May
12-20, 2005
MIT
Press organizes book tour for new John Thackara publication
"In The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World"
Note:
John Thackara will tour multiple cities in the United States
for lectures and presentations. See column on the left for dates
and locations.
In
The Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
John Thackara
MIT Press
6 x 9, 288 pp.
ISBN 0-262-20157-7
$29.95
Available April 2005
We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but
we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff
for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John
Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex
World.
These are
tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our
economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no
small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself
in our daily lives.
Technology
is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the ends it
will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask
what purpose will be served by the broadband communications,
smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances
that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact
all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after
it, and how?
In the Bubble
is about a world based less on stuff, and more on people. Thackara
describes a transformation that is taking place now -- not in
a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts
it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation
already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for
what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes
services designed to help people carry out daily activities
in new ways. Many of these services involve technology -- ranging
from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems
play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design
focus is on services, not things. And new principles -- above
all, lightness -- inform the way these services are designed
and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed
by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility
can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical
innovation.
John Thackara,
described as a "design guru, critic and business provocateur"
by Fast Company, is the Director of Doors of Perception, a design
futures network based in Amsterdam and Bangalore. He is the
author of Design after Modernism, Lost in Space: A Traveler’s
Tale, Winners! How Successful Companies Innovate by Design,
and other books.
Author site:
www.thackara.com
Contact:
Colleen Lanick, Publicity Manager
M.I.T. Press
Five Cambridge Center
Cambridge, MA 02142-1493
Tel.: 617-253-2874
Fax: 617-258-6779
colleenl@mit.edu
http://mitpress.mit.edu
