Product Description

As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products - from "intelligent" toasters to iPods - it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the "electrosphere" in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in "Hertzian Tales", must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives - to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends.The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in "Hertzian Tales" are not utopian visions or blue-prints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, "mixing criticism with optimism." Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context - considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness - and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include Electroclimates, animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; When Objects Dream..., consumer products that "dream" in electromagnetic waves; and, Tuneable Cities, which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105647 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
"A worthwhile challenge to the market subservience that dominates industrial design, indicating some of the ways of turning design towards more speculative, critical possibilities." - Design Philosophy Papers"

From the Back Cover
Architecture and furniture design have operated in the realm of cultural speculation for some time, but product design's strong ties to the marketplace have left little room for exploring the cultural function of electronic products. As more of our everyday social and cultural experiences are mediated by electronic products, designers need to develop ways of exploring how this electronic mediation might enrich people's everyday lives.

Hertzian Tales sets the scene for relocating the electronic product beyond a culture of relentless innovation for its own sake based simply on what is technologically possible and semiologically consumable to a broader context of critical thinking on its aesthetic role in everyday life.

About the Author
Dr Anthony Dunne is Senior Research Fellow in Computer Related Design and Senior Tutor in Industrial Design and Furniture at the Royal College of Art, London. He is also partner in the design practice Dunne + Raby.