July 08, 2005

In the Bubble: Designing in a complex world

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.

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By Kristi, Jul 2005 | Comments (0)

September 14, 2004

Design for Sports: The Cult of Performance

Title	Design for Sports: The Cult of Performance
Author	Akiko Busch (editor)
Publisher	Princeton Architectural Press, New York
Date	1998
ISBN	1 568 981 45 7
Reviewed by
Technology has reshaped the way sports are played. Cultural fascination with the icons of sports‹from Michael Jordan to Rollerblades‹and technology/design that afford ever-higher levels of performance are the subject of this book. Contributors include journalist Candace Lyle Hogan, Steven Skov Holt (former editor at I.D. Magazine) and sport star/journalist Diana Nyad.
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Beyond Boredom and Anxiety

Title	Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
Author	Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Publisher	Jossey-Bass Publishers
Date	1975
ISBN	0 875 892 61 2
Reviewed by
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, worldfamous for his 'flow' theory, explores the experience of play in work and games.

By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Trade: Commodities, Communication and Consciousness

Title	Trade: Commodities, Communication and Consciousness
Author	Thomas Seelig, Urs Stahel and Martin Jaeggi (eds)
Publisher	Scalo, Zurich
Date	2001
ISBN	3-908247-47-0
Reviewed by	Jane Szita
How do we interpret a world in which everything is fluid, flexible, and flowing faster than ever before? In what ways can we accurately reflect the reality of ‘global’ trade, the quasi-religious power of consumerism, and the spectral flows of information which determine today’s economic and political landscapes? That was the starting point for this book, and for the exhibition (staged at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Nederlands Foto Instituut, 2002), behind it. Photographs by over 60 artists, photographers, advertising agencies, magazines, and corporate reports, are complemented by texts ranging from philosophy and economic theory, to quips from politicians and pundits. The effect is of a kind of devil’s scrapbook, a visual journey through a diverse collection of images from the blandly banal and seductively glossy, to the unnervingly revealing and deeply moving. The first pages illustrate urban landscapes (Los Angeles, Tokyo), followed by the weirdly sanitised images of American malls and corporate HQs by Marc Räder. They are followed by idealised images of consumer ‘lifestyles’: bodies in a club, bodies on a beach, and bodies bedecked in jewellery at Cannes. These lead into a dense assortment of images depicting all of life — from food to sex - as commodities, accompanied by David Bosshart’s assertion that, “shopping has become the most fundametal act in all areas of life” (David Bosshart). Then the focus changes to production, from high-tech cleanrooms to child labour on the fraying edges of the global economy. Distribution follows, then the dissenting voices of Greenpeace, its tiny boats taking on Goliath-like whaling ships, and protests during the WTO conference in Seattle (1999). Finally, refuse and recycling are pictured, with images of ‘garbage kids’ in Manila juxtaposed with textual references to the psychic waste of a world in perpetual motion, in which “failure is the great modern taboo,” (Richard Sennett), and life is rendered meaningless by a system in which, “the object, which lasts, matters more the subject” (George Bataille). So the book itself embodies a kind of sinister flow from appearance to reality, from a Western urban vision bathed in consumerist delusion, to the impoverished, polluted reality of rotting, useless excess in the dumps of the Philippines.

By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Cluster 3, on innovation

Title	Cluster 3, on innovation
Author
Publisher
Date
ISBN
Reviewed by
An excellent book/magazine reaches us from Turin, “Cluster On Innovation”. It looks at “new technologies and the mutations they generate in society and language”. Cluster 3, a special on interaction design, features an interview with media artist Lev Manovitch; Marco Zanini’s design for a “Liquid Jungle Lab” in a steamy Panama jungle; and a new design centre in a former rat-infested fish market in Buenos Aires.

