The latest book by communication professor Anne Balsamo (pictured above) calls for taking culture seriously in the design of innovative technologies. She asserts that the wellspring of innovation is the technological imagination.
In the book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke University Press), Balsamo investigates three key sites for the training of the technological imagination: the industrial research lab, the science/technology museum and the research university.
Balsamo, also a professor of interactive media in the School of Cinematic Arts, draws from her experiences as a former research scientist at Xerox PARC, a multimedia designer, and more recently as a teacher and scholar interested in 21st century literacies to argue that the activities of designers involve the technological imagination at work. What gets “designed,” she argues, is not simply new technologies or applications, but more importantly the conventions and platforms that will shape the cultures of the future. For her, the practice of designing innovative technologies is at base an ethical project.
In the book she offers several lessons about the relationship between culture and innovation.
“What I learned through my own experiences in working on innovative technology projects is that innovation is a multidisciplinary endeavor that works best when collaborators share a set of ethical commitments," she said.
Her focus on the imagination is part of her collaborative work with the Annenberg Innovation Lab, where she serves as the coordinator for the research track in Public Interactives. As Balsamo notes: “The Annenberg Innovation Lab, under the direction of Jonathan Taplin and Creative Director Erin Reily, is unique in its approach to innovation in that Lab research projects take culture seriously as the foundation for technology development and innovation."
She said she joined the Annenberg Innovation Lab “to work with a group of colleagues and students who understand the important role of the arts and humanities in the process of technology innovation."
“Up until very recently, many people and funding institutions believed that to prepare students and future workers to be innovators of new technologies required invigorated educational efforts focused solely on the so-called STEM subjects of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But what we have come to realize is that technological innovation is not simply a matter of creating new technologies. Innovation involves the creation of entirely new cultural experiences. To imagine new cultural possibilities requires the kind of training and habits of thinking fostered among artists and humanists. We need STEAM (science, technology, engineering ARTS and mathematics) efforts, not simply STEM projects if we want to cultivate the technological imaginations of our students and ourselves.”
“This,” she asserts, “is the ethical and intellectual project that is elaborated in my book and through the work of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. I believe that most everyone has the capacity for a creative and robust technological imagination. Moreover, our future depends on all of us – not just the scientists and the technologists – to think more creatively and critically about the technologies we want to develop that will shape our cultural experiences to come."
The book has received praise from many corners of academia.
“Designing Culture is a road map to the technological imagination, provided by one of our best theorists and practitioners," said Duke University professor Cathy N. Davidson. "Anne Balsamo’s architecture of the future rests solidly on her own experiments, inventions, theoretical engagements, pedagogical innovations, and interactive hermeneutics. This is cultural theory at its best, brilliant, bold, and daring."
Lawrence Grossberg, author of Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, called Designing Culture a tour de force that offers a unique vision of the possibilities for contemporary cultural studies. "Refusing to separate research from pedagogy, technology from culture, or innovation from imagination, Anne Balsamo maps the concrete complexities of specific design processes, and opens up new ways of thinking about — and teaching — technocultures in relation to broader socio-political fields," Grossberg said. "Her book is required reading for anyone working with contemporary cultures."
John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, said Balsamo's experiences as a researcher and designer who has worked across cultural domains give her a unique ability to foster conversations among diverse groups of thinkers who want to engage with issues of culture and technological innovation.
"Balsamo not only describes ways to take culture seriously in the design of new technologies but also elaborates why it is ethically imperative to do so," Brown said. "Her insights into expanding the traditional considerations of socio-technical design to consider issues of culture are coming at a critical time. This is a great book that should be read by anyone interested in creating new technologies of imagination — for enhancing learning in the twenty-first century and creating expressive cultural platforms for the future."
Balsamo reflected on the reasons for writing the book: "This book to me was an answer to the question, 'What do I do after the criticism?' It was important for me to learn how to translate my critical analyses of the cultural impact of new technologies into insights about how to do things differently in the future. My hope is that this book inspires other scholars and students to critically reflect on the broad implications of the design of innovative technologies and then to imagine how their critical insights might be used as a creative resource for the designs of technologies and cultures in the future.”
For more information about the Designing Culture Transmedia Project visit: www.designingculture.org.
Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work
Annenberg Innovation Lab
