Digital Materialities: Design and Anthropology

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:
Chapter 1. Editor's Introduction: Bringing social and design disciplines together in a digital-material world Part 1: Platforms Chapter 2. Rematerializing the Platform through Emulation Chapter 3. Designing a Digital Archive Part 2: Localities Chapter 4. Materiality and experience in the Smart Future-Present of urban design Chapter 5. Affordances of Mixed Reality Interventions Chapter 6. Digital Interventions in Declining Regions Part 3: Homes Chapter 7. Reimagining the smart home Chapter 8. Transforming energy demand through digital design Chapter 9. Speculative Method and Babble of Design Part 4: Bodies Chapter 10. Designing digital experiences for the active human body Chapter 11: Ethnography and (co)designing for a Mixed Reality Interactive Slide Part 5: Final thoughts Chapter 12: Afterword Index

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.