Human in digital: Mind and body grappling with project-making in a dematerialized world

Hauling human beings into the digital world is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. After three previous eras of great transformation, humankind must now actively connect with the current era of "robots and AI." This requires not only transferring a realistic human image into the virtual space but also developing a heteromatic and algomatic identity for the individual, bringing their complex and often unknown aspects into the digital realm. For designers, this means understanding and representing a model of reality that can be handled and manipulated by machines. This model is characterized by multiple layers. The process is epitomized by digital identities, recognized as a full dataset that confirms a person as a citizen in the country's social, political, and economic system. The second layer is the visual and auditory representation of our morphological identity, including our body shape and voice. Another layer consists of our brain identity, which can be distilled through neuroscientific techniques and the applications that derive from them. The fourth layer is the immersive environment, the artificial and natural landscape in which we are immersed, which can be modeled and reproduced through computation. Bringing these layers together creates a sketchy approximation of immersive parallel realities, where all our actions and thoughts are recorded and stored, and can be turned into data and value. The analysis presented here aims to provide a framework for contemporary designers to handle this jump in species, helping to transform individuals in this critical super-adaptation process. What we have mentioned has become one of the most exciting fields of study in modern-day advanced design. At the Advanced Design School of Bologna, we study this level of complexity, which we call the “transformative human being”; in other words, the need to design and redesign ourselves continuously and con-sciously and not just by changing environment into habitat.