anne balsamo's blog and portfolio

I’m thrilled to announce the publication of my new book Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (Duke University Press).

The book calls for taking culture seriously in the design and development of innovation technologies.

I assert that the wellspring of technological innovation is the technological imagination.

Following this, I examine key sites for the cultural reproduction of the technological imagination:  the research university, the industrial research lab, and the science/technology center.

Much of the material in the book draws on design-research projects I’ve been involved in over the past 15 years.  Based on these experiences, I offer several “lessons” about the nature of innovation in contemporary culture.

• Innovation is a process, not a product
• Innovation is a multidisciplinary endeavor
• Designing is a key site for the exercise of the technological imagination
• The future begins in the imagination; designers hack the present to create our futures
• Working with other people to make things is important for the construction of shared knowledge
• Every technology has contradictory and multiple effects
• Collaboration across differences is the key to techno-cultural innovation
• The creation of new technologies always involves the design of new cultural possibilities
• Designing culture is, therefore, an ethical project
• Understanding the relationship of culture and technology is an ethical imperative

The print publication is part of a broader TRANSMEDIA PROJECT simply called Designing Culture.

Packaged with the book is the interactive multimedia documentary, Women of the World Talk Back, created by Mary Hocks and Anne Balsamo in 1995 based on our participation at the 4th UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China.

Other media elements available at the designingculture.org website include:

• video archives and interactive applications relating to the Experiments in the Future of Reading EXHIBIT created by RED @ PARC in 2000
• examples of interactive digital WALL books
• interactive MAPS of matters of concern for the technological imagination
• short VIDEO primers on key themes of contemporary technoculture

Designing Culture is a tour de force, offering a unique vision of the
possibilities for a contemporary cultural studies. Refusing to separate
research from pedagogy, technology from culture, or innovation from
imagination, Anne Balsamo maps the concrete complexities of specific design processes, and opens up new ways of thinking about and teaching technocultures in relation to broader socio-political fields. Her book is required reading for anyone working with contemporary cultures.

– Lawrence Grossberg, author of Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

“Designing Culture is a road map to the technological imagination, provided by one of our best theorists and practitioners. Anne Balsamo’s architecture of the future rests solidly on her own experiments, inventions, theoretical engagements, pedagogical innovations, and interactive hermeneutics. This is cultural theory at its best, brilliant, bold, and daring.”—Cathy N. Davidson, Duke University

“In this sweeping expansion of the classic innovation literature, Anne Balsamo portrays both the necessity and the challenge of cultivating the technological imagination in all of us. Her experiences as a researcher and designer who has worked across cultural domains—as a humanist in the academy, as a research scientist in an industrial innovation center, and as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley—give her a unique ability to foster conversations among diverse groups of thinkers who want to engage with issues of culture and technological innovation. Balsamo not only describes ways to take culture seriously in the design of new technologies but also elaborates why it is ethically imperative to do so. Her insights into expanding the traditional considerations of socio-technical design to consider issues of culture are coming at a critical time. This is a great book that should be read by anyone interested in creating new technologies of imagination—for enhancing learning in the twenty-first century and creating expressive cultural platforms for the future.”—John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and Director of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

This project will explore the possibilities for innovative museum visitor experiences using a range of networked technologies and social media applications.  Based on an earlier research project previously supported by the MacArthur Foundation called “Inspiring the Technological Imagination: The Future of Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age,” this effort will include the creation of an interactive application that maps the distributed (digital and analog) spaces of the museum in networked cultures.

Co-Directed with Susana Bautista (Annenberg, USC), this project is sponsored by the Annenberg Innovation Lab as part of our new research track in PUBLIC INTERACTIVES and will involve collaborations with the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Susana and I presented the first version of this project at a Professional Forum at the Museum and the Web Conference in Philadelphia in April 2011.

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In 2006, I created a graphic novel about the distinguished career of Paula A. Treichler: ACE Discourse Detective, to commemorate her retirement from the University of Illinois.  The comic book, called Feminist Noir was illustrated by Roberto Gomez.

November 11-14, 2010

I participated in the DIY Citizenship Conference held at the University of Toronto in November. Organized by UT Professors Megan Boler and Matthew Ratto, the conference featured presentations and panels on expected topics such as: citizen journalism, citizen science, and youth and media, but it also included new perspectives on issues such DIY health, fan-based civic platforms, and the citizen factory.

Two aspects of the conference I especially appreciated: 1) the attention to gender as an ongoing SOCIAL barrier to DIY participation, and 2) the critical making hackspace.

A talk by Rosa Reitsamer (Universitat Salzburg) titled, “Challenging the ‘anyone can do it’: DIY Feminist Citizenship and Mechanisms of Inclusion and Exclusion” cogently examined the way that gender continues to structure participation in maker projects in subtle ways: by looking at the behaviors and interactions between girls and boys in DIY settings. Jennifer Jenson (York University) raised the issue as well in her excellent keynote address: “Raising the Bar on ‘Voice’ in a Troubled Community: Student Media Projects.” In this talk, Jennifer noted the difficulty in scaffolding media making experiences for youth whose media literacy is rudimentary. In particular she raised the issue of praising inadequate work (projects that had no story structure, for example) in the hopes of reinforcing the value of “process.” I appreciated her frank assertion that we need to raise the bar on our expectations of what “counts” as good work so as to avoid patronizing and misleading students about their media making skills.

The critical making hackspace included exhibits and demonstrations of projects such as the “Citizen-centric ID” created by Andrew Clement and his research team (U of Toronto). This device enables people to read the information stored on the magnetic strips of their plastic ID cards so that they can better monitor what information is shared with vendors when these cards are “swiped” during transactions and travels. As an example of a “counter-surveillance” device, this project is firmly built on a critical assessment of the kind of technologies WE NEED, but will never be developed by corporate R&D labs.

The conference was full of energy and open-sharing of ideas and projects. Video clips of conference events are available at the U of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs website.