In the bubble - John Thackara

We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost
sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to
our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble:
Designing for a Complex World. These are tough questions for the pushers
of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would
be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.
Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is
before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the
broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected
appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this
stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and
how?

In the Bubble is about a world based less
on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking
place now -- not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it,
"the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily
life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't.
In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry
out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology --
ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a
supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not
things. And new principles -- above all, lightness -- inform the way these services
are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief,
informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can
inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.