Parutions récentes
Le soin des choses
Politiques de la maintenance
Jérôme Denis, David Pontille — 2022
Qu'ont en commun une chaudière, une voiture, un panneau de signalétique, un smartphone, une cathédrale, une œuvre d'art, un satellite, un lave-linge, un pont, une horloge, un serveur informatique, le corps d'un illustre homme d'État, un tracteur ? Presque rien, si ce n'est qu'aucune de ces choses, petite ou grande, précieuse ou banale, ne perdure sans une forme d'entretien. Tout objet s'use, se dégrade, finit par se casser, voire par disparaître. Pour autant, mesure-t-on bien l'importance de la maintenance ? Contrepoint de l'obsession contemporaine pour l'innovation, moins spectaculaire que l'acte singulier de la réparation, cet art délicat de faire durer les choses n'est que très rarement porté à notre attention.
Ce livre est une invitation à décentrer le regard en mettant au premier plan la maintenance et celles et ceux qui l'accomplissent. En suivant le fil de différentes histoires, ses auteurs décrivent les subtilités du " soin des choses " pour en souligner les enjeux éthiques et la portée politique. Parce que s'y cultive une attention sensible à la fragilité et que s'y invente au jour le jour une diplomatie matérielle qui résiste au rythme effréné de l'obsolescence programmée et de la surconsommation, la maintenance dessine les contours d'un monde à l'écart des prétentions de la toute-puissance des humains et de l'autonomie technologique. Un monde où se déploient des formes d'attachement aux choses bien moins triviales que l'on pourrait l'imaginer.
https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/le_soin_des_choses-9782348064838
Decidim, a Technopolitical Network for Participatory Democracy
Philosophy, Practice and Autonomy of a Collective Platform in the Age of Digital Intelligence
Xabier E. Barandiaran , Antonio Calleja-López , Arnau Monterde , Carol Romero — 2024
This Open Access book explains the philosophy, design principles, and community organization of Decidim and provides essential insights into how the platform works. Decidim is the world leading digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, built entirely and collaboratively as free software, and used by more than 500 institutions with over three million users worldwide.
The platform allows any organization (government, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood, or cooperative) to support multitudinous processes of participatory democracy. In a context dominated by corporate-owned digital platforms, in the era of increasing social structuring via Artificial Intelligence, Decidim stands as a public or community owned platform for collective human intelligence. Yet, the project is much more than its technological features. Decidim is in itself a crossroad of the various dimensions of the networked society, a detailed practical map of its complexities and conflicts. Theauthors distinguish three general dimensions of the project: (1) the political - shedding light on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations, (2) the technopolitical - explaining how this technology is democratically designed and managed to produce and protect certain political effects, and (3) the technical - presenting the conditions of production, operation, and success of the project.
This book systematically covers those three levels in an academically sound, technologically consistent, and politically innovative manner. Serving as a useful resource and handbook for the use of Decidim, it will not only appeal to students and scholars interested in participatory and digital democracy but also to professionals, policy-makers, and a wider audience interested in learning more about the Decidim platform.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-50784-7
Expanding the Frontiers of Design
Critical Perspectives
Gabriela Goldschmidt, Ezri Tarazi — 2024
Design Thinking, a method widely used in design business and management, has changed the landscape of contemporary design. Whereas in the past non-designers were called upon to serve as external consultants ad-hoc, in an effort to promote creativity and innovation most design teams now consist of a mix of designers and other professionals. The impact of this development on the design landscape in recent years is so far without thorough investigation and analysis of its various influences. This book comprises an edited collection of selected papers from the 13th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS13) which offers an exploration of Design Thinking from theoretical, practical, and pedagogical perspectives as well as critical analysis of the design process.
The book is arranged in five parts as follows:
Part 1: Thinking about design
Part 2: Design thinking in the studio
Part 3: Design thinking in practice and professional training
Part 4: Design teams of diverse backgrounds, Interdisciplinary projects
Part 5: Design and nature; visual representation
Providing a comprehensive source for new perspectives on design and Design Thinking, Expanding the Frontiers of Design is ideal for designers and design academics of all disciplines wishing to strengthen and innovate their practice, as well as industry leaders who seek to consolidate their business strategies and evolve their work.
Feminist Designer
On the Personal and the Political in Design
Alison Place — 2023
A bold and timely collection that brings feminist theory and critical thinking to life through vital, approachable design methods and practices.
Feminist Designer brings together a constellation of voices and perspectives to examine the intersection of design and feminist theory. For decades, the feminist refrain within design has hinged on the representation and inclusion of women in the field. This collection, edited by Alison Place, however, is a call to move beyond this narrow application. Feminist design is not just about who does design—it is about how we do design and why. Feminist frameworks for design activism are now more relevant than ever, as they emphasize collaborative processes that aim to disrupt and dismantle power hierarchies while centering feminist ways of knowing and doing.
