Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World - Hardcover

Keller Easterling

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1788739329 ISBN 13: 9781788739320

Publisher: Verso, 2021

Synopsis

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 keythe rational explanation of the design and its problem-solving capacities in the mode of start-up clichés 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.

About this title

About the Author

Keller Easterling is an award-winning writer, architect and Professor at Yale. She is the author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Enduring Innocence, which was named Archinect s Best Book of 2005, and Organization Space. She is also the author of two essay length books: The Action is the Form and Subtraction. Her writing and design work was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design and the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking.

From the Back Cover

How to design the world: creating spaces for interplay

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1788739329
• ISBN 13: 9781788739320
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176