A conclusion for the class -
Ten things - science, technology and design
- Making things makes people - using, consuming them too
- we have always been cyborgs - intimately defined by materiality and things
- the distinctions between science, technology, culture and society are the result of people's making rather than the pre-conditions under which things are made
- all making, manufacture, design is heterogeneous engineering
- this involves networked associations of material and immaterial forms - assemblages
- think therefore of things as "gatherings"
- this includes a gathering of time - artifacts fold temporality through their making, use and consumption - every artifact is the result of a genealogy of (prior) design questions and solutions, a genealogy of heterogeneous engineering
- experience of this genealogical folding of time, is the heart of our sense of history - human historicity
- things are part of a world of human agency - they perform all kinds of work
- the work things do includes the storage of information and knowledge - most of our knowledge of the world is distributed through human-artifact assemblages
- another way of putting this is that people are distrubuted agencies (consciousness too, it may be argued, is so distributed)
- this notion of heterogeneous engineering subsumes conventional terms (in understanding design) such as function, efficiency, economy, use
- the history of design is the history of society
Posted at Mar 17/2006 10:40AM:
Michael: innovation and change - no wave of advance
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