The first book in nearly three decades to address such practices in design, Feminist Designer contains essays, case studies, and dialogues by 43 contributors from 16 different countries. It engages a wide variety of design disciplines, from graphic design to disability design to algorithmic design, and explores key feminist themes, such as power, knowledge, care, plurality, liberation, and community. Through diverse, sometimes conflicting, intersectional perspectives, this book contributes new design methods informed by a multiplicity of feminisms that confront design's patriarchal origins while ushering in new pathways for making critical and meaningful change.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048422/feminist-designer/
Beyond Digital
Design and Automation at the End of Modernity
Mario Carpo — 2023
Recasting computational design: a new modern agenda for a post-industrial, post-pandemic world
Mass production was the core technical logic of industrial modernity: for the last hundred years, architects and designers have tried to industrialize construction and standardize building materials and processes in the pursuit of economies of scale. But this epochal march of modernity is now over. In Beyond Digital, Mario Carpo reviews the long history of the computational mode of production, showing how the merger of robotic automation and artificial intelligence will stop and reverse the modernist quest for scale. Today's technologies already allow us to use nonstandard building materials as found, or as made, and assemble them in as many nonstandard, intelligent, adaptive ways as needed: the microfactories of our imminent future will be automated artisan shops.
The post-industrial logic of computational manufacturing has been known and theorized for some time. By tracing its theoretical and technical sources, and reviewing the design theories that accompanied its rise, Carpo shows how the computational project, long under the sway of powerful antimodern ideologies, is now being recast by the urgency of the climate crisis, which has vindicated its premises—and by the global pandemic, which has tragically proven its viability. Looking at the work of a new generation of designers, technologists, and producers, Beyond Digital offers a new modern agenda for our post-industrial future.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545150/beyond-digital
Design and Solidarity
Conversations on Collective Futures
Rafi Segal, Marisa Morán Jahn — 2023
In times of crisis, mutual aid becomes paramount. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, new forms of sharing had gained momentum to redress precarity and stark economic inequality. Today, a diverse array of mutualistic organizations seek to fundamentally restructure housing, care, labor, food, and more. Yet design, art, and architecture play a key role in shaping these initiatives, fulfilling their promise of solidarity, and ensuring that these values endure.
In this book, artist Marisa Morán Jahn and architect Rafi Segal converse about the transformative potential of mutualism and design with leading thinkers and practitioners: Mercedes Bidart, Arturo Escobar, Michael Hardt, Greg Lindsay, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ai-jen Poo, and Trebor Scholz. Together, they consider how design inspires, invigorates, and sustains contemporary forms of mutualism—including platform cooperatives, digital-first communities, emerging currencies, mutual aid, care networks, social-change movements, and more. From these dialogues emerge powerful visions of futures guided by communal self-determination and collective well-being.
https://cup.columbia.edu/book/design-and-solidarity/9780231204057
Decolonizing Design
A Cultural Justice Guidebook
Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall — 2023
A guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.
From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.
A leading figure in the movement to decolonize design, Dori Tunstall uses hard-hitting real-life examples and case studies drawn from over fifteen years of working to transform institutions to better reflect the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. Her book is at once enlightening, inspiring, and practical, interweaving her lived experiences with extensive research to show what decolonizing design means, how it heals, and how to practice it in our institutions today.
For leaders and practitioners in design institutions and communities, Tunstall's work demonstrates how we can transform the way we imagine and remake the world, replacing pain and repression with equity, inclusion, and diversity—in short, she shows us how to realize the infinite possibilities that decolonized design represents.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047692/decolonizing-design/
Touch Screen Theory
Digital Devices and Feelings
Michele White — 2022
Technology companies claim to connect people through touchscreens, but by conflating physical contact with emotional sentiments, they displace the constructed aspects of devices and women and other oppressed individuals' critiques of how such technologies function.
Technology companies and device designers correlate touchscreens and online sites with physical contact and emotional sentiments, promising unmediated experiences in which the screen falls away in favor of visceral materiality and connections. While touchscreens are key elements of most people's everyday lives, critical frameworks for understanding the embodied experiences of using them are wanting. In Touch Screen Theory, Michele White focuses on the relation between physically touching and emotionally feeling to recenter the bodies and identities that are empowered, produced, and displaced by these digital technologies and settings. Drawing on detailed cases and humanities methods, White shows how and why gender, race, and sexuality should be further analyzed in relation to touchscreen use and design.
White delves into such details as how women are informed that their bodies and fingernails are not a fit for iPhones, how cellphone surfaces are correlated with skin and understood as erotic, the ways social networks use heart buttons and icons to seem to physically and emotionally connect with individuals, how online references to feminine and queer feelings are resisted by many men, and how women producers of autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos use tactile strategies and touchscreens to emotionally bond with viewers. Proposing critical methods for studying touchscreens and digital engagement, Touch Screen Theory expands a variety of research areas, including digital and internet cultures, hardware, interfaces, media and screens, and popular culture.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544689/touch-screen-theory/
Civic Media
Technology, Design, Practice
Eric Gordon, Paul Mihailidis — 2022
Examinations of civic engagement in digital culture—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life.
