Journal of Design and Science

24/10/2019

To Unreality—and Beyond · Journal of Design and Science

In Issue 6: Unreal, Peter Pomerantsev explores both the breakdown of shared reality in our “futureless present" and some possible solutions. “The real antidote to the politics of unreality is to foster a grounded conversation about the future.”

An examination of the “propaganda of unreality” and why age-old principles of resistance to manipulation don’t work against today’s style of unreality.

24/10/2019

Making Up the Unreal · Journal of Design and Science

“What is the real face?” asks Media Lab student Nina Lutz, whose work focuses on cosmetics and interactive technology. “In particular,” she says, “I’m interested in how we can create immersive and often identity-affirming experiences by using cosmetics, technology and art.”

A look at how makeup can be used to completely transform identity, and how these transformations impact our understanding of real and fake.

09/10/2019

Tools for Multispecies Futures · Journal of Design and Science

"This story excites in me this desire to know. It’s not about commodities, it’s about a sense of being alive on this Earth." In the closing conversation for Issue 5: Other Biological Futures, Donna Haraway and Drew Endy consider care, storytelling, play, and activism as Tools for Multispecies Futures.

What tools do we need to move towards a more equitable, sustainable future for all people, species, and ecosystems? What stories do we need to tell and hear? Donna Haraway is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the Universit...

17/09/2019

False Alarm! · Journal of Design and Science

“Is there room to mix nonfiction and fiction, reality and unreality, on the radio (or anywhere else for that matter) at a moment where unreality has become a political strategy?” Ethan Zuckerman introduces Benjamen Walker’s False Alarm!, part of Issue 6: Unreal.

Is there room to mix nonfiction and fiction, reality and unreality, on the radio (or anywhere else for that matter) at a moment where unreality has become a political strategy?

21/08/2019

Response: "QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal" · Journal of Design and Science

“From the outside, it looks completely unreal, but on the inside, it feels quite real.” In JoDS Issue 6: Unreal, danah boyd considers the nature and function of unreality, including the sense of community it can foster.

danah boyd responds to Ethan Zuckerman's article on the community surrounding QAnon.

15/08/2019

Response: "The Dangers of Weaponized Truth" · Journal of Design and Science

"While Black women are often the canaries in the coal mine, at every decision-making point the people who have the most to lose if the wrong decision is made are not at the table from the beginning. It is the collective duty of all those who believe in equity, dignity and democracy, both on and offline, to listen to their calls and act now before it’s too late." Brandi Collins-Dexter, senior campaign director for Color of Change, responds to Brian Friedberg and Joan Donovan’s essay on participatory propaganda for JoDS Issue 6: Unreal.

Brandi Collins-Dexter from Color of Change responds to Friedberg & Donovan’s essay “On the Internet Nobody Knows You’re a Bot”

14/08/2019

MIT Spectrum

Trajectory: Explore the Summer 2019 issue of MIT Spectrum.

MIT Spectrum

07/08/2019

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Bot: Pseudoanonymous Influence Operations and Networked Social Movements · Journal of Design and Science

“When facts become hard to establish, distortion takes over.” Issue 6: Unreal, Brian Friedberg and Joan Donovan consider what happens when politically motivated humans impersonate vulnerable people or populations, and discuss the challenges of detecting such actors. https://bit.ly/2YOP2Uq

An exploration of what happens when politically motivated humans impersonate vulnerable people or populations online to exploit their voices, positionality and power.

07/08/2019

The Effects of Participatory Propaganda: From Socialization to Internalization of Conflicts · Journal of Design and Science

In Issue 6: Unreal, Gregory Asmolov explores how propaganda has been rewired for the digital age and how this new, “participatory propaganda” mediates conflict, manipulates relationships, and creates isolation.

A look at how propaganda has been rewired for the digital age and how this new, “participatory propaganda” mediates conflict, manipulates relationships and creates isolation, both online and offline.

16/07/2019

6. Unreal · Journal of Design and Science

"There is a version of propaganda on the rise that isn’t interested in persuading you that something is true. Instead, it's interested in persuading you that everything is untrue." Explore Issue 6: Unreal.

Unreal explores the first order effects recent attacks on reality have on political discourse, civics & participation, and its deeper effects on our individual and collective psyche. How does the use of media to design unreality change our trust in the reality we encounter?

20/05/2019

[forthcoming] 7. Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children · Journal of Design and Science

Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children, guest editors Joi Ito, Mimi Ito, and Candice Odgers are calling for submissions from child development experts, researchers, educators, parents, and children (ages 12-18). Proposals are due 5/28!

