Perpetual design is design practice that aims at creating artefacts that are not only permanent but also relevant for an indefinite time.

I've already grazed this idea over a year ago. A new wave of thought emerged when pictures of Russian / Ukrainian mobster tombstones surfaced on blog English Russia.

They're quite amazing. It's only that shameless showing off of wealth and luxuries in the context of transcendence looks very campy, to us non-mobsters in the west at least.

The desire to leave an earthly mark of one's existence has already left us with artefacts of perpetual design like the Giza pyramids and Taj Mahal to start with. The privilege to a memorial has democratised since. Yet, I've recently learned that even graveyard spots are actually leased and then subject to survivors' liquidity.

There are other cases to study.

This online document called "Excerpts from Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant" introduces some solutions to a very specific perpetual design problem – how to mark nuclear waste burial sites so that they will survive and deliver the message 400 generations into the future.

It's a heavy document but worth at least scrolling through for some insight. Interestingly the waste markers are also a special case of what could be called deterrent design. Usually design aspires to create or denote something beautiful and desirable. Now it must achieve something opposite.

The noblest and most elegant example I've found so far must be the Pioneer plaques. They are inscribed metal plates sent off in the early 70s with Pioneer spacecrafts towards Jupiter and beyond.

Designed by famous and late science populariser Carl Sagan and his wife Linda Salzman Sagan the plaques contained a specially crafted message to any off-world intelligence that might intercept the one and half man sized space probes. That is a very remote chance and the whole effort makes more sense as a symbolic gesture of uplifting ideals.

Some serious thinking was anyhow put into the designs. The bottom part of the plaque shows Pioneer's origin and trajectory out of the solar system. Figures of male and female human outline the physical appearance of our species against the silhouette of the probe itself for comparison. To their left converging lines pinpoint the location of the Sun relative to 14 pulsars and the galactic plane. The two connected circles at the top represent hydrogen atoms and as such establish a binary language that can be used to decode the plaque's information.

That's all pretty elaborate and I can share those details only because I've been told. In real life, reportedly, almost none of the human scientists originally shown the message could get it. Estimating the alien response isn't even an educated guess.

The initial question remains, how viable is perpetual design? The search goes on.

Pink Floyd - Echoes

Last week I had a chance to check out CityWall – a public, interactive screen at Helsinki's Lasipalatsi. It's a multi-touch installation very much along the lines popularised by the film Minority Report and pioneered by Jeff Han. However, it is not based on FTIR, but "designed from the ground up to work outside in daylight", said John Evans, member of the UIx project group of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT.

Their project website explains the principles, so I won't get into that. Another blogpost at Playpen is also good read. What cuts it for me, is the social and public aspect of their work. The content is drawn from Flickr, namely what's labeled under tag "Helsinki", will be fetched onto the CityWall to be accessed by the crowds, on-site in the city centre. This is the approach I love about it – tapping into the "user-generated content", bringing it into a relevant context and having an advanced physical interface to play with

Of course CityWall is a work of such a nature, that it can hardly be without glitches at this point. It's truly enjoyable only in the nighttime, so go now, the summer's white nights take over as we speak.

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Update 29.5.2007

Somehow missed it on the first sweep, but lewism.org has also blogged about CityWall. Check out the comments below. Thanks to him I just found an interesting service Tagzania. O-ou, does it never stop…

It's not uncommon to pay attention to sustainability and sustainable design these days. Fair enough, but what could then be perpetual design? Does such a concept exist or did the movement reach its pinnacle already when Pyramids of Giza were erected?

I ran across an advertisement from IWC, Swiss clocksmiths. The Portuguese Perpetual Calendar is an all mechanical watch with its dials programmed until year 2499. Part of the array is a moon phase display that deviates one day in 577 years. It's all very impressive – just take a look at their demonstration video (Quicktime, 22 MB).

What I don't get is, how does the use of crocodile leather in the wristband get along with the idea of half-millennial watch. Unless there's no idea beyond showing off, which would be a pity. Then again, what were the pyramids for?

Recently scientists figured out the workings of the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2000-year-old Greek analogue celestial computer – dragged from the Mediterranean in 1900. If an owner of IWC watch threw it into floodtide after its calendar had run out in 2499, how much could the archaeologists of 4499 recover and make out from its remains? Probably more than from his iPod's.

Picture from www.iwc.ch

The concept of cutting parts of an image out ouf its background is not unambiguous in English. I've heard at least "masking", "outlining" and "silhouetting" used for this purpose. In German, the corresponding verb is "freistellen" and in Finnish "syvätä".

This all will soon be just semantics as, thanks to globalisation, we'll shortly be out of jobs there. There's a company in Copenhagen, through which we can outsource all our "clipping path" tasks to specialists in Philippines. This solution is fittingly to be found on lazymask.com.

Via Nordic Design Blog.