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We're filling up the world with technology
and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question:
What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives?
So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the
Bubble: Designing in a Complex World.
These are tough questions for the pushers
of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered
on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech"
ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.
Technology is not going to go away, but
the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy
it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served
by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable
computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing
upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff
will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and
how?
In the Bubble is about a world based
less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation
that is taking place now -- not in a remote science-fiction
future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock
of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging
in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people
can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes
services designed to help people carry out daily activities
in new ways. Many of these services involve technology --
ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects
and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered
world. The design focus is on services, not things. And
new principles -- above all, lightness -- inform the way
these services are designed and used. At the heart of In
the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world
examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design
decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.
John Thackara, described as a "design
guru, critic and business provocateur" by Fast
Company, is the Director of Doors of Perception, a design
futures network based in Amsterdam and Bangalore. He is
the author of Design after Modernism, Lost in
Space: A Traveler's Tale, Winners! How Successful
Companies Innovate by Design, and other books.
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