My main drive to do research is to understand what are the deep mechanisms at work around me. I feel that if I can at least see all of this hidden processes, I can carve some more agency in my life. A recently published book, called “Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial” offers amazing new insights about our relationship with things. I found it fascinating. I’ll let the book introduce itself:
We relate to things and things relate to us. Emerging technologies do this in ways that are interesting and exciting, but often also inaccessible or invisible. In Relating to Things, leading design researchers and philosophers respond to issues raised by this situation – inquiring into what it means to live with and relate to things that can actively relate to us, and that relate to each other in ways that do not involve us at all.
Case studies include Amazon’s Alexa, the Internet of Things, Pokémon Go and Roomba the robot vacuum cleaner. Authors explore everything from the care work undertaken by objects, reciprocal human/machine learning, technological mediation as a form of control, and what it takes to reveal things that tend to be hidden and that often (by design) conceal the ways in which they use us.”