Connectivity is the capacity of communication networks to connect everything and everyone to everything and everyone else. Unlike the telephone, whose great advantage is its neutrality as a medium (you use the phone, but you don't think about it) the InterNet very positively conveys the idea of shared communication space. We already use the telephone, send faxes and e-mails; what happens in telematic space is that people start having continuous conversations and dialogues "out there." In the words of anthropologist Constance Perin, "new electronic social fields are emerging which raise fundamental questions of space and time in relation to industrial organization."

But even if connectivity, rather than "Being There" verisimilitude, becomes the driving force behind the development of communication networks, there are still important ways for design to enhance the communication processes.

A project called "The Poetics of Telepresence" by Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby of the Vormevingsinsituut might provide a sense of what this could involve. The project looks at the effect of fusing physical and telematic space using the study of proxemics: how do different spatial relationships - standing close, standing apart, eavesdropping - change the whole tenor of the way we communicate? Why should videoconferencing always be face to face? Here, each person sits inside a box in which the weather in the other country is projected, and listens to the person's voice. Why limit contact to speech, or sight? We could use radio to trigger heat devices remotely, or to emit smoke or smells. I like the idea of a "hot air" button on my telephone, so I could politely (or not-so-politely!) let the person at the other end know she or he was talking nonsense. Temperature is highly evocative of the body: to recreate an intimate atmosphere of "co-presence" for a call, why not make the area warm?

The big telecom companies emphasize "purposive" communication - all those TV ads with dynamic business persons doing deals on their cellular phones. But a lot of the most important communication is informal, accidental, happens by chance. Dunne & Raby came up ideas whereby telecommunications might allow you "bump into" people in distant spaces. A sub-text of this work is to explore the idea of a "virtual institute," richer modes of communication than simply exchanging messages. Dunne & Raby emphasize the importance of objects among all this communication, and have come up with these totemic "things" that trigger all sorts of poetic telematic exchanges when you go near them.


CONCLUSION

The thing about air travel is that it allows you to cover vast distances in a short time, and I've certainly done that in the last 50 minutes or so. I set out to explore a common activity - flying - shared by most of us here, with the particular aim of provoking you to look and think about it differently next time you fly. I suggest that in the modern world - of which airports and air travel are a paradigm - ignorance is not bliss. We need to develop new design languages, a grammar of complexity, which can describe the contemporary world, not as it used to be, and not as the engineers would like us to see it, but as it actually is. A world of global computer and communication networks; of distributed intelligence; of interactivity; of connectivity.

What we need - and I did warn you I might end with a "big issue" - what we need is a second Enlightenment. In the seventeenth century science revealed that the world is not flat. Today, the world is more complicated than it used to be. But we have made it so, and we do have the capacity to understand it. So why run away from complexity? why hide it?

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