi:10.1007/s11721-011-0063-y.

McCulloch, Warren S., and Walter Pitts. “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, vol. 5, no. 4, 1943, pp. 115–133, doi:10.1007/bf02478259.

Straszak, Damian, and Nisheeth K. Vishnoi. “On a Natural Dynamics for Linear Programming.” Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science - ITCS '16, 2016, doi:10.1145/2840728.2840762.

Thomas, Sue. Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace. Bloomsbury, 2013.

“TRIZ Methodology, Tools, Articles and Case Studies.” The Triz Journal, triz-journal.com/.

A Design Process for Digital Naturalness

In the last blog, we described existing products and methodologies that incorporate nature into digital design. Broadly the two methodological approaches we discussed were 1) applying patterns or designs found in nature (biomimicry) and 2) bringing nature or simulations of nature into our environments (biophilia). Here we go a step deeper and suggest processes engineers and designers can use to purposefully transform their own subjective states - their experiential and attentional habits - in order to “prime the pump” toward spontaneously noticing design opportunities and making design choices that will tend to instantiate coherence, fractality, and autopoiesis in new digital products automatically. Adopting one or several of the tactics below may throughout the design process may then lead to product users experiencing greater wellness, beauty, and aliveness.

Tactic 1 - Relying on the Senses

Guide: Pay attention to your sensory experiences: seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, touching, balancing, temperature, passage of time, magnetic fields, etc. Sometimes purposefully refrain from analysis. Can we develop our sense perception to know when tech is good for us?

Inspiration: Analysis is necessary and helpful, but it can also be mutually exclusive with sensory attention. Our senses offer us deeper, richer, more complex and contextual information about the impact of our designs. We have probably over-emphasized the degree to which sensory data cannot be trusted, as we are evolutionarily adapted to use our senses to determine the meanings of various structures in the world. “If we focus on the world around us, and… take our conscious experiences and verbal descriptions with a grain of salt, we can start to improve our ability to trust our perceptual acumen and the structural information we access” (McCabe, 2014).

Tactic 2 - Tacking Toward Pleasure

Guide: Build digital tools which feel sensual and erotic to use rather than anxious and addictive. Feelings can be complex, but aim for a primary feeling of joy or pleasure, the deeper and more satisfying the better. 

Inspiration: The meanings we perceive in objects, their relevance for us, are delivered through subtle feelings and intuitions of possibilities. Negative and positive feelings provide useful information about the consequences of the object for us and their subtle, long term impacts. “Ecology is all delicious... Pleasure and delight only become more and more accurately tuned as ecognosis develops” (Morton, 129).

Tactic 3 - Designing Wholes

Guide: Design elements of an object so that they remain in harmonious and consistent, yet dynamic relationship with each other such that the whole they create is coherent and effective from the very beginning, rather than building up one part at a time.

Inspiration: We do not primarily experience our world as many separate objects, but rather as an integrated whole field of structural information and dynamic relationships that stay globally consistent while varying locally over time. 

The assumption that we need ‘higher mental processes’ to organize our perceptions of the world comes in part from our unfounded assumption that the terrestrial world in which we live is made of a multitude of separate objects that we must mentally reassemble and insert back into the context from which we abstracted them… On a terrestrial level, nothing is made of separate parts. (McCabe, 2014)

Tactic 4 - Using Nature’s Favored Structures

Guide: Consider using specific structures including spirals, meanders, branching patterns, 120-degree joints, self-similar scaling, and approximately infinite depth/complexity.

Inspiration: Some structures are ubiquitous in nature in part because they minimize energy use while maximizing other useful features. Since we have co-evolved with these structures all around us and because we are made of many of them ourselves, these structures may be particularly useful for creating coherence between ourselves and new technology. 

“In matters of visual form we sense that nature plays favorites. Among her darlings are spirals, meanders, branching patterns and 120-degree joints” - Peter Stevens ...Self-similar scaling… minimizes energy use, maximizes growth, and provides structural information about trees and forest systems on all levels of inquiry… We are structured to resonate to the structures of our world. (McCabe, 2014)

Tactic 5 - Entering the Open Ground

Guide: While designing, learn to track and modify your subjective state. Track: 1) what sensory information you are noticing and what sensory information you are not noticing; 2) how aware you are of this sensory information; which sensations are amplified, and which are attenuated; 3) what other aspects of subjectivity are strengthened or weakened; 4) what is in the foreground of your awareness and what is in the background; 5) where (if at all) you are experiencing a boundary between the “inside” and the “outside” of yourself; and 6) which (if any) self-state arises. Aim for: clean intention, tuned attention, sensory acuity, enhanced proprioception, time-space dilation, and selflessness. (Roy, 2018)

Inspiration: The subjective state you are in while developing new technology will influence the deep intention you bring to the design, what you notice, what design options occur to you, what decisions you make, and potentially the subjective experiences of the people who will use your product.

Tactic 6 - Communicating for Participation

Guide: When working with others use procedural, situated, specific, embodied, relational, and process language rather than abstract, managerial, declarative, or symbolic language.

Inspiration: Design is usually a collaborative rather than solitary activity. The collaborative process itself will limit or engender specific characteristics in the designed object (ABPUnimelb, 2016).

References

ABPUnimelb. “Dean's Lecture Series 2016 - John Wood.” YouTube, YouTube, 10 Apr. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkuLHVLvrq0

McCabe, Viki. Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes. Oxford University Press, 2014

Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. Columbia University Press, 2018

Roy, Bonnitta. “Awakened Perception: Perception as Participation." Integral Review, Vol. 14 No. 1, August 2018. https://integral-review.org/awakened-perception-perception-as-participation/

A Proposed Digital Naturalness Application: Supply Chain Network Resilience

Our goal with the Digital Naturalness project is to demonstrate the value of an approach to digital technology design leads to increased wellness, beauty, and aliveness in technology users (as well as supports humans to impact nature in a healthy way while continuing to develop more advanced digital tools). To do that we’ve so far outlined a possible set of objective features that can guide design, as well as subjective state-change processes to increase designers and engineers insight and intuition for embedding those features into their concrete projects. Here we suggest a novel product that could demonstrate the usefulness of this approach. 

