Shaping Things

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Bruce Sterling

The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005, English

Design, General; Nonfiction, Product/Industrial Design

7.5 x 5.6 inches, paperback, 152 pages, 62 illustrations

ISBN: 9780262693264

Suggested Retail Price: $20.95

From the Publisher. DiSalvo explores the political qualities and potentials of design by examining a series of projects that span design and art, engineering and computer science, agitprop and consumer products. He views these projects—which include computational visualizations of networks of power and influence, therapy robots that shape sociability, and everyday objects embedded with microchips that enable users to circumvent surveillance--through the lens of agonism, a political theory that emphasizes contention as foundational to democracy. Each of these projects engages one of three categories as a medium—information, robots, and ubiquitous computing—and in each of them certain distinctive qualities of computation are used for political ends or to bring forth political issues. DiSalvo’s illuminating analysis aims to provide design criticism with a new approach for thinking about the relationship between forms of political expression, computation as a medium, and the processes and products of design.

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Tucker Viemeister

On Tucker Viemeister’s Book List

Sci-fi author proposes a design manifesto where everything is a Splime (smart and connected—the developed environment works like the “natural” one in Avatar).

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