Dr. Thomas Pearce Appointed Junior Professor of »Emerging Technologies and Design«

Before reading, we recommend listening to the song »Emerge« by Fischerspooner (link to Youtube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTetvhDqfqY

»Hi, Huh-i…«

What is »Emerging Technologies«?

»Hyper, Hyper-media-ocrity…«

The subject of hyper-media-presence sung about by artist collective »Fischerspooner« in the early 2000s has now reached entirely new levels. Breakneck development and ever evolving methods and technologies all promising to make everything easier, faster, smarter, more efficient and automated:

»Feels good, Looks good, Sounds good…«

But does »good« really mean good? This is a key question for Thomas Pearce and one that he would like to take into long-term consideration. Born to a Canadian-born Belgian and a Canadian, Pearce began his academic career at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, graduating with a degree in Cultural History. Even then, he was already focussing on topics of architecture and design. After completing his Master’s degree in Cultural History, Pearce moved to Germany to study architecture at the TU Berlin where he completed a Bachelor of Science. Following that, he completed both a Master’s degree in Architecture and a PhD in Architectural Design at the renowned Bartlett School of Architecture in London. This was where Pearce encountered and was shaped by unconventional teaching methods, for example designing problems instead of solutions. Once he completed his Master’s degree, Pearce began working with various experimental architecture and design studios as an expert in the technologies of digital capture, design and fabrication. He also moved into teaching at UCL and the Architectural Association where he taught design fundamentals, led his own design class for a number of years and, more recently, worked on the »Design for Manufacture« digital fabrication programme.

»One credo that I took away from there was to try, experiment, fail, fail again, and eventually fail better. This is the only way to make progress as a designer. You can’t state something without first building it«, says Pearce. »This extends beyond teaching at many universities; it’s important to me to continuously explore disciplinary boundaries through experimental technologies founded in theory, craft and history.«

»Feels good, Looks good, Sounds good…«

But are new technologies such as 3D printing truly the saviours of do-gooders? »You might imagine that I am a technopositivist. But I am actually much more concerned with other issues — the question of which new worlds can emerge from new technology, for example. Or whether we can use new technologies as speculative, creative tools. If we look at 3D scanning, for instance, on the one hand, it provides us with the possibility of capturing physical reality with extreme precision.

On the other hand, however, it creates a completely new way of understanding the world as semi-transparent clouds made up of millions of data points. This is not only an issue of aesthetics; if we consider how these measurements come to be, we also become aware of their susceptibility to error, for example when we can reflective, tiny or moving objects. We could also say: too bad, we have to filter out these errors or forego scanning these objects at all. Or we could instead ask ourselves: how can we use these erroneous, non-real measurements in a speculative way, dealing with them playfully? Perhaps we can learn to understand these technical errors, plan and actively design them as »chimeras«.

Such speculative approaches are not simply playful ends in themselves — they absolutely have a broader social relevance when we realise, for example, that 3D scanning can be used not only in manufacturing, but also in areas such as autonomous driving, surveillance or even warfare. And so I always aim to ask the question: How can we, with the knowledge from this technology, think critically and speculatively? And how does this knowledge insert itself into social and artistic discourses?