m m m c ( a t ) u m i c h ( d o t ) e d u official faculty profile Hello, world . . . Please let this one small scrollable page serve as my sole online media presence. Resisting the virtual life has not been going so well lately. Zoom, Midjourney, and always Instagram consumes the gaze of my ever-so-visually-astute colleagues: we have our best people on that!
Like a fern or a horseshoe crab, I am an evolutionary holdover from a distant era. Back before smartphones, there were many more advantages for people who knew things themselves, whose work (and little else) resided on their own computers, and for whom most of the day involved very few messages.
For many years, I sought to bridge between architecture and interaction design. For even longer, as early as the 1980s, I was exploring prospects of digital craft. The media arts must not be just a proliferation of tools. Done right, the media arts can afford reflectivity, expression, appropriation, critical discourse, and communities of practice.
Socially embodied, lateral, unpredictable, and no mere delivery of instruction, resident education will survive!
In January 2022, Taubman College launched a new degree program Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology Because the city is not just an engineering problem, today's education must emphasize wider social participation, more agile policy, enhancement of local difference, and better design for living. Rather than being alienated by "the system," as built and owned by distant digital overlords, here the aim is to to become an able contributor to a more just and resilient "world of systems."
With the return to public space after the pandemic, and now also with the need to contextualize AI, the time is right to rethink text in the city, so to speak. How do people read the city and its media as one? For me, this renews the topic of ambient information, this time not only via arguments in activity theory, but also in multiple literacies. After all, there has to be more to life than being led about by your phone.
Information environmentalism could bring more responsibility over what plays best where. It could be no more oppressive than noise ordinances or signage policies, and it certainly isn't culture war on free speech. This sensibility recognizes how not all attention is of the kind one must pay. Instead an effortless flow of fascination, often fascination with surroundings, needs to be upheld against relentless entertainment, diminished interpersonal presence, and other such side effects of distraction engineering. And well, if you write a book about it, you may never eat lunch in tech town again... This book got great initial exposure, but then sank from its weight. . . Today it's easier just to go read other writers who have better cred to utter such heresies. Yet I still stand by this work, and it is important to what I am researching lately. preface | table of contents (PDF) | reviews
Back when digital futures moved beyond the desktop, out into the sites and situations of everyday life, so much of it improvised, civic, and partipatory. Early on they called it "locative media" or "urban computing." Soon a lot of it became a normal part of everyday life. But then you know what happened in the 2010s, with every moment watched over by giant corporations. Then in the pandemic, any talk of techlash melted away. If the future is virtual, the future is very grim. Even so, Digital Ground still gets airtime, now in historic perspective, as a foundation for interaction design in context of architecture and the city. preface | table of contents (PDF) | reviews
Today when appreciation of craft has become widespread and perhaps even normative in the media arts, it may be difficult to grasp what an unconventional and even unwelcome position this was in the design computing research community, twenty five years ago. Better books on the topic now exist (from Matthew Crawford and Richard Sennett, to name two), but this one has held up as an opening move. preface | table of contents (PDF) | reviews
My most recent book (MIT Press, Spring 2020) vanished into the pandemic. Although a credible and well-endorsed work in the Science-Technology-Society idiom, as inspired by years in my university's STS Program, it came across as a mere oddity for a field that runs on webinars, white papers, and solutions. Perhaps there is no right to question the always-on fragility of the smart city vision. Of course great complexities of technology and policy dominate the electric power industry, and this work makes diligent disclaimers about not trying to second-guess them. Nevertheless since clean local energy remains among the most positive and fast-changing topics of the times, somehow that must bring new opportunities in architecture and urbanism.
You may be a professor if. . . you spend half your time reviewing the work of other professors: conference papers, book manuscripts, and above all, promotion and tenure cases. Lately I have had a little too much practice at the latter, however, and so I may need to decline some requests. (I still love book manuscripts, nevertheless.)
Keeping it human amid saturation in media has become an everyday concern for just about anyone-- and the core of a good education. This is going to take something quite different from infinite clickable choice. It may not be something to send or share. It probably involves daily practice at something. Consider what it means to need no entertainment! Knowing things yourself takes the courage to step away from social media, political identities, and the economics of perpetual connectivity. You are going to miss almost everything anyway. The question is what you DO notice. For that, there is nothing like education!