Peter and Eric, thank you for your generous posts, and the references and recommendations they contain.
Peter: from what you say, I shall certainly follow up on Bogost more carefully.
I am on the run today, so will have to absent myself from this conversation for a while, but hope that others who are working with this material might join in. I would love to know who else is engaging in this territory, and around what questions.
Best wishes, Susan.
I look forward to hearing
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 10:18 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Activity Theory and ANT and computers are capable of design?
Susan - Just to follow, I'm an avid reader of Latour's work in scientific
practices - and while he critiqued the social practices in science that
essentially "manufacture facts" his Laboratory Life (and Knorr-Cetina's
Epistemic Cultures) reveal scientific work to be a design and designed
practice. Designers may not recognize this as the case, but many scientists
in fact do see experimental and "hard" science as a design process.
Scientific discoveries are teased out by the intentionality (hypotheses) to
make sense of data. Discoveries are also generative, much as design
discoveries are generated through a wide range of methods.
All theories are valid if useful structures for interpretation and
explanation. Bogost owes much to Latour, and he acknowledges him throughout
Alien Phenomenology, as well as Harman. Where I see Ian Bogost as "going
beyond" is not theoretically (theories take time to become culturally
relevant so who knows) but physically. "Alien" asks use to envision the
private lives of objects in their invisible and intrinsic relationship to
each other, regardless of agency or human interaction.
It's much more of an alien and a flatter universe than ANT prefigures, at
least as I've read it. So it seems both radically a-human and yet tangible.
It suggests an ethics of object relations and empathy for things in
themselves. And a responsibility of designers to recognize the new universes
of objects that may persist in their own relationships without any
intention, user, or prime mover.
Peter
Subject: Re: Activity Theory and ANT and computers are capable of design?
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.
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