James Robert White

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Design at the interface of 'Complexity'

This article is about technological complexity and designers' approaches for adapting it to us, or adapting us to technology. Thinking about complexity in terms of our changing relationship to technology reveals how we think about our relationship to our environment and our cultural assumptions that drive those relationships. This then shapes how we design and shape our environment through new technology. Designers are particularly interested in modifying our attitudes to technology in ways that either bring us back to simpler realities, or enable us to take the plunge and immerse ourselves more fully in our new technological environments. Both of these approaches can be viewed as different

The 'New Wild' and the 'sublime' in western philosophy

The concept of the 'New Wild' also hints at the notion of the 'sublime' which for much of the history of Western thought has been closely associated with the awe and wonder inspired by nature. Latterly, the notion of the technological sublime has also been argued to have replaced the original in 20th century culture as documented by David Nye in his book 'American Technological Sublime' (1994). Nye shows how this notion of the technological sublime had originally been embraced by the popularity of huge engineering projects and architecture, such as hydro-electric dams, which also inspired awe and wonder, but was soon tainted by a growing realisation of the significant limits and drawbacks of