I get interviewed quite a bit as well as doing my fair share of interviewing. Beyond the realm of immediate practice, I have long harbored an interest in dialogue (dialectic) as a mode of philosophical inquiry and puzzled over its relative rarity within the contemporary academy. Perhaps it appears too “unprofessional,” too tainted by the literary and the ludic, the matter of fact and the improvisational, to be taken seriously as a form of scholarship.…
Read more
Tag: education
The Thing Tank is an exhibition of design fictions currently on display on the ground floor of Gund Hall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It was developed within the setting of a spring 2019 seminar/studio that I taught structured around a sequence of case studies of exemplary 20th century Italian artifacts devised to suit fundamental needs of modern life: sitting, drinking, lighting, walking, moving about, cooling, cooking, writing, calculating, and entertainment. Though…
Read more
Redundancy has a bad name. Already in antiquity redundantia implied excess: literally, the superabundance of a resource (such as water); figuratively, an overflowing stream of words as in the Ciceronian “illa pro Roscio juvenilis redundantia” (Or. 30: 108). In the era of industry and post-industry, the word retains a ring of inefficiency. If something is redundant, by definition, it is something to be trimmed, something that is misaligned with history’s headlong rush into the future.…
Read more