LIke: Anne Balsamo's Blog: designing :: techno | culture - (originally posted on her blog)

Designing Culture :: The Book | Now Available!

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of my new book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke University Press).

The book calls for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovation technologies.

I assert that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination.

Following this, I examine key sites for the cultural reproduction of the technological imagination:  the research university, the industrial research lab, and the science/technology center.

Much of the material in the book draws on design-research projects I’ve been involved in over the past 15 years.  Based on these experiences, I offer several “lessons” about the nature of innovation in contemporary culture.

• Innovation is a process, not a product
• Innovation is a multidisciplinary endeavor
• Designing is a key site for the exercise of the technological imagination
• The future begins in the imagination; designers hack the present to create our futures
• Working with other people to make things is important for the construction of shared knowledge
• Every technology has contradictory and multiple effects
• Collaboration across differences is the key to techno-cultural innovation
• The creation of new technologies always involves the design of new cultural possibilities
• Designing culture is, therefore, an ethical project
• Understanding the relationship of culture and technology is an ethical imperative

The print publication is part of a broader TRANSMEDIA PROJECT simply called Designing Culture.

Packaged with the book is the interactive multimedia documentary, Women of the World Talk Back, created by Mary Hocks and Anne Balsamo in 1995 based on our participation at the 4th UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China.

Other media elements available at the designingculture.org website include:

• video archives and interactive applications relating to the Experiments in the Future of Reading EXHIBIT created by RED @ PARC in 2000
• examples of interactive digital WALL books
• interactive MAPS of matters of concern for the technological imagination
• short VIDEO primers on key themes of contemporary technoculture

via designingculture.net

Posted via email from Siobhan O'Flynn's 1001 Tales