Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World

Description

What is the relationship between the housing crisis - the demand for building more, and the credit crunch - when the markets crashed as a result of overheated speculation in housing? Why does building more roads only lead to more traffic jams? Why are there so many 'free economic zone' in countries with authoritarian leaders? These questions is at the heart of Keller Eastering's provocative Medium Design. It is a call to look at the world in a different way, and as a result to rethink the way we design it, politically and architecturally. Currently innovation is expressed in one key-the rational explanation of the design and its problem-solving capacities in the mode of start-up cliches like elevator pitches and TED talks. . We are very good at looking at individual objects - buildings, commodities, ideas, but we are very poor at seeing how they connect and interact. We go in search of the right answer, and fail to see the array of potential outcomes. We are stuck in patterns of thought such as binaries or loops, that are often avoidable forms of violence. We mistake power for freedom; new for smart. In this book, Easterling proposes a new process: we need to look at the world in a different way in order to redesign it. We need to look not at the design object by itself but in its relations with the things around it. This is the potential power of of design is in the interplay and disposition of the objects and ideas. We should place an emphasis in 'knowing how' above 'knowing that', in order to liberate, challenge existing power and rebuild a more reflexive future.

Keller Easterling is an award-winning writer, architect and Professor at the Yale School of Architecture. She is the author of Enduring Innocence, which was named Archinect's Best Book of 2005, and Extratstatecraft. She is also the author of two essay length books: an ebook, The Action Is the Form: Victor Hugo's TED Talk and Subtraction. Her writing and design work was included in the 2014 and 2016 Venice Biennale. Easterling lectures widely in the US and abroad and contributes to, among others, Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, E-Flux, Cabinet and Volume.

Establishes Keller Easterling's growing reputation as the savviest student of post-national spatial and infrastructural forms. -- Arjun Appadurai, author of The Future as Cultural Fact * [for Extrastatecraft] * An essential text for anyone with a stake in the built environment, architect and citizen alike, in articulating the forces that shape our nation-states, and cataloguing-in a precise and readable style-the strategies of an otherwise unaccountable global order. -- Architectural Review * [for Extrastatecraft] * I have long admired Keller Easterling's talent for extracting a space, a shape, a marking, from mixes of elements rarely brought together-whether materially or conceptually. In Extrastatecraft she does it at a grand scale, cutting across fields of meaning and of practice. A must read. -- Saskia Sassen, author of Expulsions * [for Extrastatecraft] * This is a remarkable work. Keller Easterling has written one of the most original works about the American environment I've ever read. -- Michael Sorkin * [on Enduring Innocence] * Easterling is one of our most provocative theorists of infrastructures and the critical actions that might make them better. Here she gives us ways to remix, radically, their ingredients. Who else could parse the "canine mind" of the canny designer and city-dweller to show that we already know how to break the deadlock formed by binaries and manipulative media loops? Read this immensely engaging book to find a new toolkit for infiltrating, occupying, and recasting the mediated and material world. -- Caroline A. Jones, Professor in the Department of Architecture, MIT Easterling wants designers and architects and urbanists to think less about designing discrete things and more about "parameters for how things interact with each other. -- Hari Kunzru * Harper's Magazine * Medium Design actively works against popular culture's hunger for simple solutions. While embracing a diversity of tactics for a diversity of crises, Easterling puts forward an expansive definition of "design" that includes examples of systemic hacks like community land trusts and tactical refusals of market norms like social capital credits. -- Ingrid Burrington * OneZero * An insurgent energy and imagination crackle beneath the surface ... this a hopeful and thrilling text. -- David Terrien * ArtReview * Keller Easterling is a thinker intent on peering behind the veil to inquire into the forces and conditions that give rise to forms and spatial formations: the infrastructural, political, and financial milieux that softly but surely govern the production of architectural objects. -- Kearon Roy Taylor * Archinect * Easterling's work turns reason's cunning - and therefore the indirect acts of history - into a vibrant political theater for our age. -- Michael Osman * Los Angeles Review of Books * At its best, Medium Design reads a bit like Sun Tzu. It is calm and distant from the fray of disasters and conflicts that define our collective action or inaction in the midst of climate crises and failed globalization. Easterling's voice tends toward the wise and poetic. -- V. Mitch Mcewen * The Avery Review *