Children make up a third of all Internet users, yet the complex algorithms that shape their online experiences are rarely aligned with their interests or their needs. Dependent on adults to guide and structure their online experiences and their access to media, information, and social connection, ch...

03/05/2019

[forthcoming] 7. Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children · Journal of Design and Science

[forthcoming] 7. Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children · Journal of Design and Science

Children make up a third of all Internet users, yet the complex algorithms that shape their online experiences are rarely aligned with their interests or their needs. Dependent on adults to guide and structure their online experiences and their access to media, information, and social connection, ch...

24/04/2019

[forthcoming] 7. Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children · Journal of Design and Science

Announcing forthcoming JoDS issue 7: Algorithmic Rights and Protections for Children. Guest editors Joi, Mimi Ito, and Candice Odgers will curate an exploration of the question—How can we build a more equitable algorithmic world for all children?

Children make up a third of all Internet users, yet the complex algorithms that shape their online experiences are rarely aligned with their interests or their needs. Dependent on adults to guide and structure their online experiences and their access to media, information, and social connection, ch...

19/02/2019

Deep Learning with Biomimicry

"We propose the ongoing development of evolutionary intelligence be framed in terms of the...life cycles found in the world around us, utilizing botany and biomimicry as transdisciplinary tools." Read the latest explorations essay. http://mitsha.re/ZaPU30nKPU0

A transdisciplinary discussion of artificial intelligence, biomimicry, data science, and software engineering research. Can we frame the development of evolutionary intelligence in these terms?

25/09/2018

MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The Knowledge Futures Group, a new initiative from MIT Press and the Media Lab, seeks to redefine research publishing from a closed, sequential process, into an open, community-driven one. Among its first projects is PubPub, which hosts the Journal of Design and Science.

24/09/2018

Design With Science

Christina Agapakis and Suzanne Lee are pioneers in biodesign, possibly the first creative leads in biotechnology companies. But as a scientist doing design and a designer in science, and as women in a male-dominated industry, both are simultaneously insiders and outsiders. Why have they left familiar spaces to show that design in—or better, with—science is valuable, and their work is more than just the design of science? In this conversation, they explore those distinctions and discuss the opportunities and challenges in the burgeoning area of biodesign.

Christina Agapakis has a PhD in synthetic biology from Harvard University. In 2015 she became Creative Director of the leading biotechnology startup Ginkgo Bioworks, which designs organisms for applications in food and agriculture, consumer products, and medicine. Suzanne Lee is a designer with a ba...

17/09/2018

If You're Reading This, You're Too Tall

If you're reading this, you're too tall: In Other Biological Futures, artist Arne Hendricks and design journalist Rab Messina discuss the mental switch that happens right before we think of engaging in a redesign.

Arne Hendriks is a Dutch artist and researcher, best known for The Incredible Shrinking Man, a critical research project that asks people to consider scaling down to fifty centimeters (about 20 inches) in order to use the planet’s resources in a more sustainable way. Rab Messina, born in the Domin...

13/09/2018

Editorial: Other Biological Futures

Issue 4 of the Journal of Design and Science has launched! Read a framing essay by editors Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Natsai Audrey Chieza, and stay tuned for a series of conversations asking whether really can make things better, as we begin to imagine other biological futures.

Medical devices embedded deep in human flesh. Mushrooms growing designer chairs. Engineered probiotic bacteria colonising the guts of soldiers. Implants; fungal factories; bacteria. All three are “biodesigns”, yet each is a product of a very different discipline: biomedical engineering, design, ...

13/09/2018

4. Other Biological Futures

Get to know the editors of Issue 4 of the Journal of Design and Science: Other Biological Futures! Natsai Audrey Chieza is a pioneer of design-led biofabrication for materials and has spent 8 years experimenting with the biological and cultural context of making with life. Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist who has spent 10 years researching synthetic biology and the design of living matter, exploring the values that shape design, science, technology, and nature.

Issue 4 of the Journal of Design and Science, “Other Biological Futures,” looks at biodesign, the design of, with, or from biology. Biodesign is being promoted by scientists and designers as an ecological remedy, a technological challenge, an economic opportunity, and a manufacturing and industr...

13/08/2018

Systems Justice

In “Systems Justice,” his response to , political and moral theorist Vafa Ghazavi writes, “Our conceptions of responsibility for realising justice are under immense strain. In our world, causal connections to unjust harms are often highly diffuse and the effects of discrete actions on overall outcomes are increasingly hard to discern. Even as connections between deprivations and globalised social processes have intensified, moral implications for specific agents remain unclear. The standard view of “normal justice”, as the political theorist Judith Shklar called it, comes to represent the interests of some, often a relatively privileged few, while neglecting those of others. Meanwhile, there appear to be few alternatives to dominant market or political dogmas that can adequately respond to these circumstances. Individual virtue seems insufficient but institutional responses to take up the slack are not in sight either.

