The New Normal

by Benjamin H. Bratton

Programme Director of Strelka Institute describes his vision for how design should approach and intervene in the new normal and what kinds of cities we should be planning for now

What is the new normal? Something has shifted, it seems. We are making new worlds faster than we can keep track of them, and the pace is unlikely to slow. If our technologies have advanced beyond our ability to conceptualize their implications, such gaps can be perilous. In response, one impulse is to pull the emergency brake and to try put all the genies back in all the bottles. This is ill-advised (and hopeless). Better instead to invest in emergence, in contingency: to map the new normal for what it is, and to shape it toward what it should be.

Part manifesto and part syllabus, this essay by design theorist, Benjamin H. Bratton describes his vision for how design should approach and intervene in the new normal and what kinds of cities we should be planning for now.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Design, Research, Theory, Sociology, Architecture

28 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 27, 2017

About the author

Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist whose work spans philosophy, computer science, and design. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, San Diego. He is also Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture) and Professor of Digital Design at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.