Explore the vast range of titles available.

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of ‘smartness’ to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even ‘creatures’. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy (Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari), and quantum physics (Bohm, Rovelli). It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction ('philoso-fiction') to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy (Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari), and quantum physics (Bohm, Rovelli). It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction ('philoso-fiction') to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.

This article proposes to examine animism through the perspective provided by a notion of immanent matter drawn on process philosophy (Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari), and quantum physics (Bohm, Rovelli). It then deploys this perspective to illuminate how planetary computation - the impact of digital media technologies on a planetary scale - is rewiring the cognitive, affective, perceptual capacities of the human. The article puts forward the notion of hybrid animism, as a speculative and imaginative philosophical fiction ('philoso-fiction') to grasp planetary computation as a sensorial pan-affective event, and to account for the hybrid techno-digital ecologies humans already inhabit, characterised by ongoing modulation, sensorial intensification and pervasive distribution of computational matter across a plethora of screens, surfaces and surroundings. The value of this proposition, the article explains, is to eschew dominant techno-deterministic narratives: not only techno-euphoria and techno-dystopia, but also the notion of technology as enchantment, with its in-built mystification. By deploying the philoso-fiction of hybrid animism and the un-mediated intuitive sensorial grasp it fosters, planetary computation can begin to be immediately perceived as the expression of new modes of co-habitation and co-evolution of the human and the nonhuman. Finally, the article brings together the nonhuman mutating surfaces of digital matter with cephalopods' skins to vividly and speculatively illustrate hybrid animism as a thought experiment of sorts.

This research investigates the practice of tattooing as a material, affective and superficial technology of shifting subjectivity, that is, in its power of inducing effects of subjectivity. Moreover, it argues that tattooing can be considered a micropolitical resource toward the production of experimental, creative and subversive paths of subjectificationa nd against machineso f homogenisationa nd bodily conformity. Drawing from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and from personal accounts of body modification, I discuss tattooing as a technology of empowerment and mobilization of subjectivity whose intensity, by way of the dis-organization of the bodily surface it induces, is capable of instigating lines of escape and liberation and entering into the production of new subjectivities. I have developed my argument by following several lines of investigation: the historical and cultural location of the practice of tattooing; an overview of Spinoza's philosophy; the production of subjectivity by way of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari's thought; and the analysis of the skin as the material site of tattooing and as a contested trope of identity. Finally, by looking at the distinction between skin shedding machines and botox machines, I have claimed tattooing as a micropolitical tool of liberation. Both the skin and subjectivity have been examined in terms of their production. I have discussed the skin as the site of manoeuvres of dis/organization of corporeal matter. I argue that its continuous unfolding radically questions the polarization surface vs. depth and a notion of identity predicated upon the skin seen as a boundary. This research aims at being a contribution to current debates on subjectivity and embodiment and, as such, it pertains to the wider project of rethinking the bodily roots of subjectivity. It is concerned, in particular, with how to create, express and sustain new forms of subjectification that resolutely place embodiment, desire and becoming at their core.