Transforming Grounds

It is great to see books being published by people you respect as scholars and thinkers. I am especially happy to see my colleague and friend John Redström's new book " Making Design Theor y". Johan is one of the most thoughtful scholars in the world today when it comes to how to understand the relationship between design practice, design research, and knowledge production. Johan is one of the few who can, in a scholarly and successful way, grapple with fundamental questions around design as an approach of making things and of making theory . One of the most important features of this book is that it presents a foundation of concepts and definitions that are philosophically sound and practically useful.  I am convinced that his thoughts around design research: what it is, how to think about it, but also how to actually do it, will soon be regarded as a fundamental corner stone in the field of design research and research about design. This is a book I strongly enc...

Ok, now it is only a week or so until our new book is available (at least according to Amazon ). Here is the title and short overview of the book. Things That Keep Us Busy The Elements of Interaction By Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman Overview We are surrounded by interactive devices, artifacts, and systems. The general assumption is that interactivity is good—that it is a positive feature associated with being modern, efficient, fast, flexible, and in control. Yet there is no very precise idea of what interaction is and what interactivity means. In this book, Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman investigate the elements of interaction and how they can be defined and measured. They focus on interaction with digital artifacts and systems but draw inspiration from the broader, everyday sense of the word. Viewing the topic from a design perspective, Janlert and Stolterman take as their starting point the for manipulation by designers, considering such topics as complexit...

My colleague and friend Harold Nelson sent me a link to a very interesting article . It is a review of Rita Felski's new book "The limits of critique". I have not read the book but just by reading the article I get a good sense of the major argument Feltski makes. And it really resonates with my own experience and thinking, of course, not so much when it comes to literature critique, but critique in general. Interesting!