Medium design: knowing how to work on the world

摘要

For those who have followed Keller Easterling's theoretical musings on active forms, spatial products, and global organisational systems of architecture writ large, the contents of her latest book will not come as a surprise. Much of Medium Design revisits concepts that preoccupy Extrastatecraft (2014), Subtraction (2014), and Enduring Innocence (2005) - interplay, temperament, multiplication, disposition....1 Except this time, it promises not only theory but practical theory, an actionable ethic, for designers facing climate crisis, political impasse, and urban conundrums of all kinds.Medium Design's subtitle, 'Knowing How to Work on the World' - perhaps the most assertive slogan of all her books (compared with, say, 'The Power of Infrastructure Space' or 'Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades') - suggests there will not only be critique, but also paths for action. It recasts the static built environment as interdependent objects within active relationships, as arbiters of flows, trade-offs, and economies that exceed a building's formal description. By recalibrating or leveraging that spatial relationship, a savvy designer could potentially rewire the economy of an entire organisation. Medium thinking is meant to transcend ideological arguments about the built environment in a world that is splintering by design. Structured as five chapters interspersed with narrative interludes, Easterling borrows terminology from media theory, anthropology, political philosophy, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) - from Bruno Latour (actor-network theory) to Foucault (dispo-sitif), John Durham Peters (media) to Gregory Bateson (switch) - all to explain how built forms can be conduits and condensations of information, power, and potential to act otherwise.