Medium Design

Knowing How to Work on the World

By: Keller Easterling

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eBook | 19 January 2021

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Everyone is a designer: making sense of the world

How do we formulate alternative approaches to the world’s unresponsive or intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power? Easterling argues that the search for solutions is a mistake. Instead, she offers the perspective of medium design, one that considers not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. This background matrix with all its latent potentials is profoundly underexploited in a culture that is good at naming things but not so good at seeing how they connect and interact.

In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new technologies for innovation but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but rather put them together in productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organisations of all kinds.

About the Author

Keller Easterling is an award-winning writer, architect and Professor at Yale. She is the author of Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space; Enduring Innocence, which was named Archinect’s Best Book of 2005; and Organization Space. She is also the author of two essay length books: The Action is the Form and Subtraction. Her writing and design work was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design and the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking.