Lively, original, and wide-ranging, Digital Materialities provides a compelling framework for and provocation towards exploring the dense entanglements of design, the digital, and those complex collaborations of collective practice they catalyze and depend upon. A significant set of expeditions into fascinating, consequential, and newly emergent terrain. -- Donald L. Brenneis, University of California Santa Cruz, USA Digital and material have never been as separate as many people imagined them to be. Anthropology is now broaching this border, to grapple with more pertinent issues of change, design, and conceptualisation. The wait for a set of studies which gather Design, HCI, and Media Studies is over. Things will never be the same. -- Adam Drazin, University College London, UK This collection provides a keen series of speculative, experimental, and innovative projects, focusing attention on the complexity of the socio-technical context. It uses a series of cases to shed light on how the digital and material are inseparable elements of everyday lived contexts. Read as a whole, the book offers an exemplary vision of how research and design can be an interventionist practice; through collaborative, participatory, experimental forms of knowledge creation and, more importantly, exploration of future possibilities. -- Annette Markham, Aarhus University, Denmark Innovatively drawing together perspectives from the worlds of digital media and design anthropology, Digital Materialities is at the crest of a new way of thinking about the digital that both understands the technical nuances and affordances of the digital as a medium, and the social worlds that it produces and is produced by. Wide-ranging, taking on topics as disparate as energy efficiency in the home, mobile phones, virtualism, and digital design, Digital Materialities will be a crucial resource for all of us working across disciplines to understand the resonance of the digital as both an analytic frame, a form of practice, and a material assemblage. -- Haidy Geismar, University College London, UK The essays in this volume make the case for the undeniable hybridity of human experience and suggest further avenues for researching the forms that material/digital interactions take and how individuals, families, communities, and societies (co-)design digital materialities, often in unanticipated ways that diverge from the expectations and intentions of professional designers. -- Jack David Eller Anthropology Review Database
