Andrew White University of Nottingham Ningbo China There is no such thing as utopia. But without utopianism we cannot begin to address some of the global political problems that the first decade of this millennium has magnified. This is manifest in a widespread perception of increasing environmental degradation, a seemingly permanent state of emergency in…
Marina Levina University of Memphis In 2010 General Electric launched an initiative called Healthymagination. On its website, GE declared that Healthymagination is about becoming healthier, ‘through the sharing of imaginative ideas and proven solutions’. Looking to explore/exploit the growing field of health information technologies, GE declared that through sharing health information in the networked social…
Nathalie Casemajor Loustau and Heather Davis McGill University and Concordia University Introduction The geography of the city functions as a mechanism for distributed power. Power manifests in the physicality of everyday urban life, through planning, government jurisprudence and resident use. The train tracks in the Canadian city of Montréal are one site where this dialectic…
Carl DiSalvo Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta Introduction Speculative design is a practice of creating imaginative projections of alternate presents and possible futures using design representations and objects. At times critical and at other times whimsical, it is a distinctive, if loose, grouping of projects. Using the term broadly, speculative design covers a range of…
Dan Frodsham University of Exeter There still exist – and there may exist in the future – spaces for play, spaces for enjoyment, architectures of wisdom or pleasure. In and by means of space the work may shine through the product, use value may gain the upper hand over exchange value: appropriation, turning the world…
Laura Watts IT University of Copenhagen Which is farther from us, farther out of reach, more silent – the dead, or the unborn? Those whose bones lie under the thistles and the dirt and the tombstones of the Past, or those who slip weightless among molecules, dwelling where a century passes in a day, among…
Nicholas Knouf Cornell University, Ithaca, NY This essay examines a series of events that took place over a few days around the summer solstices in 2004 and 2005. These events, under the collective title of fadaiat—libertad de movimiento y libertad de concimiento (freedom of movement and freedom of knowledge) ‘took place’ within the Madiaq region…
Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle Trinity College Dublin Introduction In The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society is Coming Online, editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (2009) argues that the collaborative cultures emerging around web 2.0 platforms cultivate a “digital socialism”, with broad political and economic implications for the producers of online culture. Kelly, alongside others,…
Jonas Fritsch Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University Introduction Digital technologies in new interactive environments are radically affecting the way we experience and make sense of the world. The advent of ubiquitous computing in particular has led to the development of advanced sensor technologies and microchips, moving the realm of computing from the desktop…
Malcolm McCullough University of Michigan [Abstract] Background The rise of the ambient brings new directions in environmental criticism. Here ‘the ambient’ means a continuum of contexts where information has been embedded locally, to facilitate being brought in and out of focal attention. How may design for that state contribute to necessary shifts of worldview? Do…