Countless people around the world harness the affordances of digital media to enable democratic participation, coordinate disaster relief, campaign for policy change, and strengthen local advocacy groups. The world watched as activists used social media to organize protests during the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution. Many governmental and community organizations changed their mission and function as they adopted new digital tools and practices. This book examines the use of “civic media”—the technologies, designs, and practices that support connection through common purpose in civic, political, and social life. Scholars from a range of disciplines and practitioners from a variety of organizations offer analyses and case studies that explore the theory and practice of civic media.
The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a “debt resistance” movement to government service delivery ratings to the “It Gets Better” campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545815/
Gaia's Web
How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth
Karen Bakker — 2024
A riveting exploration of one of the most important dilemmas of our time: will digital technology accelerate environmental degradation, or could it play a role in ecological regeneration?
At the uncanny edge of the scientific frontier, Gaia's Web explores the promise and pitfalls the Digital Age holds for the future of our planet. Instead of the Internet of Things, environmental scientist and tech entrepreneur Karen Bakker asks, why not consider the Internet of Living Things? At the surprising and inspiring confluence of our digital and ecological futures, Bakker explores how the tools of the Digital Age could be mobilized to address our most pressing environmental challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss. Interspersed with ten elegiac, enigmatic parables, each of which is based on an existing technology, Gaia's Web evokes the conundrums we face as the World Wide Web intertwines with the Web of Life
A new generation of innovators is deploying digital technology to come to the aid of the planet, using spy satellites to track down environmental criminals, inviting animals to the Metaverse, and biohacking Frankenstein-like biobots as environmental sentinels. But will they end up doing more harm than good? In an engaging take on conservation technology, Bakker looks at the digital tech applications to environmental issues from predatory harvesting of environmental data to human bycatch and eco-surveillance capitalism. If we address these issues and mobilize digitally mediated forms of citizen science, she argues, digital tech could help reverse environmental harms and advance environmental sustainability. And in the process, Big Tech might be transformed for the better.
With its uniquely broad scope—combining insights from computer science, ecology, engineering, environmental science, and environmental law—Gaia's Web introduces profoundly novel ways of addressing our most pressing environmental challenges—mitigating climate change, protecting endangered species—and creating new possibilities for ecological justice by empowering nonhumans to participate in environmental regulation.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048750/gaias-web/
Hacker Protester
Guide pratique des outils de lutte citoyenne
Geoffrey Dorne — 2022
« Hacker Protester » est un guide pratique qui explore, à travers le monde, 100 outils de lutte citoyenne. Bricolés, détournés, hackés, ces armes d'auto-défense sont au service de la justice sociale et environnementale du XXIe siècle. J'ai écrit ce livre en me basant sur plus de 5 ans d'études d'ethnographie du design autour des outils de contestation et des luttes sociales contemporaines. Pour enrichir cette recherche, j'ai interviewé des militants de divers pays et j'ai inclus dans ce livre les témoignages et analyses d'historiens, sociologues, journalistes, activistes et hackers. Leurs contributions offrent une perspective intellectuelle, historique et sociologique, transformant ce travail d'étude et d'enquête en un guide pratique indispensable pour quiconque s'intéresse aux outils de lutte citoyenne.
Géopolitique du numérique
L'impérialisme à pas de géants
Ophélie Coelho — 2023
21,00 € TTC
Voyage à la fois historique et géographique, ce livre nous donne voir un nouveau théâtre d’opérations où, loin de l’utopie d’un internet sans frontières, l’impérialisme technologique avance à pas de géants.
Il y a à peine une trentaine d’années, les technologies numériques étaient absentes de nos vies. D’abord initiées par les investissements des États, nous avons vu naître des Géants - Gafam et autres Big Tech moins connues - et avec eux des rapports de dépendance inquiétants. Producteurs de technologies stratégiques, ils sont aujourd’hui propriétaires de gigantesques infrastructures sur lesquelles reposent notre activité numérique, parmi lesquels les réseaux de câbles sous-marins représentés sur la couverture du livre.
Rendant dépendants des pans entiers de l’industrie, les administrations étatiques et les individus, ils forment des oligopoles disposant d’un pouvoir d’influence colossal qui transforment la géopolitique du numérique. Dans cet ouvrage, Ophélie Coelho montre notamment que ces Big Tech utilisent aujourd’hui des stratégies d’expansion territoriale comparables à celles des grands Empires pour étendre leur domination sur l’Europe et l’Afrique.
En croissance permanente, ils constituent des défis nouveaux, comparables à ceux des précédentes révolutions industrielles, en matière de réglementation, de pouvoir et d’impact environnemental . Si l’autrice analyse les enjeux et les dangers de cette dépendance moderne, elle propose des solutions pour sortir de cette emprise, en tant qu’individus et en tant que société. Ce livre de référence en géopolitique du numérique offre à la fois une analyse aussi pointue qu’accessible, et des pistes pour se libérer de cet impérialisme insidieux.
Car enfin, cette situation de dépendance n’est pas aussi inéluctable qu’on veut bien le croire, et la souveraineté numérique ne se limite pas in fine à la liberté de choisir qui sont nos maîtres.