About the Book
As the distinction between the digital and the material world becomes increasingly blurred, the ways in which we think about design are also shifting and evolving. How can the human, digital and material be brought together to intervene in the world? What constitutes our digital-material environments? How can we engage with digital technologies to make sustainable, healthy and meaningful decisions, both now and in the future? Digital Materialities presents twelve chapters by scholars and practitioners working at the intersection between design and digital research in the UK, Spain, Australia and the USA. By incorporating in-depth understandings of the digital-material world from both the social sciences and design, the book considers how this combined knowledge might advance our capacity to design for the future. Divided into three parts, the focus of the book moves from the theoretical to the practical: how different digital materialities are imagined and emerge, through software emulation, urban sensors and smart homes; how new digital designs are sparked through collaborations between social scientists and designers; and finally, how digital design emerges from the insider work of everyday designers. A fascinating, ground-breaking book for students and scholars of digital anthropology, media and communication, and anyone interested in the future of digital design.
Table of Contents:
List of figuresAcknowledgementsList of contributors1. Digital materialitySarah Pink, Elisenda Ardèvol and Débora LanzeniPart One Expectations2. Rematerializing the platform: Emulation and the digital-materialPaul Dourish3. Smart global futures: Designing affordable materialities for a better lifeDébora Lanzeni4. Envisioning the smart home: Reimagining a smart energy futureYolande StrengersPart Two Co-interventions5. Refiguring digital interventions for energy demand reduction: Designing for life in the digital-material homeSarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Val Mitchell, Garrath T. Wilson and Tracy Bhamra6. Speculative design and digital materialities: Idiocy, threat and com-promiseMike Michael7. Ethnography and the quest to (co)design a mixed reality interactive slideJaume Ferrer, Elisenda Ardèvol and Narcís Parés8. Designing for the active human body in a digital-material worldFlorian 'Floyd' MuellerPart Three Insider Design9. Mobile intimacies: Everyday design and the aesthetics of mobile phonesHeather Horst10. Designing for the performance of memoryDavid Carlin11. Digital interventions in declining regionsIan McShane, Chris K. Wilson and Denise MeredythNotesBibliographyIndex
About the Author :
Sarah Pink is Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia.Elisenda Ardèvol is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain.Dèbora Lanzeni is Researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at the Open University of Catalonia, Spain.
Review :
Lively, original, and wide-ranging, Digital Materialities provides a compelling framework for and provocation towards exploring the dense entanglements of design, the digital, and those complex collaborations of collective practice they catalyze and depend upon. A significant set of expeditions into fascinating, consequential, and newly emergent terrain. -- Donald L. Brenneis, University of California Santa Cruz, USA Digital and material have never been as separate as many people imagined them to be. Anthropology is now broaching this border, to grapple with more pertinent issues of change, design, and conceptualisation. The wait for a set of studies which gather Design, HCI, and Media Studies is over. Things will never be the same. -- Adam Drazin, University College London, UK This collection provides a keen series of speculative, experimental, and innovative projects, focusing attention on the complexity of the socio-technical context. It uses a series of cases to shed light on how the digital and material are inseparable elements of everyday lived contexts. Read as a whole, the book offers an exemplary vision of how research and design can be an interventionist practice; through collaborative, participatory, experimental forms of knowledge creation and, more importantly, exploration of future possibilities. -- Annette Markham, Aarhus University, Denmark Innovatively drawing together perspectives from the worlds of digital media and design anthropology, Digital Materialities is at the crest of a new way of thinking about the digital that both understands the technical nuances and affordances of the digital as a medium, and the social worlds that it produces and is produced by. Wide-ranging, taking on topics as disparate as energy efficiency in the home, mobile phones, virtualism, and digital design, Digital Materialities will be a crucial resource for all of us working across disciplines to understand the resonance of the digital as both an analytic frame, a form of practice, and a material assemblage. -- Haidy Geismar, University College London, UK The essays in this volume make the case for the undeniable hybridity of human experience and suggest further avenues for researching the forms that material/digital interactions take and how individuals, families, communities, and societies (co-)design digital materialities, often in unanticipated ways that diverge from the expectations and intentions of professional designers. -- Jack David Eller Anthropology Review Database
