Address at vision 65 217 the older technologies. You can never perceive the impact of any new technology directly, but it can be done in the manner of Perseus looking in the mirror at Medusa. It has to be done indirectly. You have to perceive the consequences of the new environment on the old environment before you know what the new environment is. You cannot tell what it is until you have seen it do things to the old one. The need, however, to understand the processes and changes brought about by new technology gets strong as the technology does. Therefore, in terms of design or style or shaping of perception, a conference of this sort is very timely in bringing attention to the tremendous new role of design in shaping human perception. “Style is a way of seeing,” as Flaubert put it. We are engaged in Toronto in carrying out a unique experiment—it is far too big for us—we need a lot of help and a lot of collaboration. We are carrying out an experiment to establish what are the sensory thresholds of the entire population of Toronto. That is, we are attempting to measure, quantitatively, the levels at which the entire population prefers to set its visual, auditory, tactual, visceral and other senses as a matter of daily use and preference—how much light, how much heat, how much sound, how much movement—as a threshold level. Anything that alters a sensory threshold alters the outlook and experience of a whole society. The sensory thresholds change without warning or indications to the users thereof, for it is new technological environments that shift these levels. We are concerned with what shifts occur in a sensory threshold when some new form comes in. What happens to our sensory lives with the advent of television, the motor car or radio? If we can establish this sort of knowledge quantitatively, we will have something that the computer can really bite into. A child is a genius till he is five because all his senses are in active interrelation. Then his senses shift. The computer will be in a position to carry out orchestrated programming for the sensory life of entire populations. It can be programmed in terms of their total needs, not just in terms of the messages they should be hearing, but in terms of the total experience as picked up and patterned by all the senses at once. For example, if you were to write an ideal sensory program of Indonesia or some area of the world that you wanted to leapfrog across a lot of old technology, this would be possible if you knew in the first place its present sensory thresholds and, second, if you had established what kind of sensory effect a given technology like radio or literacy had upon sensory life as a whole. On this continent the sensory levels have changed drastically since television. The visual component in our lives has been dropped dramatically and the visceral, the kinetic, the auditory modes of response have shot up to compensate for the drop in the visual component of our culture. This sensory shift has changed the taste in design, in packaging, in every form of entertainment, as well as in every form of vehicle, food and in clothing.