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.
