MAY 3 @ 7:30pm BST / 8:30pm CEST / 2:30pm EDT / 11:30am PDT
Technology ensnares as much, if not more, as it liberates. Information, techniques, tools, articulated around economic and political interests, combine in radical ways to mould our experience of the everyday as well as our desire. Navigating our networked existence requires taking stock of the challenges these potentials present us with. Join New Design Congress's Benjamin Royer and Cade Diehm in discussion with writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield, as we parse the recent technological developments with the help of his body of work spanning two decades. We might also discuss Zen and the Way of the Sword.
In other lives a rock critic, a blogger, a PsyOp specialist in the US Army, and head of design direction and UI at Nokia, Adam Greenfield has worked and written extensively on the design and development of networked digital information technologies. In 2013, he has been awarded the inaugural Senior Urban Fellowship at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics and has taught in the MArch Urban Design programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture of University College London.
Adam has published a number of insightful and accessible titles on the topics of computing, urbanism and technologies of control: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing (2006), Urban Computing and its Discontents (2007), and Against the Smart City (2013). His more recent book, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (Verso), published in 2017, traces back the development of the most recent technologies that are affecting our societies in dramatic ways—such as smartphones, blockchains, automatisation, artificial intelligence.
About FIGURES
NEW DESIGN CONGRESS presents FIGURES, an informal series of discussions and debates on systems with provocative figures from a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives.
