Design in Hyperreality

Spoiler alerts! Blade Runner (1982), Inception (2010), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Last week, I wrote about the significance of human-centered ethos in design. Our actions are governed by our perspectives on the world, which are impacted by every experience we undergo, which are in turn (at the least) influenced by the features environment in which those experiences occur. On the other side, the features that someone adds to the environment are informed by the way in which that individual perceives the world—an outlook that is, again, influenced by their previous experiences, influenced by the features of the surrounding environment. The history, present, and future of society is in this way a self-perpetuating succession of perspectives influencing designs influencing others’ perspectives: we design our environments and thereby design ourselves, the progression of our human society.

Detractors might attempt to deflate the significance of the design of film, or other “invented” media, insisting that because it is not real in some important sense—not even framed as real—it is not an significantly impactful feature of the environment. But my claim is that all designed features of the environment—manufactured, non-fictional or entirely fictional—impact those who interact with them in an important way.

We can turn to a feature of the 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner for an effective rejoinder to the detractor’s objection. In the film, Rachael, a replicant, is manufactured with implanted memories to promote her belief that she is human. In a scene that takes place after she is convinced she is not human, but a replicant, she begins playing the piano. She says she remembers piano lessons, but expresses doubt that the memories are her own. The audience is left with some sense that they are not real memories—at least, that they are not her own.

In a similar way, the detractor could say that film is not real in the sense that the events happened to someone else (and not to the viewer) in the case of non-fictional film, and that they happened to no one at all in the case of fictional film—and are thus not impactful to the viewer in a way we should really care about.

To address the former case, the film shows clearly that despite the fact that the memories were encoded by someone else (most likely the niece of the man who created her, the audience learns), because Rachael has access to them, she is affected by them: she is able to leverage them to play the piano in the present. To address the latter case—fictional film—it seems likewise easy to imagine that Rachael might have had entirely manufactured memories implanted in her; if they were of piano lessons, there is the sense that she would still be affected by those false memories to be able to play the piano at present. It does not seem to matter one way or the other that the memories were encoded by someone else or entirely manufactured: in both cases, because she has access to them, they affect her. The same is true of designed features of the environment: manufactured, non-fictional or entirely fictional, those who interact with them will be affected by them.

This point becomes especially relevant with consideration of the possibility that we live in a “hyperreality” in the Postmodernist age. Media theorist Jean Baudrillard mourns the “culture of the simulacrum” of Postmodernism. [i] Simulacrums, in Baudrillard’s terminology, are copies without originals, such as films: for example, even if I watched the film Blade Runner at its premiere and you watch it at home, it makes little sense for me to insist that I watched the original and you watched merely a copy. Baudrillard also mourns the loss of the distinction between original and copy, a process he calls simulation, or “the generation of models of a real without origins or reality: a hyperreal.”

Hyperrealism, Baudrillard argues, is the characteristic mode of Postmodernism, where the distinction between simulation and reality “continually implodes” and so are experienced for the most part without difference compared to one another. When they are experienced as different, the simulation can often be experienced as more real than reality, and we come to inhabit—and prefer to inhabit—the realm of the hyperreal.

At the same time, however, we seem to prefer the idea that we inhabit the realm of the real: Baudrillard attributes Disneyland’s success to the fact that it poses as the imaginary to allow us to experience the rest of the world as real by comparison; when all the while all of it is hyperreal. The simulacrum is experienced as better than the real—Disneyland is seen as a rosier version of reality—and while we prefer to believe that we generally reside in the realm of the real, we inhabit the realm of the hyperreal.

We see engagement with this idea in the 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception, which moreover suggests that humans to some extent choose to accept preferred sets of circumstances or perspectives as reality.

In the film, Cobb reveals that he and his wife Mal went into limbo, a world of infinite subconscious from which escape is extremely difficult. At that deep level of subconscious, Mal refused to believe that her environment was not real; finally convincing her of this idea, Cobb unintentionally incepted into her mind the generalized notion that her world was not real, causing her to believe the same when inhabiting reality. Attempting to awake for real, Mal committed suicide, and tried to entice Cobb to do the same by framing him for her death, causing him to flee the country, leaving their children behind. At the climax of the film, Cobb rejects his projection of Mal, the sim of her, saying that she was “just not good enough” compared to the real version of her. At the close of the film, however, he returns to the United States and his children, and runs a test to determine whether his environment is simulacrum or reality; he does not observe the result of the test, instead joining his children outside. This lack of observation leaves the strong sense that he does not care if his environment is real or simulacrum, or if he can tell the difference. He embraces his desired set of circumstances, succumbing to Mal’s earlier encouragement to “choose the reality he wants.”

