Space and Social Consciousness

When we speak of the consciousness of an individual, we can describe the elements that shape it to a certain degree. The experiences a person acquires over their own short life; the family they were raised in, the geography they were born into, the social environment and class they belong to, their economic conditions and the rises or collapses within those conditions — all of it affects their manner of acting, their view of the world and their way of thinking. Out of the accumulation of all this, a consciousness particular to that person forms over time.

When we come to societies, the matter cannot be described so easily. Because a society is the product not of a single human lifetime but of a far longer stretch of time. Out of what has been lived, transmitted, forgotten and remembered again across generations, a social — in other words a collective — consciousness emerges.

This consciousness is not a simple sum of the individual consciousnesses that vary from person to person. Social consciousness is the common ground formed by the values, the assumptions, the memories and the ways of looking at the world that a society gathers around and agrees upon.

Of course there will always be differences between the individuals and groups that make up a society. A living society cannot be expected to consist of people who all think alike. But beneath all those differences there is a minimum common ground, a shared floor that binds people to one another. And one of the most important elements shaping that ground — and therefore social consciousness — is the past.

We might say that one of the fundamental characteristics separating the human being from other living creatures is historical consciousness. A person knows their past; they are curious about what they do not know, and they try to understand it and to learn. Sometimes they remember incompletely, sometimes wrongly; but still they establish a bond between their past and their present. And they do not only look backwards. They also carry an anxiety, an expectation and an imagining of the future. With the knowledge and experience gained from the past they make sense of their present, and from the present they build predictions and intellectual extensions towards what is to come.

Human consciousness does not exist only inside the "now". It is a consciousness of time, continually establishing a bond between past, present and future.

The question the age puts to us

Today we are entering an age of artificial intelligence that adds a new dimension to this thought. We are faced with systems that come ever closer to human thinking, that can imitate some of its cognitive activities, and that can process enormous quantities of information to build new intellectual extensions. We are increasingly open to the information, the images, the language and the ideas these systems produce influencing our own ways of thinking.

Preventing this entirely seems neither possible nor necessary. We will live with the positive and the negative sides of artificial intelligence together. But precisely for that reason we face an important question: how are we going to protect and reproduce what belongs to the human?

This question matters particularly for the design of space.

Because space is not merely an arrangement that answers physical needs. A person establishes a relationship with the space they are in; there they remember, they encounter, they share, they feel themselves belonging to a place and to a community. A space therefore creates real value not simply by succeeding functionally or aesthetically, but through the quality of the relationship it establishes with the human being.

In this sense space is both the carrier and the producer of collective consciousness. A square, a street, a house, a workspace or a public building carries traces of the past, and just as much prepares the ground for the relations that will be established between people today and for the memories that will form in the future. Design therefore does not only produce form; it intervenes in the relations, the behaviours and the encounters between people, and in shared memory.

The human touch

In an age when artificial intelligence is increasingly part of the design process, perhaps the most important issue in the design of space appears exactly here. Technology can offer us forms, alternatives, calculations and optimisations. But the question of why a space should be meaningful to a human being is not only a technical problem.

For space to create value for people, we need the human touch more than ever.

We have to put empathy, shared values and the sense of belonging back at the centre of design. We should be designing spaces that people will not only be inside of, but in which they will find something of themselves; where they can form relations with one another; where, while making a bond with the past, they can develop a shared imagining of the future.

Because the real issue determining the spaces of the future is not how far technology will go, but what kind of human beings and what kind of society we want to be alongside it.

And space will be one of the most concrete expressions of the answer we give to that question.