Ontological Design, a (r)evolutionary approach to life
According to the Dictionary, ontology is the area of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence. It studies why we are the way we are.
Ontological Design is hence a design discipline concerned with designing the human experience.
It’s this idea that everything we design, in turn, designs us back. It’s a wireframe to understand that through architecture, lighting, texture, sound, taste, words or experiences we can change how we think and how we feel. Jason Silva summarizes this idea by saying that “Spaces architect the mind” or explained by Steven Johnson “Our thoughts shape our spaces, and our spaces return the favor”. Emmerson Brown misquoted Churchill on a line famously attributed to Marshall McLuhan and said: “We shape our tools and then the tools shape us.”
Design is something far more pervasive and profound than is generally recognized by designers, cultural theorists, philosophers or the average person, as it can pertain not only to how we build buildings, cars or furniture, but how we shape our thoughts or how we architect societies.
I’m often looked at with curiosity and deep interest when I introduce myself as an Ontological Designer, explaining that I use all the tools that design gives us, both tangible and intangible, to shape how people think and feel, but it’s soon demystified when I share that we are all, including my listeners, ontological designers: We look to rent apartments with more light and plants because we know that makes us feel better in the spaces we live in. We take a bath and a glass of wine at the end of a long day because we know that will make us feel better. We are constantly designing our environment to change how we feel or think, knowingly or unknowingly. We shape our spaces and they return the favor.
Additionally to these tangible things, we can also design our minds with our language. Abracadabra, an old hermetic word for magic, literally meant “As I speak, I manifest”. We could rewrite Steven Johnson’s quote and say that our thoughts shape our words and our words return the favor. Terence Mckenna used to say that “we can only evolve as fast as our language does” and that “we can only understand what we can name”. The way we describe our reality changes how we experience it. Some tribes in the Amazon don’t have verbs for the past or the future and hence can only comprehend the present time. They count one, two and many. Three, four or three thousand are alien concepts, they are all “many”. But if we craft new words we can understand deeper. First Nations of Canada have a multiplicity of words to describe the different snows they experience: hard snow, spring snow, melting snow. They can see much more than an average human for which it’s all just… snow.
Ontological Design is nothing but the awareness that our reality and perception are built by our environment and our words, and that we can have agency at designing how we feel and how we think.
This is why I’m so passionate about my work as an Ontological Designer. It’s the delightful possibility to use space and experience to design a better world. A world where we can redefine our connection with Other, Self and Nature. Where we can redesign our social architecture, our communion with our environment. Where we can transform spaces to serve us better and foster connection. A regenerative world where we give more than we take and where by the use of these tools we can make people happy(er) and more connected.
A world where we can foster Ecstasis, Catharsis and Communitas through ritual practice, art and experience.
And by changing ourselves, we can change our societies. I believe behavior is a function of culture. If we change culture, everything changes.
Daniel Pinchbeck writes in his article titled Ontological Intervention that “You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system […] But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing.
[…] While it is very difficult to change the underlying paradigm of society as a whole, any society is made up of individuals. Those individuals can undergo a paradigm shift at any moment. When enough individuals have made a shift, society as a whole will follow.”
Using Ontological Design we can transform our world to unimaginable extents. And if we don’t get that far, at the bare minimum we can tend to and transform our own human experience. By applying Ontological Design principles we can make small changes that transform our daily experiences. By changing cold hospital white lights for warmer tones and beautiful wallpapers we accelerate healing (I believe white lights should be banned from the face of the Earth like they were demonic tools invented by perverse men just to make us unhappy). By letting the warmth of the sun bathe our faces for five minutes a day, by walking barefoot and feeling the soil more often, by playing music that is soothing to our nervous system, by designing green spaces and parks into our cities, by changing our language and how we refer to ourselves and others, we can change our very own state of being. We can exponentially improve our moods and our vision of the world with such small effort, and choose awe instead of darkness.
This is also why we invented art, poetry, music, color. So we can nurture our senses and remember why we are human.
My work as an Ontological Designer focuses on three major verticals: Space, Experience and Systems Architecture.
