Jonas Löwgren – författare

Boken tar upp designteoretiska frågor som designprocessens natur, begreppet designförmåga och vad det omfattar, samt metodernas roll i design.Vidare diskuteras designmaterial och några önskvärda brukskvaliteter – mål att sträva efter när man designar digitala artefakter i olika genrer – skisseras.Boken vänder sig främst till studenter som ägnar sig åt utveckling av digitala system och medier samt till professionella utvecklare av digitala artefakter.

A thorough analysis of contemporary digital media practices, showing how people increasingly not only consume but also produce and even design media.

With many new forms of digital media–including such popular social media as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr—the people formerly known as the audience no longer only consume but also produce and even design media. Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer term this phenomenon collaborative media, and in this book they investigate the qualities and characteristics of these forms of media in terms of what they enable people to do. They do so through an interdisciplinary research approach that combines the social sciences and humanities traditions of empirical and theoretical work with practice-based, design-oriented interventions.

Löwgren and Reimer offer analysis and a series of illuminating case studies—examples of projects in collaborative media that range from small multidisciplinary research experiments to commercial projects used by millions of people. Löwgren and Reimer discuss the case studies at three levels of analysis: society and the role of collaborative media in societal change; institutions and the relationship of collaborative media with established media structures; and tribes, the nurturing of small communities within a large technical infrastructure. They conclude by advocating an interventionist turn within social analysis and media design.

The intent of this chapter is to outline a distinctive way of thinking about issues of technology and society that has characterized many Nordic approaches to the topic. One of the characteristics of this approach has been the recognition of the worth of human labour. Technology is not seen as an alien force, but something which is itself a product of human labour, and it can be designed and utilized in ways which augment human skills and expertise, rather than degrading them. What is particularly striking, at least to this author, in this approach is that we are presented not simply with a vision of how things could be better in our society, but with concrete exemplars of how we can build such a better world. It is in recognition of this fact that I have chosen the title of this chapter, as it emphasizes that, while the tradition of Utopian literature is the - lineation of a supposedly idea world which exists no-place (u-topos, in Greek), these visions can be an inspiration for quite practical activities on the ground, as steps towards their realization. As Wilde notes (in the quote above) this is a never-ending quest, as with each achievement, we recognize that there are further bridges to cross and places to be visited.