Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work

by Anne Balsamo

The renowned cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo maintains that technology and culture are inseparable; those who engage in technological innovation are designing the cultures of the future. Designing Culture is a call for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovative technologies. Balsamo contends that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination, a quality of mind that enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible. She describes the technological imagination at work in several multimedia collaborations in which she was involved as a designer or developer. One of these entailed the creation of an interactive documentary for the NGO Forum held in conjunction with the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. (That documentary is included as a DVD in Designing Culture .) Balsamo also recounts the development of the interactive museum exhibit Experiments in the Future of Reading , created by the group RED (Research in Experimental Documents) at Xerox PARC. She speculates on what it would mean to cultivate imaginations as ingenious in creating new democratic cultural possibilities as they are in creating new kinds of technologies and digital media. Designing Culture is a manifesto for transforming educational programs and developing learning strategies adequate to the task of inspiring culturally attuned technological imaginations.

Genres: Design

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Designing Culture just barely loses five stars, for a couple shortcomings, but it is an outstanding work at the intersection of science & technology studies, literacy studies and design, which not only does justice to each field but says new and important things across them.

Balsamo's account of designing a museum exhibit about technology and the document is engrossing, fascinating and insightful, some of the best participant-observer writing about technology development I've read. Similarly, her account of cross-disciplinary teaching at USC and calls for new practices at the periphery of the academy are fascinating and important.

The work has a few shortcomings, most notably the prose style of a 1990s humanities scholar: it is unnecessarily jargon-filled and obscure, limiting its potential audience to experienced scholars and the very patient. Another is a portrait of contemporary undergrads that reads more like a projection of Baby Boomer wishful thinking than the post-9/11 generation in my classrooms. She calls them "Original Synners" for their supposed "transgressivenes" and "fluidity" of identity and media practices. I'm not convinced that the experimental nature of adolescence has changed in meaningful ways, and see very little of the techno-hippie radicalism Balsamo reads through rose colored John Lennon glasses.

Otherwise, though, this is one of the best works on the social nature of technology out there, and should be required reading in design and STS classes, despite the difficulty of its language.

[Anup Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

In book "Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work" author Anne Balsamo narrates stories of technological imagination and aesthetic industrial designing as prevalent in the post-industrial western societies. She also introduces new dimensions of designing cultures for the urban spaces, where end users are able to live within ergonomically comfort zone. This book is ideal for scholars in innovation studies and technoculture, and designers of sustainable cities/ workplaces.

[thalia · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best works on tech cultures I’ve yet found. I recommend this for people interested in digital humanities, as well as people who want to apply various social frameworks to our digital spaces and places.