Evocative Objects

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262516772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Book Description
Autobiographical essays, framed by two interpretive essays by the editor, describe the power of an object to evoke emotion and provoke thought: reflections on a cello, a laptop computer, a 1964 Ford Falcon, an apple, a mummy in a museum, and other "things-to-think-with." For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.These days, scholars show new interest in the importance of the concrete. This volume's special contribution is its focus on everyday riches: the simplest of objects—an apple, a datebook, a laptop computer—are shown to bring philosophy down to earth. The poet contends, "No ideas but in things." The notion of evocative objects goes further: objects carry both ideas and passions. In our relations to things, thought and feeling are inseparable. Whether it's a student's beloved 1964 Ford Falcon (left behind for a station wagon and motherhood), or a cello that inspires a meditation on fatherhood, the intimate objects in this collection are used to reflect on larger themes—the role of objects in design and play, discipline and desire, history and exchange, mourning and memory, transition and passage, meditation and new vision.In the interest of enriching these connections, Turkle pairs each autobiographical essay with a text from philosophy, history, literature, or theory, creating juxtapositions at once playful and profound. So we have Howard Gardner's keyboards and Lev Vygotsky's hobbyhorses; William Mitchell's Melbourne train and Roland Barthes' pleasures of text; Joseph Cevetello's glucometer and Donna Haraway's cyborgs. Each essay is framed by images that are themselves evocative. Essays by Turkle begin and end the collection, inviting us to look more closely at the everyday objects of our lives, the familiar objects that drive our routines, hold our affections, and open out our world in unexpected ways.

Evocative Objects

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262291649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Evocative Objects

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Countless Connecting Threads

Author: Deborah G. Douglas
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262525459
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"[T]hese countless connecting threads, woven into one indissoluble texture, form that ever-enlarging web which is the blended product of the world's scientific and industrial activity." -- William Barton Rogers, 1860, "Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology "Inspired by an exhibition of 150 objects created by the MIT Museum to mark MIT's sesquicentennial, this lavishly illustrated volume is a unique collection of visual and written meditations about the making and meaning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The story of MIT is more than a simple tale of a founder's vision. It is greater than the sum of all the stories that have been or are yet to be told by the hundreds of thousands who have a direct personal connection with the Institute. Yet, with the assistance of the collective intelligence of the MIT community, the Museum was able to capture some of those "countless connecting threads" -- from a towering module for the first real-time digital computer to the famous Baker House Piano Drop. Part history, part catalog, part souvenir, "Countless Connecting Threads" invites readers to (re)discover, through some of the Institute's most evocative objects, the essence of the vast and varied tapestry that is MIT.

Falling for Science

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262201720
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Book Description
Passion for objects and love for science: scientists and students reflect on how objects fired their scientific imaginations.

Kelly Wearstler: Evocative Style

Author: Kelly Wearstler
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847866033
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
For her first book in ten years, Kelly Wearstler, one of the most irreverent and fascinating designers working today, continues to push boundaries with her inventive and opulent interiors, here inviting readers into her latest creations including her newly designed home. Celebrated for luxurious interiors that capture the swankiness of old-world Hollywood with a modern pop sensibility, Wearstler is known for her decadent designs of residences and boutique hotels, such as the line of Viceroys and the tastemakers Maison 140 and Avalon. Her ornate interiors are distinctive for layers of bold textures, patterns, and rich colors juxtaposed with lustrous surfaces, adding up to a whimsical and elegant look that has been called "mod baroque." Here Wearstler shares her creative world, profiling in detail her latest residential and commercial designs (several previously unpublished) and her sumptuous new San Francisco Proper Hotel, as well as her creative process. Full of ideas and with beautiful images of many never-before-photographed interiors, Kelly Wearstler: Evocative Style is an inspirational look at the designer's inventive work. Filled with new work, this volume is a must for other designers and homeowners looking for elegant design inspiration and ideas.

The Inner History of Devices

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262291568
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
Memoir, clinical writings, and ethnography inform new perspectives on the experience of technology; personal stories illuminate how technology enters the inner life. For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening—that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines. In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an “intimate ethnography” that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: “This computer means everything to me. It's where I put my hope.” Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: “What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?” The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer. In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan (“Tokyo sat trapped inside it”); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.

Simulation and Its Discontents

Author: Sherry Turkle
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262012707
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
How the simulation and visualization technologies so pervasive in science, engineering, and design have changed our way of seeing the world. Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it in Turkle's description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil, of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more “real” than experiments in physical laboratories. Echoing architect Louis Kahn's famous question, “What does a brick want?”, Turkle asks, “What does simulation want?” Simulations want, even demand, immersion, and the benefits are clear. Architects create buildings unimaginable before virtual design; scientists determine the structure of molecules by manipulating them in virtual space; physicians practice anatomy on digitized humans. But immersed in simulation, we are vulnerable. There are losses as well as gains. Older scientists describe a younger generation as “drunk with code.” Young scientists, engineers, and designers, full citizens of the virtual, scramble to capture their mentors' tacit knowledge of buildings and bodies. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important is slipping away. Turkle's examination of simulation over the past twenty years is followed by four in-depth investigations of contemporary simulation culture: space exploration, oceanography, architecture, and biology.

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects

Author: Stephanie LaCava
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062223666
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
A haunting and moving collection of original narratives that reveals an expatriate's coming-of-age in Paris and the magic she finds in ordinary objects An awkward, curious girl growing up in a foreign country, Stephanie LaCava finds solace and security in strange yet beautiful objects. When her father's mysterious job transports her and her family to the quaint Parisian suburb of Le Vésinet, everything changes for the young American. Stephanie sets out to explore her new surroundings and to make friends at her unconventional international school, but her curiosity soon gives way to feelings of anxiety and a deep depression. In her darkest moments, Stephanie learns to filter the world through her peculiar lens, discovering the uncommon, uncelebrated beauty in what she finds. Encouraged by her father through trips to museums and scavenger hunts at antique shows, she traces an interconnected web of narratives of long-ago outsiders, and of objects historical and natural, that ultimately help her survive. A series of illustrated essays that unfolds in cinematic fashion, An Extraordinary Theory of Objects offers a universal lesson—to harness the power of creativity to cope with loneliness, sadness, and disappointment to find wonder in the uncertainty of the future.

Sensitive Objects

Author: Jonas Frykman
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
ISBN: 918816862X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Book Description
Some objects seem especially personal and important to us - be it a quickly packed suitcase, an inherited vase, or a photograph. In Sensitive Objects the authors discuss when, how, and why particular objects appear as 'sensitive'. They do so by analyzing the objects' affective charging in the context of historically embedded practices. Sensitive Objects is a contribution to the upcoming field of 'affect research' that has so far been dominated by psychology and cultural studies, and the authors examine the potential for epistemic gain by connecting the studies of affect with the studies of material culture. The contributors, predominantly ethnologists and anthropologists, use fieldwork to examine how people project affects onto material objects and explore how objects embody or trigger affects and produce affective atmospheres.