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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