Machiko Kusahara: Toward Digital Biodiversity: A View on Correlation of Digital Technology and Culture through Analysis of Media Art and Entertainment (2001)
Filed under thesis | Tags: · art, art history, artificial life, digital culture, interactive art, japan, media art, media culture, technology, telematics, telerobotics
This dissertation deals with the relationship between contemporary media art and digital technology. The main focus is on the analysis of the nature of interaction between art and technology. Through a series of case studies, various interactions are analyzed. This will be dealt with from a number of different perspectives, yet always within the context of media culture and society. The way media art and technology simultaneously both influence and are influenced by society and culture will be considered from the perspectives of art history, science, perception and media research. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop conceptual methods for a better understanding of the modalities of human-computer interaction.
Dissertation thesis
The University of Tokyo, January 2001
180 pages
PDF (single PDF)
Comment (0)John Thackara: In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · design, information society, interaction design, internet, learning, smart mobs, technology, telerobotics
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
PDF (updated on 2012-11-23)
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