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Design Etude 1
Part 1: Taking Notice
- Wildlife Crossings
- Stenotype
- PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)
Part 2: Means and Ends
Wildlife Crossings
Wildlife crossings are structures that cross over/under highways, rail lines, or other long and/or otherwise impassable pieces of infrastructure to allow wildlife to cross those pieces of infrastructure safely. I find their function beautiful in isolation; they combat habitat fragmentation and reduce collisions between vehicles and wildlife. That is a good thing on face, but they also have aesthetic merit. I particularly appreciate the attention to detail that these structures often exhibit in emulating the natural environment around them as best as possible. Below, I've attached a photo of a crossing in Banff that I find particularly beautiful. You can see the grasses and the foliage match the surrounding area.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_crossing
I find the contrast between the busy road and the serenity above it particularly compelling. This contrast is aesthetically elegant, but also serves the function of the crossing. The whole point is that the road remains the road and the habitat remains the habitat and that they interrupt each other less.
The means-to-an-end that the crossing serves is to allow habitats to defragment without interrupting the flow of traffic/people. The end-in-itself that it speaks to is the interconnectedness of humanity with nature, and the false dichotomy between the two.
Stenotype
Stenotype is the practice of using chorded keyboard--keyboards that function by pressing several keys together at the same time to make a letter "chord"--to perform tasks such as transcription, court reporting, and live closed captioning. I, unfortunately, do not own a stenotype machine, but I have been interested in shorthand and similar systems for a long time.
The ends here are varied, but basically it enables people to record in written form at very high speeds, high enough to be suitable for live court transcription and live closed captioning. These ends are useful and interesting in their own right. However, I find the specifics of the transcription system to be the most fascinating and richly designed part of the system.
Words are entered one phonetic unit at a time, where a phonetic unit is the combination of a starting consonant, a vowel, and an ending consonant. A phonetic unit is entered with a chord. This enables the stenographer to type at the speed of speaking, which I found very interesting.
In particular, I find the lens that stenography places upon language very illuminating. Language is more than just abstract words and concepts, it can be understood in a very embodied way through the sounds that are produced. I think that stenotype illuminates that embodied spirit very well.
PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)
PCR is an interesting example in that it is, in my opinion, partially discovered and partially designed. It's a wet lab method to make large quantities of specific sequences of DNA from a minuscule amount of starter DNA. It works via thermal cycling, or repeatedly heating and cooling the reagents. First, DNA is heated up to the point that the two helices separate. Then, the temperature is lowered and small pieces of DNA that are complementary to the target sequence called primers bind to the helices. Then, an enzyme called DNA polymerase uses free-floating nucleotides to build the other half of the target sequence, using the sites where the primer is bound as anchors. Thus, after one cycle, you have two times the amount of DNA you started with. Then, you repeat this cycle as many times as is needed to get the target amount of DNA.
PCR's use as a ubiquitous wet lab technique was enabled by the discovery of a heat-resistant DNA polymerase found initially in bacteria close to thermal vents in the ocean. The heat resistance of the enzyme enables it to stay intact even when the temperatures are high enough to denature DNA. If the polymerase was not heat resistant, it would have to be added after each heat cycle, which would be expensive and tedious.
The ends that PCR serves are innumerable. It is the basis of many techniques in basic biological research, bioengineering, diagnostics, epidemiology, forensics, and probably more. The inventor of the technique, Kary Millis received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993, along with Michael Smith who did different but related work.
I found the elegance of the technique to be of the most interest, however. All the ingredients for the reaction are placed into a tube, and the only thing that changes over the course of the reaction is the temperature. It so elegantly exploits the different behaviors of the ingredients at different temperatures, and additionally is a closed-loop process in which the products from one step of the reaction become the reactants for the next step.
The technique's effectiveness at accomplishing its task is inextricable from its aesthetic elegance. Its speed and ability to exponentially amplify DNA are directly linked to the circularity of the process. Its usefulness is in its brilliant simplicity.