Category: Reading Journal
-
Ballard (1962), The Drowned World
I thought I’d read this before, many years ago, and perhaps I did – the handful of dog-eared pages in my paperback copy suggest someone read it, though perhaps I acquired it second-hand. Or perhaps I buried my memories of reading it, whether deliberately or unintentionally? That would certainly be a Ballardian response to a…
-
Urbanism 101
“… I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” Kublai said. “It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.” “I…
-
“Man-made, artificial, mutable” — Dunne (2005), (In)human Factors
Chapter 2: (In)Human Factors (pp. 21-42) from Dunne, A. (2005). Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. MIT Press. # Paradigm of user-friendly design generates “enslavement […] to the conceptual models, values and systems of thought the machines embody” (p21) “By poeticizing the distance between people and electronic objects, sensitive skepticism must be…
-
“Deviant and non-average practices” — Fam, Lahiri-Dutt & Sofoulis (2015), Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices
Fam, D., Lahiri-Dutt, K., & Sofoulis, Z. (2015). Scaling Down: Researching Household Water Practices. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(3), 639-651. [link] # (A timely rediscovery that echoes with Carson’s digs at Accelerationism… ) This is the introductory editorial piece from a special issue devoted to qualitative demand-side approaches to water consumption research; while the…
-
“A model of how to be and how to behave”: Szeman (2015), Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense
Szeman, I. (2015). Entrepreneurship as the new common sense. South Atlantic Quarterly, 114(3), 471-490. [link] # Via a Wired article on the start-up Boomtrain, Szeman introduces the increasingly ubiquitous entrepreneurial story, “narratives that make it seem as if financial and social success is, in the main, inevitable in the new world of the devices and gadgets that increasingly…