Medium Design

Knowing How to Build the World

180 pages

English language

Published Jan. 23, 2021 by Verso Books.

ISBN:
978-1-78873-932-0
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5 stars (2 reviews)

In Medium Design everyone is a designer. But the approach to design inverts the typical focus on object over field, to work on the medium—the matrix space between objects, events and ideological declarations. And it disrupts some habitual modern approaches to the world’s intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. In a series of case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design offers spatial tools for innovation that challenge the authority of more familiar legal or economic declarations.

From this perspective, solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable markers. Rather than the modern desire for the new, designers find more sophistication in relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. Encouraging entanglement, medium design does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. And special interludes puzzle over bullet-proof powers, a Kubrick movie, …

1 edition

"knowing how" instead of "knowing what"

No rating

Easterling is arguing for a different habit of mind called medium design (or medium thinking) that approaches problem at an angle, rather than head-on. Medium design thinks less about objects and more about the interplay between objects. It designs with the affordances, capacities, and interactions in mind. It looks for the dispositions of objects and environments. Rather than describing things, it does things. Rather than focusing on "know what" it focuses on "know how." She gives a number of examples of this from across different disciplines and situations, but this is my favorite example:

"A parent with squabbling children does not attempt to litigate or parse the content of the argument, but rather manages potentials in the environment. They might lower the temperature of the room, move a chair into the light, increase the blood sugar of one child, or introduce a pet into the arms of another so that …

ruthless optimism

5 stars

I'm just going to paste the review I wrote for this Yale School of Architecture magazine because it's probably the most coherent version of my thoughts.

Halfway through Medium Design, Keller Easterling notes that, regrettably, "[new ideas] will not burst upon the scene, take hold, or sell books unless they are presented as the lone, leading idea standing atop the high-altitude peak." It’s a lament not only about the notion of the public intellectual, but the trap that she inevitably faces as an author. My instinct in drafting this review was to cast Easterling and her propositions for "knowing how to work on the world" in a visionary, singular light, using the kinds of words that show up on blurbs for Easterling’s past books. “Foremost.” “Extraordinary.” “Provocative.” All accurate descriptors, but in Medium Design beside the point.

Because one of Medium Design’s central arguments is a rejection of simplistic modernist …