Hi Peter,
Thanks for this link! I read Bogost's blog with great interest. The points he makes are completely relevant - it is interesting to see these conversations popping up in so many contexts. I am not sure, though, that you are right in suggesting that Bogost's conception ranges far beyond ANT. He seems right in that territory. Another text that emerged about the same time as Latour, Law, Callon and Bjiker's work in the late 1980s, that introduces the kind of playful animism that Bogost is enjoying, is Elaine Scarry's 'The Body in Pain' (the second half of this book is especially relevant to design). Verbeek has also written a number of texts that develop these lines of thinking.
Interestingly Bogost mentions Graham Harman as being an influence on him. Harman has written on Latour. Of particular interest to this thread, perhaps, is a paper he published in 2007 titled 'The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy', published in 'Recalling Modernity' Vol.13, No.3.
It is great that you have students working with this material. I am interested, myself, in the intersection between design and strategy. I would be fascinated to hear more about your students' projects.
Best wishes, Susan
Susan Stewart B.Arch, PhD
Senior Lecturer in Design
School of Design, Faculty of DAB
University of Technology Sydney
________________________________________
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Jones | Redesign [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 1:19 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Activity Theory and ANT and computers are capable of design?
For the last decade or more there have been notable contrasts made between
ANT and AT, strong agency theory and distributed cognition.
But I can't let the moment pass without recommending - no, requiring people
(Susan, Ken, Ranjan, Kari and Terry) to read Ian Bogost's Alien
Phenomenology (or What it's Like to be a Thing). Ian is Director of the
Graduate Program in Digital Media at Georgia Tech, and has written on
critical game theory and video games as a window into the behavior and
ethics of object interaction.
http://www.bogost.com/writing/aliens_but_definitely_not_as_w.shtml
Bogost's latest book tours object oriented ontology, which ranges far beyond
ANT into "all objects" in a flat ontology that affords the open possibility
of object interactions beyond the observation and intrusion of human
awareness or intervention. He starts from the question: what do objects
experience? What's it like to be a thing? And to interact with other things
in a flat universe of thingness? It is a treatment of these "tiny
ontologies" of object-object relationships as a non-human metaphysics of
speculative realism.
I'd be interested to hear opinions of OOO from other design scholars.
Graduate students of mine have been working these concepts into narrative
methods of strategic foresight.
Best, Peter
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