What is designed, designs us

Early in my conversation with Todd Breyfogle, senior advisor for humanistic studies and practices at the Aspen Institute, he gave me a gift his grandmother had given him.

In the first episode of Season 13 of the DB|BD podcast, Breyfogle shares that while growing up in rural Colorado, he watched a lot of television. His grandmother, who had barely finished high school, noticed. She was, he says, "wonderfully self-educated in the arts and literature." When he was about 11, she handed him a book of Chekhov short stories and said, "Read this, we'll talk about it." Like in so many families, he says, “When grandmother says that, you do."

So he did. And it changed his life, and by extension, the lives of so many others. “What is it that, as we read it, it reads us?" he asks.

I was close to tears by the end of my conversation with Breyfogle, perhaps because we went so deeply into the human experience, now filled with the urgent distractions of yet another modern age. His work as a steward of the Aspen Institute's soul comes with a keen set of reminders. The highest job of reading is to be read in return. The quality of our dialog directly measures the state of our civic life. And personal reflection belongs to everyone, and we forget that at our own peril. “You are never too young or never too ‘ill-credentialed’ by our standards to think deeply about what it means to be human,” he says.

We may or may not be at the dawn of a machine age that once again threatens to turn human beings into things, cogs, line items. The Bauhaus explored this in 1918, the Aspen founders in 1949, and now, with AI doing — what, exactly? — we find ourselves once again casting wide nets to sort out how to make sure the machine serves us and not the reverse.

Long-form makers and thinkers have a duty to remind us, through their work, that we have been here before and therefore know what to do.

Let’s start where this essay began.

In Chekhov’s short story, “The Student,” we meet a cynical young seminary student named Ivan Velikopolsky, who, walking home on a cold evening, stops by a fire where a mother and daughter, both widowed, are warming themselves. 

The encounter reminds him of The Denial of Peter, the Biblical account of Jesus’s arrest, in which Peter, warming himself by a similar fire, is asked three times if he's one of Jesus's followers. Three times he says no. Then a rooster crows and Peter suddenly remembers that Jesus predicted this betrayal. As then, "he went out, and wept bitterly."

While telling them the story, the two women confuse Ivan by weeping just as bitterly. Walking away, he realizes it wasn’t his storytelling skills that moved them, but rather their personal connection to Peter’s anguish, shame, and need for forgiveness. 

The gloomy young man’s mood shifted. “And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. ‘The past,’ he thought, ‘is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.’ And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.”

“The Student” is the first Chekhov short story I’ve read, a gift I accepted from Todd Breyfogle’s grandmother, mostly because I was raised right, and I tend to follow grandmothers’ orders. But also because I was curious. Now, I’m thinking about the power of allegory to connect, the warmth of a temporary fire against a harsh world, and the idea that in suffering — as in joy — we have always been more alike than different.

And I’m thinking about all of you. To paraphrase Breyfogle: What is designed, designs us.

What are you reading, thinking, designing, burning? Let us know.

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This edition of The Observatory was edited by Rachel Paese.

Design Observer devotes October to the thorny place where horror and design meet, looking both at how fear gets designed and at the ways design itself can become frightening. Curated by former Design Observer executive editor Delaney Rebernik, an independent journalist covering death and digital life and a lifelong horror devotee. She is the co-founder of Gravesite, a new, death-focused media platform.

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Assistant Professor of Engineering Technologies and Applied Design, Tenure-Track at Berea College, Berea, KY.

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