By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Backstage — MoMu

Title	Backstage — MoMu
Author	MoMu
Publisher	Ludion, Ghent and Amsterdam
Date	2002
ISBN	90-5544-423-5
Reviewed by	Jane Szita
A ‘museum of fashion’ is an essentially paradoxical concept. On the one hand, as Shakespeare noted, “The fashion wears out more apparel than the man,” so clothes, worn for a season or two, or even for just one special occasion, frequently outlive their wearer. On the other hand, fashion exists only through repetitive self-destruction, in the perpetual flow of continuous consumption. How to preserve a phenomenon, which, by its very nature, is in a state of constant flux, asking to be consumed, rather than contemplated? This question is the central theme of the catalogue of the first exhibition of the revamped Antwerp Fashion Museum (MoMu), a satisfying study in photographs and essays of the museum’s collection, the spaces containing it, and the philosphy of its curatorial team. As Linda Loppa, chief curator, writes, MoMu’s garments are viewed as a ‘living’ collection, to be seen not in isolation, but as the result of design ‘flows’: sketches, patterns, fabrics, techniques and processes. So there is no ‘permanent’ exhibition, and the clothes are not kept under glass, which would distance the observer. Moreover, multidisciplinary influences are brought into focus, so a first gallery project by British designer Hussein Chalayan uses video to show how ‘morphing’ inspired his Ambimorphous collection (2002-2003). As another musuem professional, Judith Clark, writes: “What would it be like to be the Laurence Sterne of fashion curators, to be free to lose the thread?” Not for nothing, it seems, did the Financial Times, earlier this year, refer to Antwerp as, “the thinking woman’s Milan”. MoMu is, in part, the city’s attempt to understand its own extraordinary, and unprecedented, style status since the ‘Antwerp Six’ redefined fashion so successfully in the 1990s. The city has continued to churn out talent at a giddying pace and in abundant variety — united, perhaps, by an underlying Belgian theme of sober, serious surrealism, and a love of traditional craftmanship — and Backstage helps to document that process. For jaded fashion victims (and even more jaded, jeans-wearing anti-fashion types), this book is an intriguing reminder of what Dirk Lauwerts, in a marvellous essay on the eroticism and mysterious banality of dressing, calls, “clothing, that great adventure of every human life.”

By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Cyberselfish

Title	Cyberselfish
Author	Paulina Borsook
Publisher	Little, Brown and Company, London
Date	2000
ISBN	0 316 847712
Reviewed by	Jane Szita
Government bad, market good — this is the basic mantra of high-tech culture, and the main idea underpinning the industry’s social irresponsibility, according to writer Paulina Borsook. She knows the Silicon Valley world inside out and her account is scathingly critical, funny and perceptive. She finds an "embarrassing lack of philanthropy" in the digerati, who are "full of nastiness, narcissism and a lack of human warmth." Ageist and misogynistic, to these workaholic young men (and they usually are young men), homes are merely satellite offices, or ‘platforms’ for various media. This book is a good antidote to techno-geewhizzery and a cyberculture which presents itself as being "the One True Way of the future, but which in so many ways embodies the worst of the past — where humane values and, ultimately, people, count for less than machines."
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By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Cyberspace First Steps

Title	Cyberspace First Steps
Author	Michael Benedikt (editor)
Publisher	The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass./London, England
Date	1992
ISBN
Reviewed by
Cyberspace has been defined as "an infinite artificial world where humans navigate in information-based space" and as "the ultimate computer-human interface." However one defines it, this "virtual reality" clearly both the strangest and most radically innovative of today's computer developments. The original contributions in this new book take up the philosophical basis for cyberspace in ancient thougt, the relevance of the body in virtual realities, basic communications principles for cyberspace, the coming dematerialization of architecture, the logic of graphic representation into the third dimension, the design of a noncentralized system for multiparticipant cyberspaces, the ramifications of cyberspace for future workplaces, and a great deal more.

By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems)

Title	Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems)
Author	Michael Resnick and Mitchel Resnick
Publisher	MIT Press, Cambridge
Date	1997
ISBN	0262680939
Reviewed by
Resnick (media laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) explores the counterintuitive world of decentralized systems and self- organizing phenomena. Drawing on ideas from computer science, education, psychology, and systems theory, he examines why many people resist decentralized ideas, and describes an innovative computer language, StarLogo, that he designed to help students from grade school and up simulate self-organizing behavior in systems. Resnick analyzes the educational ideas, such as constructionism, and computational ideas, including massive parallelism, underlying StarLogo.
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The Cybercultures Reader