This is the inescapable context in which artificial intelligence is surging as a global political, economic, and cultural force. Yet, this backdrop rarely makes it into the discussion of how machines ought to fit into our collective future. That is why Joi Ito’s Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto is such a timely and significant intervention. We cannot succumb to technological path dependencies. A defining question of our age is whether machines will exacerbate current injustices or contribute to rooting them out. Extended intelligence in a systems paradigm gives us realistic hope for the latter.”

Read the full essay at https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/ghazavi

Essay Competition Winner

10/08/2018

Public Books

Public Books

"As an editor, often I ask authors: what’s the problem you’re trying to solve and what’s your solution? Their peers often don’t encourage them to think in such basic terms. But part of my job is to help authors reach a larger group of people than just those within their discipline."

08/08/2018

Myth and the Making of AI

In “Myth and the Making of AI,” their response to , writer Molly McCue and UX designer Kat Holmes write, “Singularity is driving a new wave of pioneer narratives featuring man as maker and machine as protagonist. Yet this cultural mythology contradicts the characteristic that most distinguishes the rising AI age: ambiguity. Creating technology is now a practice of designing for the uncertain and coding for the indeterminate. In the history of design and technology, human and technical variability have long been treated as error: a deviation from the norm to be simplified away, either in service of mass-scale market growth or because a diversity of possibilities threatens individual control.

Yet human lives are full of ambiguous interdependencies. In his essay “Resisting Reduction,” Joichi Ito asserts that when successful, systems of these interdependencies form value exchanges marked by a flourishing function and drawing from “diversity and the richness of experience.” Interdependence is a necessary reality. Every pioneer needs a patron, every artist needs a group of creatives to inspire and provoke. No pioneer, no artist, no inventor ever makes it alone. These human truths lead us to question the reductive cultural myth of self-sufficiency as the highest form of worth and instead affirm one of adaptive interconnectivity."

Read the full essay at http://ow.ly/GDCp30ljnqH

Essay Competition Winner

02/08/2018

Resisting Reduction: The Fluid Boundaries of Non-Communicable Disease

In "Resisting Reduction: The Fluid Boundaries of Non-Communicable Disease," a response to , medical anthropologist Cathryn Klusmeier explores “what it could mean to reframe non-communicable diseases like Alzheimer’s, to resist reducing them to singular individual afflictions, and instead recognize that they are complex webs of interconnected illnesses that reach far beyond the boundaries of a singular body.”

She writes: “Tucked near the middle of Joichi Ito’s manifesto, “Resisting Reduction: Designing our Complex Future with Machines” he writes: “Today, it is much more obvious that most of our problems—climate change, poverty, obesity and chronic disease or modern terrorism—cannot be solved simply with more resources and greater control”. And although this is the only time obesity and chronic disease are specifically mentioned in this piece, I contend that this moment in the manifesto opens the door for delving into how current research into Alzheimer’s, obesity, and other chronic diseases is grappling with the tendency towards reduction in medical spheres.”

Read Cathryn’s essay at https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/klusmeier

Essay Competition Winner

31/07/2018

In “Systems Seduction: The Aesthetics of Decentralization,” responds to , bringing his background in film and installation to a discussion about systems approaches to understand technology and society.

Asked about his approach to “Systems Seduction” Gary writes, “I think most people can agree that anthropocentric, megalomaniacal and hubristic approaches to technology have gone badly. In my essay I'm essentially critiquing the idea of these perfect taxonomies and systems theories that we've imagined over time, that make everything explicable, predictable, and potentially dominable, which has largely been guided by existing colonialist and capitalist drives, often under the guise of scientific rigor. At the same time I think complexity, contingency, and the "speculative" imaginary, while obviously essential considerations, can also become fetishized orientations if they do not address the systemic failures of socio-economic and ecological organization that we are living through today. We should be looking for complexity and unknowability in the histories that brought us here, as well as where we're headed.”

Read the full essay at http://ow.ly/m1Ut30lcSPg

27/07/2018

The Wicked Queen’s Smart Mirror

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

In “The Wicked Queen’s Smart Mirror”, Snoweria Zhang in her response to reflects, “Of course, today’s technology renders the mirror per se feasible with little effort. It shall have a camera, connections to other smart mirrors in the kingdom, and a metric to evaluate the Wicked Queen’s appearance against that of other users. This gadget might use a machine learning algorithm with training sets derived from People Magazine’s Most Beautiful list, or it could be based on a series of up and down votes. However, the apprehension with this contemporary version of the famous Grimm fairy tale as outlined is not its technical feasibility. Rather, the story reflects outdated values within a modernizing society. A truly smart mirror would tell the Wicked Queen that her obsession with triumphing using a singular beauty standard, one that prizes pale skin and youth, is misguided, reductive, and futile. “While we are on the topic though,” the mirror would say, “here are seven ways you are washing your face wrong.”