Space
Architecture, lighting, decor, texture… How we structure our spaces defines how we feel but also how we behave. Wider and accessible walkways promote walking and healthier habits. Cities with bike paths reduce the use of cars. By creating nourishing spaces for community to gather we create social bonds and Communitas, leading to healthier neighborhoods and societies that support each other. Using Placemaking approaches and biophilic and biomimetic design we incorporate Nature into our spaces, we create human-scale cities designed for individuals to live happier. By designing festival grounds or temples for transformational experiences we create the conditions for ecstasis and social behavior change through noetic collective experiences.
My work in Space focuses on the design of spaces that can change how we behave and how we think. I started developing eco-villages (or metamodern villages, as I prefer to call them inspired by my friend Tucker Walsh) because they are autonomous whole systems. They encapsulate life. They are a perfect blueprint for Ontological Design and how to redesign the world we live in, how we relate to each other, to ourselves and to nature. They are a reference and inspiration on how to build better. How to create community. How to design for better states of mind.
la tierra was a two year effort to design a wireframe for how to build communities for 100 to 1000 people in which we could create blueprints for better ontological design. This masterplan has inspired many projects and is on its way to materialize somewhere in the World soon.
Another favorite project of mine is Chá, an experiential tea house.
Experience
My career as an ontological designer started as an experience designer. Experience is one of the most powerful ways to change behavior and… it’s also the most fun.
In experience design we play with narrative and space at equal parts. We use light, music, textures, sound and every sensorial element to craft story-universes that we can immerse people in. Through this, we create noetic and ineffable experiences. Experiences that touch on mysterious and elusive themes and create collective moments of awe and wonder. Experiences that create indescribable feelings, growth, learning, happiness, inspiration. We create enactive environments designed for learning through play. We craft sandboxes to unleash the imagination.
Cocina Sagrada is my playground. A nomadic experiential company that creates immersive experiences all around the world. From secret dinners to blindfolded gastronomic journeys to ecstatic celebrations of MythOS and story. Performance, art, stories and food blend into an explosion of flavor and emotion. This is where we come to be kids again. To build forts. To explore the boundary conditions of the human experience. This is where magick and awe occur.
We’ve discovered ancient civilizations hidden in 200 year old fortress islands that we conquered with sailboats. We’ve shaken the foundational stories of the valley of Silicon with visions of regenerative futures. We’ve created secret societies and dissolved them before the first light of dawn. We once kicked a European prince of our own speakeasy. Natalie Portman once bit one of our members, but she apologized. We’ve brought ballet and opera to churches, theater to deserts, food to museums, music to caves, tea to temples.
And through each one of these experiences we’ve imagined worlds and better futures. We’ve learned to exist in right relationship with the world around us. We’ve learned how to become future ancestors. How to build solarpunk cities and regenerate our ecosystems. We’ve explored what it means to be human, ontologically designing our environments to change our minds, our bodies, our souls.
Systems Architecture
The last piece in which I apply Ontological Design is in designing new systems. We are in a liminal age between two civilizations, and as one construct of the world and one model of social architecture collapses and transforms, we are in need of creating new ones and reimagining our social fabric, our relationships, our politics, the way we inhabit cities or organize, the way we vote or participate in the res publica.
By using Ontological Design principles we can design for better ways of being, for cities that are human-friendly, for systems that are life affirming and where we support all life. We use Regenerative Design (the field of design that is systemic and deeply considerate in nature. Based on core principles inspired by nature, it aims to increase the vitality and viability of any system through multi-sector stakeholder engagement), Systemic Thinking (the ability to think in systems and understand the hyperconnectivity of the world we inhabit) and Speculative Design (wireframes for thinking how to move beyond the plausible into the possible, for inquiry, investigation, innovation and ultimately inspiration for expansive futures that move beyond the present possibilities.) as tools to enact change and architect better systems.
Through the Design Science Studio, our work at Ontologica or the development of eco-villages, we set the foundations of better designed systems inspired by a better ontology of our realities, so we can become more fulfilled and whole.
Ontological Design is ultimately concerned with designing the human experience. A better human experience. We shape our tools and our tools shape us in return. It’s time to move from hammers to (vegan) feather beds. It’s time to shape our spaces to architect our minds. It’s time to discover that we are all Ontological Designers.
Nicolas Alcalá
Some additional links:
10 Ways to Thoroughly “Solarpunk” Society by Emil Ejner Friis
Ecstasis & Catharsis: The Makers of Meaning by James Cussen
Ontological Design by Stephen Bau
The Evolution of Design with Culture Thinking by Damian Madray