Hertzian tales - Anthony Dunne

As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated
by electronic products -- from "intelligent" toasters to iPods -- it is the design
of these products that shapes our experience of the "electrosphere" in which we
live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian
Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of
electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich
our daily lives -- to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial
environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially
beneficial ends.

The cultural speculations and conceptual design
proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or
blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, "mixing
criticism with optimism." Six essays explore design approaches for developing the
aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context--considering
such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness --
and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images.
These include "Electroclimates," animations on an LCD screen that register changes
in radio frequency; "When Objects Dream...," consumer products that "dream" in
electromagnetic waves; "Thief of Affection," which steals radio signals from cardiac
pacemakers; "Tuneable Cities," which uses the car as it drives through overlapping
radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the "Faraday
Chair: Negative Radio," enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque
shield.

Very little has changed in the world of design since
Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in
1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: "Design is not engaging
with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so
sexy and consumable." His project and proposals challenge it to do so.