Malcolm McCullough

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 Unreal consume 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 and AI, 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.

In recent work, Active City Reading provides a prehistory for a better augmented reality. Instead of controlling more of what you see, the technology should enable you to see more kinds of things, in context, and to see across seams, textures, and multiple media. After all, there has to be more to life than being led about by your devices. This work probes activity theory, multi-literacies, and the legibile layers of place. Whereas back at the millenium scholars spoke of "city as text," this is more about "text in the city," maybe even large language models in the city, all engaged through the practice of walking.
photo: vvvita via freepik

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 good city life, so much of it seemed improvised, civic, and participatory. Designers called it "locative media" or "urban computing." Soon a lot of it became a normal part of everyday life. But then the web darkened 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

Socially embodied, lateral, unpredictable, and no mere delivery of instruction, resident education will survive!

Why Cities? the gateway course in our urban technology program, invites incoming freshmen to expand their aspiratons and especially their vocabulary. It runs fast with a range of learning exercises best done in private, not to appear online.
Networked Cities (2001–2017): reading seminar on urban computing. Often with participants from as many as five degree programs at the table.
Thesis Seminar+Studio- "data::district" In 2020 amid the worst of the pandemic, this very speculative group convened outdoors and onlline to explore hyperlocal media, neighborhood scale, aspects of commoning, and the kinds of knowledge that reside in place.
Revealing Data (2014 –> ): Open-source urban datavis with emphasis on narrative.
Representation*Robotics (2015 -> originally co-created with Mitch McEwen): this was one of the first digifab courses to be required in an undergraduate architecture program.
Responsive Surfaces (2008–2014): building sensate objects, studying public interactive art, and possibly the first course using Arduino at this university.
Representation (2004–2010): old-school, with recognizable referents, as on the origins of orthographics.
Architecture Studios (1987 –> )
this I regard as the world's best day job, but usually not something so web-ready, thus no recent links here. But many years ago, each of my studios built its own website, and here are a couple of them:
"Holland in Holland" (2010)
"Intermode" (2008)

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!