Title	The Cybercultures Reader
Author	David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (editors)
Publisher	Routledge, London & New York
Date	2001 (reprint; first published 2000)
ISBN	0-415-18379-0
Reviewed by	Jane Szita
Where is cyberspace, and why would we want to go there? Over 700 pages and more than 50 authors address the vexed questions of ‘cyberculture’ and ‘cyborg’ identity in this collection, with essays organised into theme sections: popular cybercultures, cyber subcultures, cyberfeminism, cybersexual, and so on. The book as a whole has a premillennial tone, with many texts from the mid-90s, or even earlier; as a collection of classic commentaries alone (including Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, Timothy Leary’s The Cyberpunk, and many others), it deserves a place on any (cyber) bookshelf. The diverse treatments locate technology in the tradition of Western (and, very occasionally, non-Western), thought — from the Edenic myth and Euclidian geometry to colonialization, Wild West archetypes and road rage — as they attempt to make sense of one of our most compelling modern metaphors. Definitions of cyberspace vary widely, from William Gibson’s "infinite cage," through Timothy Leary’s perception of it as an electronic form of LSD, to Kevin Robins’ view of it as a kind of wish-fulfilment delusion embodying our desire, "to sustain the infantile experience of power and infinite possibility." The multiplicity of standpoints, ranging from hardened scepticism to breathless gee-whizzery, only serve to emphasize the nebulous nature of what we so all-embracingly call "cyberspace" (the very term coined in a work of fiction by a novelist, William Gibson again, in 1984). That the last word goes to Ziauddin Sardars seems prophetic now, in the light of the events of September 2001. His essay, Alt.civililizations.faq, is a compelling account of the mythic cyber realm as the dark side of the West, its "latest conquest, the new domain that it has colonized." A cheap alternative to space exploration, cyberspace is our new frontier, "the American dream writ large," and "an instrument for distracting Western society from its increasing spiritual poverty, utter meaninglessness and grinding misery and inhumanity of everyday lives". With his account at least, it seems our conceptions of cyberspace are escaping fiction, relocating into real-world history, and generally coming of age.

By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)

Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication

Title	Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication
Author	M. Christine Boyer
Publisher	Princeton Architectural Press, New York
Date	1996
ISBN	1 56898 048 5
Reviewed by
Urban historian M. Christine Boyer turns to the new frontier - cybercities - in this compelling new book. Boyer argues that the computer is to contemporary society what the machine was to modernism, and that this new metaphor profoundly affects the way we think, imagine, and ultimately grasp reality. But there is, she believes, an inherent danger here; that as cyberspace pulls us into its electronic grasp, we withdraw from the world. Transferred, plugged in, and down-loaded, reality becomes increasingly immaterial. Frozen to one side of our terminal's screen, Boyer concludes, we risk becoming incapable of action in a real city plagued by crime, hatred, disease, unemployment, and under-education. In a series of polemical essays, Boyer examines cyberspace, virtual reality, disembodiment, and cyborgs, drawing on a wide range of sources from Walter Benjamin to William Gibson. In the end, Boyer issues a clarion call to reinstall a social agenda in the midst of these technological innovations.
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The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 - 1928

Title	The Culture of Time and Space: 1880 - 1928
Author	Stephen Kern
Publisher	Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA
Date	1993
ISBN	0 674 17973 0
Reviewed by	John Thackara
From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile, and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as 'the stream of consciousness' novel, psychonalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought . This book is about the way Europeans and Americans came to conceive of and experience time and space in those years.The overview covers such figures as Proust, Joyce, Mann, H.G.Wells, Gertrude Stein, Freud, Conrad, Einstein, and Picasso, as well as diverse sources of popular culture and the transformation of traditional values.

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Play, Drama and Thought: The Intellectual Background to Dramatic Education

Title	Play, Drama and Thought: The Intellectual Background to Dramatic Education
Author	Richard Courtney
Publisher	Simon & Pierre Pub Co Ltd
Date	1989
ISBN	0 889 24213 5
Reviewed by

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Playing and Reality

Title	Playing and Reality
Author	D.W. Winnicott and Clare Winnicott
Publisher	Routledge
Date
ISBN	0 41503 689 5
Reviewed by
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Resisting Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information

Title	Resisting Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information
Author	James Brook and Iain A. Boal
Publisher	City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco
Date	1995
ISBN	0 87286 299 2
Reviewed by
'Resisting the Virtual Life' investigates the connections between information technologies and the increasingly abstract, virtual life that all of us - technophile and Luddite - are now compelled to lead. Scholars, writers, and activists gauge the impact of the new video, computer, and networked communications on our ways of life in a restructured world. Exposing relations of power and dependence, they offer strategies of resistance to the global rewiring of the body and psyche, work and community, literature and art.
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By Books Editor, Sep 2004 | Comments (0)