CHELSEA COLLEGE OF ARTS / GRADUATE DIPLOMA: INTERIOR DESIGN

Reflective writing

Unit1 : Commodity & Design

Project 1: live-work-collect studio

Xinrui Li

15/11/2020

Identity of collector: It is to integrate, think and narrate a large number of materials or immaterial things. It’s an act or activity.

Such work of analysis, sorting, classification and integration, no matter at the micro or macro level, has its own media and ways of expression. As observers and collectors, we have the obligations and responsibilities of listeners and communicators for the phenomena shown by the collected objects.

The foundation of the project is based on the theory of “emergence,” – “the state of our world is naturally described by the interactions between individuals capable of decision-making, and all of these systems exhibit emergence.” For example, the ant colony and the nervous system, the flexible behaviour of the whole system depends on the behaviour of a large number of subjects governed by relatively few rules, and the essential part of the complexity comes from the absolute number of subjects it contains.

Just as human society can be regarded as a huge experimental model composed of individuals with different nonlinear rules as subjects, emergent phenomena exist in every field.

Cellular automata are a classic nonlinear generation system is the study of emergence theory, it is also the basic elements of the inspiration of my project, there is an important theory emerging research conclusion: simple, almost absurd rules can generate natural phenomenon, the emergence of interaction for the centre of the emerging phenomenon, its simple accumulation is much more complex than a single behaviour.

Similarly, a classic model of emergence also exists in our computer system, which makes me think, in the post-digital era, there is a lot of information and data overload. They are all “individuals in the model”. What kind of emergence will occur in future society? What are the interactive rules? How does this affect human behaviour and consciousness, and is everything we do still controlled by our brain nerves?

Back to the identity of collector and observer, I tried to explore these problems, based on this, I joined the concept of digital heritage, compared with the nowadays growing and changing information and data, the digital heritage data seems to be in another different rule in the ” emergence “, compared to two kinds of different patterns, combined with some philosophical and poetic concept, we can even simply interpreted as “parallel world”, and they each have a running law of similar but not identical, in the process of entropy decreases gradually into chaos.

This kind of chaos is exactly the gap between “those two models”, and I make a pyramid model of personality-communication-thoughts-consciousness for the data world. Correspondingly, the part of digital heritage also makes an evolutionary model of data-information-knowledge-wisdom, which is also a pyramid form, and the two are the mirror images of each other. In the project, steel mesh materials are also been set to simulate unpredictable, nonlinear groups or individuals in data deluges and emergent phenomena.

The project explores the relationship between “the two” and the boundaries of chaos, as a collector’s point of view to interpret the interaction of macro data and microcosmic space, it is more like chatting and joking, although the rigour of the entire research process needs to be improved, but the results of the study and outcomes, could basic satisfactory in two weeks short time, in my future studies, “emergence” theory will be the most foundation for me to research human behaviour.

Reference

Ball, P. 2006. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Macmillan.

Izhikevich, E., Conway, J. and Seth, A. (2015), “Game of Life”, Scholarpedia, Scholarpedia, Vol. 10 No. 6, p. 1816.

Holland, J.H. 2000. Emergence: From Chaos to Order. OUP Oxford.

Bibliography

Gutowitz, H. (1991), Cellular Automata: Theory and Experiment, MIT Press, available at: (accessed 3 December 2020).

Bhatia, M. (2009), Introduction to Computer Network, MADHULIKA, available at: (accessed 3 December 2020).

Noback, C.R., Ruggiero, D.A., Demarest, R.J. and Strominger, N.L. (2005), The Human Nervous System: Structure and Function, Springer Science & Business Media, available at: (accessed 3 December 2020).