A Mind With Many Bodies

Historically, designs that function within the realm of ecological interventions have heavily gravitated towards attempting to gain full authority and control over the particular ecosystem in order to reform it. The thesis proposed here instead suggests that through a soft, cybernetic approach of aggregated micro-interventions a higher degree of adaptability and autopoiesis could be attained. The approach attempts to highlight the importance of a reactive quality in systems designed to monitor, mediate, and activate the evolving needs of an environment. 

This thesis explores a methodology  of embedding the iterative process of design into the design itself. The logic behind micro-interventions being that the design is not a single large-scale intervention, but rather an aggregate, dispersed, and flexible network that generates the necessary influence through incremental accruement. In designing the system of cybernetic micro-interventions, I similarly argue that it is necessary to consider both the logic of operations, the mind, and the methods of physically interacting with the environment, the many bodies.  The work culminates in a step towards the Design For A Mind With Many Bodies: a network of soft robotic agents functioning through a responsive and iterative organizational system. 

The bodies are able to connect to each other, in part to extend their network of sensing, but also to aggregate into various formations. They work together to gradually enable patterns of change, enhance self-regulation, and incrementally influence. The agents reproduce the process of Cryoconite Microbes to insert a series of sensors into the depth of the glacial mass. As this process repeats throughout the glacier, the bodies themselves serve as nodes of sensing that eventually build up to an extended network; a sentient second skin that is applied onto the glacier surface and through its thickness. 

As one part of the body contracts, another expands. Through this rhythmic motion, the bodies slide & crawl through the snow to where they are needed. A similar technique is used to inflate the agent. Air can flow into or out of parts of the body in order to increase or decrees its volume and surface area they affect, enabling them to shrink up completely and almost become non-existent, or enlarge to shield the maximum amount of area. Since varying surfaces of the pattern are made up of different materials, through changing its form it changes its performative properties.