Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial

Description

We relate to things and things relate to us. Emerging technologies do this in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation - inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each other in ways that do not involve us at all. Case studies include Amazon's Alexa, the Internet of Things, Pokemon Go and Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner. Authors explore everything from the care work undertaken by objects, reciprocal human/machine learning, technological mediation as a form of control, and what it takes to reveal things that tend to be hidden and that often (by design) conceal the ways in which they use us. As a whole, the book is a collaborative philosophical inquiry into the nature and consequences of contemporary technological things. It is a design inquiry into the current nature of the artificial, and possibilities for how things might be otherwise.

Heather Wiltse is Associate Professor of Design at Umea University, Sweden. She is the author, with Johan Redstroem, of Changing Things: The Future of Objects in a Digital World (Bloomsbury, 2018).

This is one of the first collections to take seriously our changing relationship with non-human actors, yet in doing so it is also a profoundly human book. As disturbing as it is enlightening, Relating to Things is full of insight and curiosity about what it means to live in an increasingly sentient material world. Essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of the politics of relationality in design and the coming world of active objects. -- Damon Taylor, School of Architecture and Design, University of Brighton, UK Relating to Things is an extraordinarily rich exploration of how humans and technologies act, depend upon, and guide one another. Emerging at the intersection of philosophy of technology and design studies, this collection helps us to see how we have come to relate to our creations and how our freedom to design and redesign these relations can open the door to very different futures. This is an essential read for those wanting to gain a deeper sense of how to live with technologies that ask more, give more, take more, and share more with us every day. -- Professor Shannon Vallor, Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, UK