“The martians are coming. Grab your pencils"…”
I’m not a religious person, although I was raised a catholic. My mum changed religion about as often as most people replace their kitchens, jumping from (IIRC) Baptist, to Catholicism, to Anglican, and finally, terminally, to a conflicted fundamental religious group run by our then family GP.
Up until I was about 15, I was an altar server at our local catholic church, schlepping down through the village every Sunday afternoon in my school uniform, as it was, in mum’s words, ”the smartest thing you have”. The porch to the church had stone seating either side of the door, and kids from my school would make a point of sitting there, bikes strewn across the entranceway while everyone filed into church, me included. It was a bit like the finale of “The Gauntlet”.
Some people might tell me that there’s a parable there about strength in faith, but they didn’t have to get on my school bus every Monday morning.
35 years on, I would class myself as an agnostic:
I don’t feel the need to believe in a god, but I’m not so arrogant as to think that means there isn’t one.
If pressed, I’d say that the closest I come to any formative faith is Shinto, the indigenous Japanese religion dating back to around the third century BCE. Shinto centres around “Kami”, spirits that inhabit nature around us, from flora and fauna, to weather patterns, and even the sun and moon.
Sound familiar? Purloin this idea for his script, George Lucas did.
I like the concepts behind Shinto because it gives scope for belief in cosmic organisation without the awkward anthropomorphisation of a strategic deity. Shinto says ‘pay attention and you’ll see that the world works together. Be respectful and it’ll work with you.’
As well as offering an economic, balanced doctrine for respecting both the everyday and the ‘celestial’, it’s also a neat summation of how I approach my design work, and why I rattle on about creative ‘bandwidth’ so much.
On Sunday, the Osiris-Rex spacecraft dropped off a sample of dust and rock from the asteroid Bennu, after a journey of roughly 7 years and around 320 million km. Leaving aside the fact that nothing could possibly go wrong with introducing completely alien substances to our self-contained atmosphere, there’s a buzz around what we’ll learn from this dust. Secrets about the origins of the solar system, or the beginnings of life, perhaps.
This comes hot on the heels of NASA’s recent press conference regarding its appointment of a director specifically to oversee the study of UAP’s (the new, non-tinfoil hat name for UFO’s). This appointment, just a couple of months after a larger press conference on UAP’s, can be summed up with, “There’s some stuff flying around on Earth, and we really, REALLY don’t know what it is”.
I’ll come back to NASA in a minute, as there’s something pertinent from a design perspective.
As well as NASA’s announcement on UAP’s, and Osiris-Rex’s interstellar dust, a couple of weeks ago, the James Webb telescope detected possible signs of a water ocean on the exoplanet K2-18 b, along with the substance dimethyl sulphide, which on earth is only found as the bi-product of organic phytoplankton.
I’m put in mind of Arthur C Clarke - “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying”.
The religious implications of a verified populated universe are significant. So much so that, in 2021, NASA enlisted 24 theologians from the Centre for Theological Enquiry in Princeton, NJ, specifically to help explore how religious groups would react to concrete evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
For a religion like Catholicism, with it’s focus on God’s relationship with humankind, and a long background of ‘theology as social authoritariansim’, evidence of the deity’s moonlighting might force a swift retcon, like Disney executives at a Star Wars strategy meeting.
For Shinto, where the theological framework is much more generalised, the proof of life outside our knowledge can more easily be accommodated. It’s just another aspect of universal interconnectedness.
So what does this have to do with design? How do these stories help me with my everyday creative work?
I noted that I’d come back to NASA, and it’s because I want to pick up on something that was said during the UAP press conference.
NASA has called on the public to submit their own photos and footage of UAPs - the shift in moniker from UFO to UAP is part of the de-stigmatising of the topic to encourage people to come forward.
It’s a call to amass as much information as possible – not to identify alien craft, but to create solid context around them by understanding what stuff like aircraft, weather balloons and lightening look like under varying circumstances.
To paraphrase the NASA officials. “To find a needle in a haystack, it’s not enough to know what the needle looks like, you need to know what all the hay looks like too.”
Hitting the right design can often be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The hay is made up of client briefs, timescales, production requirements, audiences, previous work, future work, family, bills. You get the idea. There’s a heap of stuff crowding in, and somewhere in that dusty mess is the idea, or connection that you’re looking for.
I see my students (and I’m guilty of it myself) staring at a page of sketches, or a brief, willing a solution to present itself, fixed into a doctrine of design processes supposedly engineered to help ‘think outside the box’.
I’m all for outside the box thinking, but it’s no use if you don’t understand what’s in the box, and how it relates to what’s outside.
NASA are seeking to identify unknowns by understanding more about the knowns that surround them. Defining the new by framing it with the existing.
By being more Shinto - embracing the equal importance of everything around us, and being more NASA – seeking to understand the context and identity of those things, we can create new ideas that are robust and grounded.
Everything is interesting, and every designer should be interested.
I’m excited to think that in my lifetime, we might find proof that life isn’t unique to our planet. It’s an exciting topic all by itself, but more so because it will change so many of our social, political and theological conventions, and challenge us to think about what it means to be human on a new level.
In terms of outside-the-box thinking, it doesn’t get much better than that…