I might buy too many books. I mean, clearly. Look at the pristine spines on those books on my desk. Nary one of them has been cracked beyond a brief thumb-through. That said, though, I love my books. One of the reasons I like getting a PhD so much is all of the reading and exploring of new ideas.
My most recent acquisition (visible on the top of the near pile of the homepage picture) is Being and the screen by Stéphanie Vial. It was just released from MIT press this month (November 2019), and I am very much looking forward to reading it. One of the drivers of my research and writing and thinking is the idea that design — including and maybe especially digital design — wreaks havoc with human experience, in particular, the notion of Being. That is, the notion of “I AM” is messed up by digital and other designed artifacts. Things. This is a theme that threads most of the posthuman philosophy and treatises. Donna Haraway refers to these digital and non-human things as being part of our cyborgification (though she would never use such a horrendous word). Peter-Paul Verbeek and others give these new objects a “thingness” which in turn grants them status as entities and change agents, despite not being sentient.
To design something is to make manifest a potential thing which in turn affects human entities. This is a notion of design that is not considered very carefully amongst the everyday work that we do, but that I believe should become more top-of-mind in the coming months.
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