Interactions - January/February 2019

book was already included once in this column—by Paul Dourish—but it’s taken me a few months to sit down with it.

Architectural Intelligence

takes four “slices” through the underexplored historical undergrowth of relationships between HCI and architecture, focusing on four figures— Nicholas Negroponte, Richard Saul Wurman, Christopher Alexander, and Cedric Price—and their intersecting worlds.

Terms such as information architecture are used so freely in design practice, but their historical background is rarely discussed; Steenson shows how much of current HCI and interaction design was not inevitable or uncontested—there were other paths, other possibilities.

New Dark Age:
Technology and the
End of the Future
By James Bridle (2018)

Also reviewed by Matt
Jones in a recent issue,
this is a fascinatingly
broad exploration
of how technology’s
promise to understand
us through monitoring,
data, and computational
approaches is in turn
creating a world where
complexity leads to a
“black box” society—or
a new Dark Age. Bridle
argues that our inability
to make sense of the
systems in which we’re
embedded, from climate
change to data-driven
propaganda to algorithmic
decision making, is being
exploited by corporate,
fundamentalist, and state
actors, to divide and
control us. I am especially
taken with Bridle’s ability
to link these subjects,
to probe the societal
imaginaries within which
we find ourselves.

Endnotes

1. Argyris, C. and Schön, D. A. Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1974.

Dan Lockton is an assistant
professor and chair of design
studies at Carnegie Mellon
University, where he runs the
Imaginaries Lab, a research/
teaching platform exploring new
ways to think and live. He has
a Ph.D. in design from Brunel
University, London, and was
previously a researcher and
tutor at the Royal College of Art.
→ danlockton@cmu.edu
http://danlockton.com
DOI: 10.1145/3292031 COP YRIGHT HELD BY AUTHOR