Specs Focus: Understanding; imaginaries; behavior; interaction design; metaphors; qualitative interface design; sustainability; futures

Base:

School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

personalities. Some of Cusk’s conversations could serve as good examples to deconstruct along the lines of Argyris and Schön’s work, identifying espoused theories and theories-in-use [ 1].

Architectural Intelligence:
How Designers and
Architects Created the
Digital Landscape

By Molly Wright
Steenson (2017) My
Carnegie Mellon
colleague’s
I’m overwhelmed with
books, which exist largely
as a messy physicalized
mental model distributed
around the office. As has
been observed before in this
section, many academics’
reading tends to happen in
liminal spaces and times—
summers, airports and
aircraft. My choices here
all somehow fit with these
in-between situations.

Applied Ballardianism:
Memoir from a Parallel
Universe By Simon Sellars
(2018) J.G. Ballard (1930–

2009) in his novels and short
stories created a science
fiction of the near future—
a literary speculative and
a narrator who recounts
her conversations with
others. It’s a kind of
autoethnography through
reported speech, with the
reader left to fill in the
outline of the narrator’s
character from what she
chooses to emphasize in
the stories told. There
are parallels with the
ways that user research
can sometimes let us into
the lives of others, but
filtered through our own
critical design rooted in
suburbia. His exploration
of the psychological
effects of technology and
architecture inspired the
adjective Ballardian, which
Simon Sellars adopts and
adapts here. This is an
unusual book—described
as theory-fiction—taking
the form of a memoir about
the struggles of doing a
Ph. D. and woven into a
recurring fugue state. It’s a
travelogue of a continuous
reconstruction of the
narrator’s understanding of
the world, situated in relation
to Borges, Baudrillard, and
Lovecraft, alongside Ballard.
It works well as commentary
on the disorientating effects
of our pervasive technology
environments.

Outline / Transit / Kudos By Rachel Cusk (2014 / 2016 / 2018) This trilogy of novels by Rachel Cusk was a compelling discovery. Cusk’s approach is to tell a story through other stories, via

Dan Lockton
J.G. Ballard
created a science
fiction of the near
future—a literary
speculative
and critical
design rooted
in suburbia.

12 INTERACTIONS JANUARY–FEBRUARY2019

WHAT ARE YOU READING?