John Thackara: In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World (2005)

We’re filling up the world with technology and devices, but we’ve lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World.

These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if “tech” ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.

Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we’re unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?

In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now—not in a remote science fiction future; it’s not about, as he puts it, “the schlock of the new” but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can’t. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology—ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles—above all, lightness—inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.

Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262201577, 9780262201575
321 pages

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Usman Haque, Adam Somlai-Fischer: Low Tech Sensors and Actuators for Artists and Architects (2005)

Low Tech Sensors and Actuators investigates how low-tech sensors and interactive actuators can be produced inexpensively from hacked toys and devices.

by Usman Haque, http://www.haque.co.uk, and Adam Somlai-Fischer, http://www.aether.hu
a research project sponsored and commissioned by FACT, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, U.K
2005 July (cc) some rights reserved
This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike License.

More info (authors)
More info (we make money not art)

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Christa Sommerer, Lakhmi C. Jain, Laurent Mignonneau (eds.): The Art and Science of Interface and Interaction Design (2008)

“Artists and creators in interactive art and interaction design have long been conducting research on human-machine interaction. Through artistic, conceptual, social and critical projects, they have shown how interactive digital processes are essential elements for their artistic creations. Resulting prototypes have often reached beyond the art arena into areas such as mobile computing, intelligent ambiences, intelligent architecture, fashionable technologies, ubiquitous computing and pervasive gaming. Many of the early artist-developed interactive technologies have influenced new design practices, products and services of today’s media society. This book brings together key theoreticians and practitioners of this field. It shows how historically relevant the issues of interaction and interface design are, as they can be analyzed not only from an engineering point of view but from a social, artistic and conceptual, and even commercial angle as well.”

Published by Springer, 2008
ISBN 3540798692, 9783540798699
190 pages

Key terms: Augmented Reality, Prix Ars Electronica, wearable computers, Christa Sommerer, interactive art, media art, ubiquitous computing, interaction design, Mixed Reality, Fluxus, Virtual Reality, RFID, mass media, Chaos Computer Club, Wolfgang Strauss, Monika Fleischmann, Linz, John Cage, Human-Computer Interaction, Peter Weibel

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