Visioning Technologies

Visioning Technologies brings together a collection of texts from leading theorists to examine how architecture has been, and is, reframed and restructured by the visual and theoretical frameworks introduced by different ‘technologies of sight’ – understood to include orthographic projection, perspective drawing, telescopic devices, photography, film and computer visualization, amongst others. Each chapter deals with its own area and historical period of expertise, organized sequentially to mark out and analyse the historical evolution of how architecture has been transformed by technologically induced shifts in human perception from the 15th century until today. This book underlines the way in which architectural forms and design processes have developed historically in conjunction with the systems of sight we manufacture technologically and suggests this continues today. Paradoxically, it is premised on the argument that these technological systems tend, in their initial formulations, to obtain ever greater realism in our visualizations of the physical world.

An investigation of the computational turn in visual culture, centered on the entangled politics and pleasures of data and images. If the twentieth century was tyrannized by images, then the twenty-first is ruled by data. In Technologies of Vision, Steve Anderson argues that visual culture and the methods developed to study it have much to teach us about today's digital culture; but first we must examine the historically entangled relationship between data and images. Anderson starts from the supposition that there is no great divide separating pre- and post-digital culture. Rather than creating an insular field of new and inaccessible discourse, he argues, it is more productive to imagine that studying “the digital” is coextensive with critical models—especially the politics of seeing and knowing—developed for understanding “the visual.” Anderson's investigation takes on an eclectic array of examples ranging from virtual reality, culture analytics, and software art to technologies for computer vision, face recognition, and photogrammetry. Mixing media archaeology with software studies, Anderson mines the history of technology for insight into both the politics of data and the pleasures of algorithms. He proposes a taxonomy of modes that describe the functional relationship between data and images in the domains of space, surveillance and data visualization. At stake in all three are tensions between the totalizing logic of data and the unruly chaos of images.

This book provides an in-depth review of the historical and state-of-the-art use of technology by and for individuals with autism. The design, development, deployment, and evaluation of interactive technologies for use by and with individuals with autism have been rapidly increasing over the last few decades. There is great promise for the use of these technologies to enrich lives, improve the experience of interventions, help with learning, facilitate communication, support data collection, and promote understanding. Emerging technologies in this area also have the potential to enhance assessment and diagnosis of autism, to understand the nature and lived experience of autism, and to help researchers conduct basic and applied research. The intention of this book is to give readers a comprehensive background for understanding what work has already been completed and its impact as well as what promises and challenges lie ahead. A large majority of existing technologies have been designed for autistic children, there is increased interest in technology’s intersection with the lived experiences of autistic adults. By providing a classification scheme and general review, this book can help technology designers, researchers, autistic people, and their advocates better understand how technologies have been successful or unsuccessful, what problems remain open, and where innovations can further address challenges and opportunities for individuals with autism and the variety of stakeholders connected to them.

This book examines emerging automated technologies and systems and the increasingly prominent roles that each plays in our lives and our imagined futures. It asks how technological futures are being constituted and the roles anthropologists can play in their making; how anthropologists engage with emerging technologies within their fieldwork contexts in research which seeks to influence future design; how to create critical and interventional approaches to technology design and innovation; and how a critical anthropology of the way that emerging technologies are experienced in everyday life circumstances offers new insights for future-making practices. In pursuing these questions, this book responds to a call for new anthropologies that respond to the current and emerging technological environments in which we live, environments for which thinking critically about the possible, plausible, and impossible futures are no longer sufficient. Taking the next step, this book asserts that anthropology must now propose alternative ways, rooted in ethnography, to approach and engage with what is coming and to contest dominant narratives of industry, policy, and government, and to respond to our contemporary context through a public, vocal, and interventional approach.

Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology challenges the assumption that science is simply what scientists do, say, or write: it shows the multiple and dispersed makings of science and technology in everyday life and popular culture. This first major guide and review of the new field of feminist cultural studies of science and technology provides readers with an accessible introduction to its theories and methods. Documenting and analyzing the recent explosion of research which has appeared under the rubric of 'cultural studies of science and technology' it examines the distinctive features of the 'cultural turn' in science studies and traces the contribution feminist scholarship has made to this development. Interrogating the theoretical and methodological features it evaluates the significance of this distinctive body of research in the context of concern about public attitudes to science and contentious debates about public understanding of and engagement with science.

In Island Futures Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability and the quest for a "just recovery" in the Caribbean emerge from specific transnational political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Because foreigners are largely ignorant of Haiti's political, cultural, and economic contexts, especially the historical role of the United States, their efforts to help often exacerbate inequities. Caribbean survival under ever-worsening environmental and political conditions, Sheller contends, demands radical alternatives to the pervasive neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and US military domination that have perpetuated what she calls the "coloniality of climate." Sheller insists that alternative projects for Haitian reconstruction, social justice, and climate resilience—and the sustainability of the entire region—must be grounded in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions that call for deeper transformations of transnational economies, ecologies, and human relations writ large.

This book contains a selection of articles from The 2013 World Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST'13), a global forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, results, experiences and concerns in the several perspectives of Information Systems and Technologies. The main topics covered are: Information and Knowledge Management; Organizational Models and Information Systems; Intelligent and Decision Support Systems; Software Systems, Architectures, Applications and Tools; Computer Networks, Mobility and Pervasive Systems; Radar Technologies; and Human-Computer Interaction.