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Responsive Environments: Designed Objects As Enablers Of New Cycles For A More Sustainable Urban Environment
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The paper examines the concept of urban environment in a framework where the technological and environmental transformations are evolving the design conversation from a Human-Centered design to a Posthuman perspective. Designers are asked to explore and re-imagine the ecological networks within which the designed objects are used, circulate and are disposed, considering the whole system and the impact they have on it. In this modality of the ‘object-with-its-environment’, Object Oriented Ontology and Actor Network Theory are used as a base to expand the understanding of multiple agencies, dependencies, entanglements, and relations that make up our urban systems. On the one hand, Object, includes non-human agents, such as climate and other biological entities, on the other hand, Object, as active participant in the modeling of the dynamics of its environment. The conventional notions of ‘product’, ‘audience’ and ‘clients’ are challenged and questioned.
The paper explores ways to enhance, through Design, the relationships between the Objects constituting urban systems: on the one hand the incorporation into the process of a multi-layered set of projections, and on the other hand the definition of products as enablers of new interactions between the objects of the system. It is about the ability to landscaping the urban environment and promoting spontaneous behaviors within the communities, to increase its economic and environmental sustainability, as well as the quality of life, beyond a reductionist individual utilitarian design strategy.
The paper discusses a series of design proposals developed in the course “Responsive environments: Reshaping the Urban” as part of the Product Design concentration program at the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation. There is a focus on the adopted methodology and a reflection on what could be the role of product designers in the shaping of the contemporary urban spaces, from domestic objects, building systems and urban devices.
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Cities are currently being redesigned with sensors and data at their core. Environmental monitoring, crime tracking and traffic mapping are just a few examples of the socio-technical systems that are remaking cities. These systems are emergent sites of politics, values, and ethics where human and nonhuman actors collaborate, negotiate and debate the futures of their cities. One the one hand, they can be used for prediction, measurement and decision-making, but, on the other hand, they can also be harnessed to imagine alternative possible urban futures. Designers have an important role to play in mediating, making sense of, and intervening in these projects, which are at the intersection of the work of a variety of stakeholders including governments, business and citizens. This article draws on science and technology studies (STS) to think through ways designers can evolve existing human-centered design (HCD) methodologies to contend with socio-technical complexity at a time of great economic and environmental crisis. In particular, this article argues that it is necessary to create and explore methodologies that decenter the human and take the nonhuman seriously in order to meaningfully engage in the design of cities with more responsible, accountable, and ethical ways of engaging with emerging technologies.
Drawing from a study of everyday home practices from a material objects' perspective, this paper examines the potential that a thing ethnography holds for both design and anthropology. In doing so, the paper challenges anthropocentric assumptions about the world, and opens up ways of understanding relationships among people, objects and use practices that would be difficult to elicit through traditional observations and interviews alone.
Since it was first proposed in 2000, the concept of the Anthropocene has evolved in breadth and diversely. The concept encapsulates the new and unprecedented planetary-scale changes resulting from societal transformations and has brought to the fore the social drivers of global change. The concept has revealed tensions between generalized interpretations of humanity’s contribution to global change, and interpretations that are historically, politically and culturally situated. It motivates deep ethical questions about the politics and economics of global change, including diverse interpretations of past causes and future possibilities. As such, more than other concepts, the Anthropocene concept has brought front-and-center epistemological divides between and within the natural and social sciences, and the humanities. It has also brought new opportunities for collaboration. Here we explore the potential and challenges of the concept to encourage integrative understandings of global change and sustainability. Based on bibliometric analysis and literature review, we discuss the now wide acceptance of the term, its interpretive flexibility, the emerging narratives as well as the debates the concept has inspired. We argue that without truly collaborative and integrative research, many of the critical exchanges around the concept are likely to perpetuate fragmented research agendas and to reinforce disciplinary boundaries. This means appreciating the strengths and limitations of different knowledge domains, approaches and perspectives, with the concept of the Anthropocene serving as a bridge, which we encourage researchers and others to cross. This calls for institutional arrangements that facilitate collaborative research, training, and action, yet also depends on more robust and sustained funding for such activities. To illustrate, we briefly discuss three overarching global change problems where novel types of collaborative research could make a difference: (1) Emergent properties of socioecological systems; (2) Urbanization and resource nexus; and (3) Systemic risks and tipping points. Creative tensions around the Anthropocene concept can help the research community to move toward new conceptual syntheses and integrative action-oriented approaches that are needed to producing useful knowledge commensurable with the challenges of global change and sustainability.
Studies from around the world show how the social media tools of Web 2.0 are shaping engagement with cities, communities, and spaces.
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Chapters by leading researchers in the emerging field of urban informatics outline the theoretical context of their inquiries, describing a new view of the city as a hybrid that merges digital and physical worlds; examine technology-aided engagement involving issues of food, the environment, and sustainability; explore the creative use of location-based mobile technology in cities from Melbourne, Australia, to Dhaka, Bangladesh; study technological innovations for improving civic engagement; and discuss design research approaches for understanding the development of sentient real-time cities, including interaction portals and robots.
Having set global warming in irreversible motion, we are facing the possibility of ecological catastrophe. But the environmental emergency is also a crisis for our philosophical habits of thought, confronting us with a problem that seems to defy not only our control but also our understanding. Global warming is perhaps the most dramatic example of what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects”—entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. In this book, Morton explains what hyperobjects are and their impact on how we think, how we coexist with one another and with nonhumans, and how we experience our politics, ethics, and art. Moving fluidly between philosophy, science, literature, visual and conceptual art, and popular culture, the book argues that hyperobjects show that the end of the world has already occurred in the sense that concepts such as world, nature, and even environment are no longer a meaningful horizon against which human events take place. Instead of inhabiting a world, we find ourselves inside a number of hyperobjects, such as climate, nuclear weapons, evolution, or relativity. Such objects put unbearable strains on our normal ways of reasoning. Insisting that we have to reinvent how we think to even begin to comprehend the world we now live in, Hyperobjects takes the first steps, outlining a genuinely postmodern ecological approach to thought and action.
"Do You Believe in Reality?" News from the Trenches of the Science Wars Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest Science's Blood Flow: An Example from Joliot's Scientific Intelligence From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment The Historicity of Things: Where Were Microbes before Pasteur? A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus's Labyrinth The Invention of the Science Wars: The Settlement of Socrates and Callicles A Politics Freed from Science: The Body Cosmopolitic The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes Conclusion: What Contrivance Will Free Pandora's Hope? Glossary Bibliography Index
Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern. This book develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being—a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. And unlike experimental phenomenology or the philosophy of technology, this book’s alien phenomenology takes for granted that all beings interact with and perceive one another. This experience, however, withdraws from human comprehension and becomes accessible only through a speculative philosophy based on metaphor.