Supply chain risk management is one of the biggest challenges for operations executives. For large companies with complex supply chains, a single crisis can result in hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue (O’Connor, 2011). These risks come not just from failures of immediate suppliers, but also failures of suppliers’ suppliers and so on. In fact, supply chain reliability is a function of the resilience of the entire supply chain network. A software tool that could 1. measure and 2. offer suggestions on improving the resilience of a supply chain network could increase the reliability of all participating companies’ supply chains simultaneously. Potential customers for the supply network resilience measurement tool would include companies with complex supply chains and supply chain management software platforms,

So how could we use a digital naturalness approach to building such a tool? Supply chains are complex mutualistic networks. One way of looking to increase their resilience is to ask how other complex mutualistic networks from nature maintain their resilience. Network scientists have looked for useful predictors and drivers of the resilience of complex systems, including ecosystems, for decades (May, 1972) (Gao, 2016).Are any of  three technical correspondences to the digital naturalness design principles relevant? As it turns out, coherence is very similar to one of the most frequently cited network characteristics linked to resilience. This characteristic is called “connectance.” There are several ways to define connectance. The simplest is as the fraction realized trophic (i.e. food web) connections over all possible connections. The more of these connections between plants and animals actually exist, the more resilient the ecosystem will be (Dunne et al, 2002) (van Altena et al, 2016) (Thébault, 2010).

So, how could we translate connectance from network ecology and test whether we could build a digital tool that could use it measure and increase the resilience of global supply chains? First we would need to define the relevant entities and relationships and gather the requisite data. For example, the process for determining the resilience of a supply chain for a target industry might follow these steps:

Define Relationships and Gather Data

1. Define a node in the industry supply chain network as a supplier, client, or transport hub. Define the relationship between these nodes as supplier, client, or transport.

2. Start with one node. Discover which companies the node sells products to, buys parts from, and ships with (tier 1). For the simplest definition of connectance, only the identification of the connected nodes and their types are required.

3. Discover which other companies (tier 2) each of the tier one companies sell to and buy from.

4. Continue with tier 3, etc. as far as data is available.

5. Repeat steps 1-3 as far as possible for each identified node, in order to discover the total number of nodes in the industry network.

Then, to determine the resilience of the industry supply chain network, calculate its connectance:

Determine Resilience

1. Connectance = the number of links between companies divided by number of companies squared = L/C2

2. “Number of links” means how many supplier, client, and shipping relationships are already operating in the network. The connectance measure uses a “directed” graph, meaning that if two companies are both suppliers and customers to each other, that counts as two links.

3. Calculate the connectance. If there are 40 companies in the analysis and 200 links between them the connectance would be 200/1600 = .125

4. The higher the connectance score, the more resilient the industry supply chain network.

Increasing Network Resilience

Once resilience has been determined, the software tool could make recommendations to individual companies to build supplier, client, or shipping relationships with nodes in the network with which it does not currently have a relationship. This would increase the connectance score for the entire network, thereby increasing its resilience.

As mentioned, L/C2 is only the simplest of the many related ways to calculate connectance in the field of network ecology. Later, more nuanced iterations of the software could use various weighted analyses by taking into account the unit volumes of the sales or purchases of each company in the network. It could also place companies that have very similar suppliers and customers into sets, then perform the connectance analysis over these sets rather than individual companies. Both of these are inspired directly from alternative ways of calculating a natural ecosystem’s connectance.

Surprisingly, as far as we have seen no supply chain risk management company is using a network topological analysis inspired by resilient ecosystems to measure the resilience of their companies’ supply chains. Using connectance to model resilience could especially aid in reducing long-term risk because it fosters industry wide collaboration and gives companies insight into making the network as a whole as resilient as possible.

This is just one example of applying the digital naturalness design principles to embed some of the deep qualities of beauty, aliveness, and wellness from our interactions with nature into digital systems. As we continue to build more and more complex digital infrastructures that manage more and more of our daily lives and the flow of significant resources, tools like the ones described here, and the process to develop it, will become increasingly useful (Bratton, 2016).

References

Bratton, Benjamin H. The Stack - On Software and Sovereignty. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016.

Dunne, Jennifer A., Richard J. Williams, and Neo D. Martinez. “Network Structure and Biodiversity Loss in Food Webs: Robustness Increases with Connectance.” Wiley Online Library. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, July 10, 2002. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1461-0248.2002.00354.x.

Gao, J., Barzel, B. & Barabási, A. “Universal resilience patterns in complex networks.” Nature 530, 307–312. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16948

May, RM. “Will a Large Complex System be Stable?” Nature 238:413414. 1927. https://doi.org/10.1038/238413a0

O’Connor, John. “Supply Chain Risk Management at Cisco : Embedding End-to-End Resiliency into the Supply Chain.” 2011.

Thébault, Elisa & Fontaine, Colin. “Stability of Ecological Communities and the Architecture of Mutualistic and Trophic Networks.” Science (New York, N.Y.). 329. 853-6. 2010. 10.1126/science.1188321. 

van Altena, Cassandra, Lia Hemerik, and Peter Ruiter. “Food Web Stability and Weighted Connectance: The Complexity-Stability Debate Revisited.” Theoretical Ecology 9, no. 1. January 2016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12080-015-0291-7.