Simulation and Its Discontents

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.

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"As computer simulation techniques have been transforming the practices of designers, engineers, and scientists, Sherry Turkle and her collaborators have been operating, at close quarters and over an extended period, as ethnographers among the simulators. This long-awaited volume presents their observations and reflections. It is an indispensable source of insights into the changing nature of learning, research, and expert practice in the digital era."--William J. Mitchell, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, MIT and author of World's Greatest Architect "It's remarkably easy to forget that there ever was a time when design engineers and architects manipulated 3-dimensional objects and scientists estimated model variables on blackboards. Turkle's latest book reminds us that, in science as in everyday life, technological change often slips past us and transforms our sense of what we're doing and why we're doing it without our remembering to notice. As she's done so often before, Turkle remembered on our behalf."--Don Ross, School of Economics, University of Cape Town and Department of Finance, Economics and Quantitative Methods and Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham -- Don Ross "In the 2008 economic meltdown, opaque computer systems had a role to play, making it hard for people to understand the levels of risk they were holding. Markets could be simulated, and simulations nicely showed what potential disaster looked like; but they couldn't say anything about whose specific actions threatened trouble for whom. That's not the kind of financial world investors were used to living in. Turkle's book reminds us that, in science as in everyday life, technological change often slips past us and transforms our sense of what we're doing and why we're doing it without our remembering to notice. As she's done so often before, Turkle remembered on our behalf." Don Ross , School of Economics, University of Cape Town and Department of Finance, Economics and Quantitative Methods, University of Alabama at Birmingham

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Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and Founder and Director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A psychoanalytically trained sociologist and psychologist, she is the author of The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Twentieth Anniversary Edition, MIT Press), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution. She is the editor of Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, and The Inner History of Devices, all three published by the MIT Press. William J. Clancey is Chief Scientist at the Human-Centered Computing Division in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center, and Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

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