“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 8, 2011

New School Symposium Liveblog 14

How do we teach it? The tools are seen to be inadequate yet in its imperfection it's still useful.

LCA: a way of teaching designers about the mesh.

LCA a fantastic way of getting designers out of what is their primary starting and end point.

“I don't understand in an OOO way that the thing has its own reality. I don't acknowledge that this is only a temporary assemblage.”

Exit from the Looking Glass House of beautiful soul via decisionism.

Cameron: “Fuck it, I'm going to make it anyway. Experimentalism.” Designers have to make an intervention. This is what terrifies the New School for Social Research. “Critique! Caution!”

Clive: counterfactual evidence that forces innovative thinking. There is no perfect algorithm.

(Me: You can't decide in advance whether an algorithm will stop.)

Clive: Algorithm as designed entity. Technology as a small part of design. Algorithms as withdrawn. They just execute. Configuring things. Tech should be reframed as underneath the taking-responsibility-for of design.

Allan: how do you factor the future into the teaching. It seems key to design.

Cameron: It's not there yet! There's no or almost no consideration of scenario planning, foresighting, what will happen in 2050, etc.

Students have an oppressive presentism.

Daemian: trying to respond to multi-layered problems and offering multi-layered solutions? One delivery mechanism. Bright green naivety. But we should be looking for as many win-wins as we can.

Pleasure and sustainability versus sustainability versus money...

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