Blaise Agüera y Arcas: Who Are We Now?

It’s rare that a design competition jury will consider a book as a website (and perhaps a website as a book), so we are particularly grateful to the Tokyo TDC jury for their open-mindedness, and for this RGB Prize for the Who Are We Now? web edition.

We believe that print and digital can be a symbiosis, not a dichotomy. A book on a mobile phone, for example, can feel like a print paperback. Each format augments the other.

Who Are We Now?, published in both print and web editions, is an exploration by AI scientist Blaise Agüera y Arcas of how biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a dynamic “us” that can neither be called natural nor artificial. At the heart of the book is a set of surveys conducted between 2016 and 2021, asking thousands of anonymous respondents all over the United States questions about their behaviour and identity, and especially about gender and sexuality.

While digital systems often require a restrictive standardisation of content, we opted instead to build a wide range of modules from scratch, highly tailored with the content to dynamically engage readers with the project’s complex material.

We paid close attention to the book’s variety of imagery, plots, charts, graphs, and maps and their relationship to the text, developing interactive representations that best suited the narrative. Readers are even able to download the raw data behind each plot, enabling open-ended re-analysis and exploration.

Working with the author and collaborators, we established a workflow based on a single content source for both print and web formats. All material—including text and media assets such as images, videos, plots, and custom maps, along with their metadata—was managed and synchronised through a spreadsheet and shared GitHub repository, ensuring simultaneous updates and seamless integration across both mediums. Despite the multiple modes of data and interactions, the result is a simple static website written in semantic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with minimal external dependencies.

Client: Hat & Beard Editions, Los Angeles

Development: Minkyoung Kim and Marie Otsuka
Editorial Coordination: Johan Michalove
Images and Permissions: David Michalove
Cartography: Scott Reinhard

James Goggin

James Goggin is a British/Australian creative director, graphic designer, and teacher from London via Sydney, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Arnhem, Chicago, Providence, and Tāmaki Makaurau. He runs a design practice named Practise together with partner Shan James, working on architectural, cultural, and publishing projects in Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North America. He has taught at Werkplaats Typografie, École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ÉCAL), and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale.

Minkyoung Kim

Minkyoung Kim is a designer and developer specializing in generative visual systems that explore repetition and difference. She is currently an assistant professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she teaches the integration of design and computational practices.

Marie Otsuka

Marie Otsuka is a designer and programmer working on fonts, websites, tools, and books. In addition to working at the type foundry Occupant Fonts, she has collaborated with a range of organizations, authors, and artists as an independent web designer/developer and graphic designer. As an instructor, she taught typography-focused interaction courses at Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, and California College of the Arts.