Tag
Design
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Gaming the Lyric: Poetry in 8-Bit
Some video games can evoke complex emotions, activate a voice, and cultivate a political imagination—like the best poetry.
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Mend Your Ways
An exhibition of Japanese textiles celebrates repaired clothing: flipping salvage into sustainability, and damage into beauty.
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Facial Recognition Is Only the Beginning
Does the relationship between power and AI mean that all people will be monitored all the time?
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Designing AI with Justice
I will discuss three concepts in this talk: first, the idea of design justice; second, how people are already resisting oppressive AI; and third, the ten principles of design justice …
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Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the …
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Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics …
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Design with Disability
The “Accessible Icon” by Brian Glenney and Sara Hendren began as design activism: the artists defaced existing disability access symbols with red and orange vinyl stickers. Today, their so-called “active wheelchair” logo has been adopted as the new standard by institutions and cities around the world. This clean, “accurate” image greeted visitors to the Access…
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Invisible Algorithms, Invisible Politics
Over the past several decades, politicians and business leaders, technology pundits and the mainstream media, engineers and computer scientists—as well as science …
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The World Silicon Valley Made
A repairman at the Shenzhen electronic bazaar treks from stall to stall, gathering inexpensive camera modules, casings, glass displays, batteries, and motherboards, and then, with only a screwdriver and his fingernails, he pieces it all together to produce a tiny talisman capable of channeling the world’s intelligence. To consumers, the iPhone can seem hermetic, consummate,…
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Our Metrics, Ourselves
In 1994, a doctor named Clifton Meador penned a satirical portrait of “the last well person” for the New England Journal of Medicine. The protagonist, bent on discovering every datum of unwellness …
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The Pocketbook Illustrations of the Rebel Artist B. M. Anand
This photo-essay was originally published in The Caravan. The featured artwork has been excerpted from Aditi Anand and Grant Pooke, Narratives for Indian Modernity: The Aesthetic of Brij Mohan Anand (HarperCollins India, 2016). Born in 1928, the artist Brij Mohan Anand was greatly informed by the political and social climate around him. Anand grew up…
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Underground Distractions, Shanghai
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Windows on trains and planes are equipped with shades: vertical or horizontal, rigid or supple. They modulate the vehicles’ apertures, allowing passengers to frame their gaze on the passing scenery as they please. The scenery available to us…
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Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this dialogue resulted from Rebuild by Design (RBD), an initiative of President Barack Obama’s Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. To deepen that conversation, RBD…
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Siri, Why Am I So Busy?: An Interview with Judy Wajcman
Smart technologies—phones, tablets, wearables, and time-saving apps—are supposed to lighten our load. So why are we always complaining about overwork? Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, tackles that paradox in her recent book, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Neta Alexander talked with her for Public Books…
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Seeing Things
December 1, 2015 — One of the great myths of our time concerns the promise of a global vision, of seeing things with the power, distance, and clarity of an all-encompassing vantage point, what Donna Haraway once called “the god trick.”1 It is no surprise that the first photographs to give this kind of perspective on…
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As in Painting, So in Poetry
“Colors are not sounds and ears are not eyes,” wrote Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a mid-18th century German philosopher and art critic. He was making a point about what he saw as a crucial division between fine art and writing: not only do art and writing enter our minds via distinct senses, but we also require…
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The Look of the Book
John Hersey’s Hiroshima takes place, as one might expect, in Hiroshima. Originally published in the August 31, 1946, issue of the New Yorker, it recounts what the magazine’s editors called, in a statement to readers of the issue, “the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb.” Within a few months it was…
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Outtakes for Tom McCarthy’s “Satin Island”
In Satin Island, the novel’s narrator, an anthropologist, succumbs to a vivid fever dream in which he finds himself flying offshore over an island—an “excrescence, a protuberance”—of waste, runoff, sewage, detritus, crude oil … a beautiful and corrupted “satin island.” So, on the jacket: an archipelago of oil; a ballistic aftermath of ink; a Triste…
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Is There Really No Smart Writing on Women’s Fashion?
Reading Women in Clothes is like spending Saturday afternoon at Nordstrom Rack. Massive, chaotic, and noisy, both are messy in a way that could be inadvertent but could be purposeful: is this disarray a sign of how much they have to offer, or a commercial tactic to make their goods seem limitless? For reader and…
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How the 9/11 Museum Gets Us
There was little choice. From the earliest conceptions of what would be done at Ground Zero, there would be one. A museum. And now here it is, the National September 11 Memorial Museum, which opened to the general public on May 21. Part of the necessity to “do something,” it was not easy to figure…
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Last Offices
Wondering how your life has changed over the past two decades? Just rummage through your email for old autoresponds. “Out of office” referred to unlucky politicians until the 1970s, when UNIX began to host vacation messages. Then, delays were counted in weeks; now, warnings that “Professor Price will be out of office from 5:30 p.m.…
