The New Normal. Medium Design

n one side of the screen, stories about sociotechnical organizations — be they railroads, hydroelectric networks or blockchains — may be about decentralization and freedom. But the real disposition of the organization may be concentrating power and authority with a universal ambition.

The player “knows how” to respond to a string of changing conditions over time with an organ of interplay.

Designing that protocol, and redesigning it as necessary, is medium design.

Designers are very good at making things, but medium design is less like making a thing and more like having your hands on the faders and toggles of organization. It is the design of interdependencies, chemistries, chain reactions and ratchets. It benefits from an artistic curiosity about spatial wiring or reagents in spatial mixtures, a curiosity about designing not a single object but a platform for inflecting populations of objects or setting up relative potentials within them.

But in any context, large or small, designing the medium is managing the potentials and relationships between objects, the activity or disposition immanent in their organization.

Just as this medium thinking inverts the typical focus on object over field, maybe medium design can invert some habitual approaches to problem solving, aesthetics and politics.

Dissent, also adopting a binary, exists in a world of enemies and innocents.

The architect sees not only buildings with shapes and outlines but also the matrix of activities that inflects them.