Introduction: Mortality in Design

Abstract

Digital design for mortals. Precisely what is unsettling about modern technological construction is that, instead of holding together earth and sky, mortals and divinities, it penetrates the earth to extract resources, pushes beyond the sky with rockets and satellites, attempts to suppress mortality with medicine and drugs, and precisely in this attempt to control the body, rejects the art of dying, and thereby and in the very process the remembering of the divinities that is the most intimate part of human suffering. More than ten years old now, Carl Mitcham’s reflection on the performance of vernacular architecture (the building of his own house in fact) is a powerful statement about the tendency of modern technology to suppress human mortality and with it the expression of the human spirit. Precisely what is unsettling about modern technological construction is that, instead of holding together earth and sky, mortals and divinities, it penetrates the earth to extract resources, pushes beyond the sky with rockets and satellites, attempts to suppress mortality with medicine and drugs, and precisely in this attempt to control the body, rejects the art of dying, and thereby and in the very process the remembering of the divinities that is the most intimate part of human suffering.