Reviews for Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design

The average rating for Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-03 00:00:00 John Sweeney This slender booklet is a collection of short, late essays by the cosmopolitan thinker Vilem Flusser. Originally from the Czech Republic he fled to Brazil at the beginning of the Second World War and returned to Europe only in the early 1970s. He died in a car crash in 1991. Writing in German, Portuguese, and French, Flusser remained unpublished in English during his lifetime. In fact, the book reviewed here was the very first to be made accessible to an English readership. Meanwhile, based on as yet a very small selection of translated work, he has acquired a kind of a cultstatus with cognoscenti as an iconoclastic, clairvoyant linguistic philosopher and media theorist. Flusser's big theme is the transition from a pre-industrial to an industrial and, onwards, to an information society. In that process, spanning a mere 300 years, our relationship with our environment, increasingly populated by `non-things', by artificial intelligences and robotic machines, has been (and continuous to be) fundamentally altered. What happens when human beings morph from being productive, shape-giving artisans to abstract calculators, pressing keys on a keyboard, when our existential concerns shift from things to information? An interesting, ambiguous reciprocal dependency sets in: "the robot only does what the human being wants, but the human being can only want what the robot can do." Hence, humans become `functionaries' of the programmed tools they have created, inscribing themselves into a kind of (hopefully) benign totalitarianism governed by potentially endless but pre-programmed choice. Flusser's perspicaciousness in anticipating an emerging, virtual, omnidirectionally transparant society is admirable. Although "The Shape of Things" is a slim booklet, it is very difficult to do justice to Flusser's ideas in the space of a short review. Flusser's way of communicating complex ideas is highly idiosyncratic. His idiom is more journalistic than scholarly: he uses clear and simple language in very short, punchy essays. There are no references to other thinkers or to secondary literature. His argument is characterized by unexpected twists, linking the mundane to the exotic, relying often on clever etymological and linguistic reasoning. The style is terse, at times to the point of abruptness. Flusser is a combative thinker, not afraid to take provocative positions to tease his readers. Sometimes there is a clenched teeth kind of wittiness. This book is not a full-fledged, methodically argued `philosophy of design' but a series of elliptical, thought-provoking essays intent on redefining the debate on what makes (and keeps) us human in a world engulfed by immaterial objects and smart robots.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-07-16 00:00:00 Michael D Roderick Interesting topics. Essays though are too short for me to absorb them completely.