Thackara, John - In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
Sun, Jun. 10th, 2007 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oyceterAnother book I read for class.
Thackara is trying to look at the job of a designer in an increasingly complex world, as per the subtitle of his book. I found this book immensely frustrating to read; it is so broad in scope that I kept wanting more citations, more everything. So I was arguing with Thackara every step of the way.
It also didn't help that I felt like he just had a lot of cool ideas and rants but didn't really tie them together. He wrote in one chapter on how we should try and imitate nature more (the much cited example of barnacles sticking like mad but detaching with no trace), but in another, he writes on how in our attempts to imitate nature, we end up creating an even larger environmental footprint. He writes about things that I do think are important, like the environment and trying to figure ethical implications in design, but he does so in such a general way that it is frustrating.
He says stuff about the complexity of systems and cites examples of failures of design and says that it must be solved, but I feel he doesn't give more steps to solve them. I mean, I know complex systems are hard! And bad design! I know that smart machines often assume too much! But what I want to know is how to fix them, and I think that is a much, much, much more complicated thing than pointing out the problem. Also, I felt he wasn't even pointing out the problem in an original way; I think I have read all those criticisms in Wired and other magazines before.
Possibly I was not Thackara's intended audience and the book was meant to be more theoretical.
Thackara is trying to look at the job of a designer in an increasingly complex world, as per the subtitle of his book. I found this book immensely frustrating to read; it is so broad in scope that I kept wanting more citations, more everything. So I was arguing with Thackara every step of the way.
It also didn't help that I felt like he just had a lot of cool ideas and rants but didn't really tie them together. He wrote in one chapter on how we should try and imitate nature more (the much cited example of barnacles sticking like mad but detaching with no trace), but in another, he writes on how in our attempts to imitate nature, we end up creating an even larger environmental footprint. He writes about things that I do think are important, like the environment and trying to figure ethical implications in design, but he does so in such a general way that it is frustrating.
He says stuff about the complexity of systems and cites examples of failures of design and says that it must be solved, but I feel he doesn't give more steps to solve them. I mean, I know complex systems are hard! And bad design! I know that smart machines often assume too much! But what I want to know is how to fix them, and I think that is a much, much, much more complicated thing than pointing out the problem. Also, I felt he wasn't even pointing out the problem in an original way; I think I have read all those criticisms in Wired and other magazines before.
Possibly I was not Thackara's intended audience and the book was meant to be more theoretical.
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