Read the entire essay at http://ow.ly/N6jp30l9GR3

Essay Competition Winner

25/07/2018

Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination

In “Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination,” scholar, activist and media maker Sasha Costanza-Chock shares a personal example of the ways AI impacts marginalized communities. They go on to challenge AI designers to resist falling into the matrix of domination—a model where race, class, and gender become interlocking systems of oppression. Ending on a positive note, Sasha points to a “growing community of designers, technologists, computer scientists, community organizers, and others who are already engaged in research, theory, and practices that take these ideas into account in the design and development of sociotechnical systems,” which shows that questions of justice, fairness, bias, and discrimination are also becoming part of the AI conversation.

http://ow.ly/YSYr30l6lc7

From Part 1 of “Design Justice, A.I., and Escape from the Matrix of Domination:” …

“…my heartbeat speeds up slightly as I near the end of the line, because I know that I’m almost certainly about to be subject to an embarrassing, uncomfortable, and perhaps even humiliating search by a TSA officer, after my body is flagged as anomalous by the millimeter wave scanner. I know that this is almost certainly about to happen because of the particular sociotechnical configuration of gender normativity (cis-normativity) that has been built into the scanner, through the combination of user interface design, scanning technology, binary gendered body-shape data constructs, and risk detection algorithms, as well as the socialization, training, and experience of the TSA agents.”

“…I share this experience here because I feel it to be an appropriate opening to my response to Joi Ito’s call to “resist reduction,” a timely intervention in the conversation about the limits and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI). That call resonates very deeply with me, since as a nonbinary trans feminine person, I walk through a world that has in many ways been designed to deny the possibility of my existence.”

Essay Competition Winner

23/07/2018

Reveling in a complex, unknowable future

“This contest was part of a larger effort to experiment with open access and open discourse in scholarly communication, and I'm very excited about the level of informed ideas and the delightful diversity the contest winners have brought to the conversation.” In MIT News, Joi Ito and Amy Brand discuss the Resisting Reduction essay contest, the ten winning essays of which are published in the Journal of Design and Science.

MIT Media Lab and MIT Press announce winners of the Journal of Design and Science essay competition.

16/07/2018

3.5 Resisting Reduction Competition Winners

After a double-blind review process, 10 essays have been selected as the winners of our essay competition! Read them today in JoDS: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/competitionwinners

Congratulations to our winning authors, and THANK YOU to everyone who participated! We will be publishing other essays submitted to the competition in future issues of JoDS!

[cc: MIT Media Lab, The MIT Press]

These 10 essays are the winners of the Resisting Reduction essay competition and will be included in a forthcoming volume by the MIT Press.

30/03/2018

Joi Ito

Joi Ito

Really great article in latest issue of Journal of Design and Science by Anjali Sastry discussing systems dynamics, second-order cybernetics and resisting reduction - Systems Lessons of the Global Problematique: Valuing Connection - https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3sastry (FB Live with her tomorrow!)

12/03/2018

Joi Ito

Joi Ito

Philippa Mothersill's "Inviting Feedback" in Journal of Design and Science - design and resisting reduction - conversation, second-order cybernetics. Thoughtful integration of many of the threads on my mind from the perspective of a designer. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3mothersill

02/03/2018

Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal to the Resisting Reduction essay competition! We are looking forward to reading them and will notify you if your proposal has been selected for round two by April 2nd.

02/03/2018

Essay Competition

Today is the final day to submit your 300-word proposal to our Resisting Reduction essay competition! This round of the contest will end at 5pm EST.

https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/essay-competition

The MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab announce a call for essays on the topic of resisting reduction, broadly defined, for the Journal of Design and Science. Essays should be in conversation with Joi Ito’s manifesto, “Resisting Reduction,” and the articles, also on this theme, published in the t...

26/02/2018

Essay Competition

There is one week left to submit your proposal to our Resisting Reduction essay competition! The authors of up to ten winning essays will win $10,000. Spread the word and learn more here: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/essay-competition

The MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab announce a call for essays on the topic of resisting reduction, broadly defined, for the Journal of Design and Science. Essays should be in conversation with Joi Ito’s manifesto, “Resisting Reduction,” and the articles, also on this theme, published in the t...