at Station Chantiers Navals ➊
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“I call the ideology that legitimizes and sanctions such aspirations “solutionism.” I borrow this unabashedly pejorative term from the world of architecture and urban planning, where it has come to refer to an unhealthy preoccupation with sexy, monumental, and narrow-minded solutions—the kind of stuff that wows audiences at TED Conferences—to problems that are extremely complex, fluid, and contentious. These are the kinds of problems that, on careful examination, do not have to be defined in the singular and all-encompassing ways that “solutionists” have defined them; what’s contentious, then, is not their proposed solution but their very definition of the problem itself. Design theorist Michael Dobbins has it right: solutionism presumes rather than investigates the problems that it is trying to solve, reaching “for the answer before the questions have been fully asked.” How problems are composed matters every bit as much as how problems are” — Toward a Complex, Realistic, and Moral Tech Criticism. (via timoarnall)
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“The idea of the Internet is still too young to produce strong anti-app sentiment. We do not yet have an adequate understanding of cyberspace as space. While it is safe to speculate that different design arrangements of the online world give rise to different aesthetic experiences, we still do not know the exact nature of this relationship. Nor do we know enough about how the design and the interconnection of online platforms affect the distribution of civic virtues—solidarity, equality, and flânerie, to name just a few—that we may wish to promote online. Just as we recognized many of the important civic functions of the sidewalk only after it had been replaced by the highway, so we may currently be blind to those virtues of the Internet—its inefficiency, its unpredictability, its disorder—that may ultimately produce a civic and aesthetic experience that is superior to the “automatic, effortless, and seamless” (one of Apple’s advertising slogans) world of the app.” — The iGod: Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection—and the consequences. (via timoarnall)
(via timoarnall)