The 2001 Steven Spielberg film A.I. Artificial Intelligence shows that design might soon extend to completely designed and manufactured potential members of society, and also that doing so might erase our current conception of the notion of “real” and “not-real” even further, perhaps leaving us to choose perhaps the reality we “want,” but perhaps otherwise the reality we are primed to see.

In the film, the “Flesh Fair” can be viewed as an attempt to assert a binary between simulacrum and the real that might, the film seems to suggest, be for naught. The Flesh Fair is “a commitment to a truly human future,” a “celebration of life”—human life, real life, it is implied—in which “mechas” (as in machine: the artificially intelligent robots) are enthusiastically destroyed in a violent carnival. The explicit goal of the fair is to “purge” the world of “artificiality” by means of dramatic, lurid disposal of everything that is simulacrum: the audience has clearly chosen to embrace a perspective in which these mechanical subjects are mere machine, and furthermore a threat to their status as real.

In this scene, the emcee invites “he who is without sim” to “cast the first stone,” to destroy a mecha. David, however, the central sympathetic character of the film, an artificially intelligent robot created to love, comes across as a liminal being. Though clearly “machine” under the producer’s x-ray device, David also does not fit the audience’s concept of mecha: aligning with the audience’s idea of human appearance and emotional display, an audience member cries, “Mecha don't plead for their lives! Who is that? He looks like a boy!” to which the rest of the audience agrees in repeated murmurs of “It’s a boy.”

David features highly anthropomorphic design features, which have been shown empirically to subconsciously trigger the attribution of human mental states and characteristics [ii]—these design choices strongly promote a certain perception of “reality.” Accordingly, despite the emcee’s attempts to steel the audience against the “lie,” the “sim,” at the climax of the scene, the humans attack the emcee, who is called a “monster” (therein dehumanized), forgetting about David and the other mechas.

It is clear here that what the audiences (both audiences—on screen and on your couch) take to be truth is a blend of what we are primed and what we prefer to see, and even then the “line” between human (“orga”) and mecha is more than blurred in this scene: David is pronounced “one of a kind” and the emcee is a “monster” of another kind; there is the sense that the distinction between reality and simulacrum ceases to matter, and perhaps ceases even to exist.

Let us consider this the worst-case scenario, for us humans who greatly prefer the idea that we inhabit reality: we do exist in hyperreality, in which there is no significant distinction between simulacrum and the real, and no meaning to be made from this difference. Even in this case, the importance of design choice just becomes more evident.

In the (hypothetical) hyperreality, we invent a (preferred, primed) meaningful perspective to take, if no grounded meaning is actually to be found, from interaction to interaction with different designed spaces and entities; if there is no reality to ground it, it just becomes even more impacted by every arbitrary feature in each design. Baudrillard is happy to throw up his hands in the midst of our hopeless descent into hyperreality in a sort of “resigned celebration…If nothing can be done…celebration is as good of a response as any; at least it’s a party”; all that is left is to play with the pieces. [iii] My response is that, if Baudrillard is correct, this playing with the pieces now more than ever has serious consequences, and should not be taken lightly. If humans can no longer meaningfully distinguish between the simulacrum and the real, all features of the environment, including design artifacts, carry equally significant weight in the formation of subjective perspective on that environment—and those humans’ success in (perhaps complacently) maintaining any one “chosen” or curated perspective.

Falsehoods framed as fact, illusions taken to be true, or fiction taken to be just that—all designed features of the environment have an impact on the users who encounter them.

[i] Storey, John. “Postmodernism.” In An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 154-180. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1993, 162.

[ii] See e.g. Darling, Kate, “‘Who’s Jonny?’ Anthropomorphic Framing in Human-Robot Interaction, Integration, and Policy.” In Robot Ethics 2.0, ed. Patrick Lin, Ryan Jenkins, and Keith Abney, 173-188. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

[iii] Storey, 165.