Reading Group > Reading List
Reading List July 2017
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Robby Collins:
I’ve a couple of earlier Carl Di Salvo papers I want to absorb, and also a vagueness video on Oron Catts’ “Contestable Design” (basically, I’m trying to get a handle on it (interesting or WTF)). https://vimeo.com/154162870
Robby Collins:
Would like to offer up the paper attached: Between Wit and Reason: Defining Associative, Speculative, and Critical Design in Practice from Matt Malpass at Central Saint Martins since it concerns itself with creating a taxonomy to review critical design work from which I think is something you're navigating at the moment.
Robby Collins:
Hey all,
This is on my reading radar at the moment via Matt Rato, Garnett Hertz etc
Towards a Critical Technical Practice: Lesson Learned in trying to reform AI, Phiilip E. Agre http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/critical.html
Cheers,
Paul
Robby Collins:
Hi all,
Many thanks for sharing your links and attachments. Below are the things I'm hoping to get through in the next few weeks with some notes, grouped under two themes. (For the books, I've included related PDFs where possible and I'm happy to lend the books/scan extracts if anyone is interested.)
Historical cases of speculative design, and what happened to them:
Hayden, "The Grand Domestic Revolution" is about the material feminist movement in the late-19th/early-20th century, which focused on socializing domestic labour. The movement involved a lot of interesting speculative design on how cities and homes could be remade. (An earlier Hayden article is attached here) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/grand-domestic-revolution
Tierney "The Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of Technical Culture" uses "convenience" (and a particular ideological definition of convenience) as a lens to explain the course of design and technology over the 20th century. Reading this as a companion piece to the domestic labour stuff above, as a way to explain how the material feminists' ideas were defeated. (Tierney doesn't seem to have published any shorter articles on this unfortunately.) http://www.sunypress.edu/p-1508-the-value-of-convenience.aspx
Current work that is kind of speculative but not really, in that it's trying to imagine alternate futures and critique current directions but is also taking concrete steps to realize those futures rather than just speculating...
Scholz (ed.) "Ours to Hack and Own" is about platform cooperativism - the design of worker-owned alternatives to software platforms like Uber and Deliveroo, who position themselves as design/technology companies (e.g. AirBnB was started by RISD graduates) rather than employers, and use that to circumvent labour rights. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/ours-to-hack-and-to-own/
(A related pdf by the author is here: http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/scholz_platformcoop_5.9.2016.pdf)
Transition Design 2015 (attached) - yet another prefixed design movement for the list... This one focuses on the role design plays in bringing about sociotechnical change. Their main focus is on sustainability and climate adaptation (their name is taken from the transition town movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_town ) but I'm interested to see what general principles they come up with.
Sorry for the long email. Rob and I were chatting over the weekend about maybe starting a very informal group blog where we could record notes on what we're reading, as a record of the reading group and as a way of getting the clutter out of our brains so we're less inclined to rant at each other when we meet in person. This email probably should have been a post there...
All the best,
Donal
Robby Collins:
Hey all,
I'm just going to throw a link up which is my reading for tonight. If it's not the kind of thing you'd normally share let me know. It's also from 2008 so maybe not current enough for the group? I've just read two essays from Modes of Criticism 2 that relate to my area of interest:
Defamiliarisation, Brecht and Criticality in Graphic Design, Peter Buwert
Operationalising the Means: Communication Design as Critical Practice, Jan van Toorn
I'd highly recommend both but don't know if you can get them online. James kindly lent me the print copy. Anyway they both reference this short article so thought I'd throw it up here in case anyone hasn't seen it.
http://designobserver.com/feature/towards-relational-design/7557/
Thanks,
Anusia
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