Here at Austin Center for Design we have been continuing on our two week reading cycle; this cycle focusing on the role of technology in society.
As part of our analysis of the various readings we were asked to analyze the readings and plot them on a 2-axis chart of our own design.
My methodology for this is to distill the core message of the readings into one to two sentence briefs. I than take these briefs and see how they relate to each other. This can at times be a challenging task, trying to combine different authors with varying ideas together on one chart. In particular there were two authors whose work just didn’t seem to fit; Neil Postman and John Dewey.
What I did next was I started to look at the other readings through the lens that each of these authors gave me. In Postman’s article he states that “Technology gives us information” and that more often than not, technology creates more problems than it solves. This led me to my first axis – does technology create problems or solves problems. Next, I looked at Dewey’s article where he states, “[an interaction] assigns equal rights to both factors in experience-objective and internal conditions.” When viewed in the frame of technology he’s saying that technology needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the user’s history and identity. This gave me the second axis – is technology flexible?
Once I had this frame the plot took form:
In the upper right hand side we have the authors that talked heavily about the opportunity that technology has. For me these are the optimists, they see technology as a positive force to be harnessed. In the lower left corner we have authors that were looking at the aftermath our technology has left us, specifically in terms of privacy and information. They see the pitfalls technology can have.
As an engineer, I see myself landing towards the lower right hand corner – technology is a method for solving problems and the rigid nature of it give us a structured framework. The designer in me wants to find a role somewhere in the middle – understanding that technology is a difficult thing to control or change, but not impossible and that there can be benefits when technology is implemented in a thoughtful, creative way.
- JacobNo Comments »