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Hi Peter, Reading the link, the first thing that came to mind was the views pointed to by Bogost, Harman and Nagel have been around for a long time - back to around 800 AD at least and I suspect much earlier. A question that needs a better answer is why we have been obsessed with using 'experience' and ' sense of identity' (along with its baggage such as 'agency' and 'intention' ) as the epistemological basis for exploring design issues. It hasn't worked very well over the last 50 years and doesn't seem to be getting any better. Perhaps it is time to look elsewhere. The main approaches to understanding and formulating theory about design as an activity have done so from egoistic perspectives with a assumption that subjective experience is a primary touchstone for validity in understanding how we design. Both are intrinsically problematic and the mess in much of the design theory literature is characterised by the problems associated with both. My analyses so far indicate it is better to drop the idea of focusing on design activity for making theories about how we make designs. Or at very least, drop those aspects of it that focus on design as a 'meaningful' activity' - until the world has a much better understanding of what something means to be meaningful that is based on more than individuals perception of 'meaning' in what they do. Best wishes, Terry -----Original Message----- From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Jones | Redesign Sent: Wednesday, 15 August 2012 11:20 PM To: Dr Terence Love 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