Artists, designers and researchers investigate the "becoming object" of the Earth, in the face of the techno-scientific vision and geo-engineering projects that tend to turn our planet into a design object.Has our planet become an object of design? In today's world of geoengineering, cloud seeding and ambitious projects to control planetary ecosystems, the question seems more justified than ever.We map the world using cartography, we shape it with spatial planning. We model ...

A design theorist (Alexandra Midal), a neuroscientist (Albert Moukheiber), two designers (Antoine Fœglé and Emma Pflieger) and two curators (Jolanthe Kugler and Scott Longfellow) take a look at the mechanisms behind the flat-Earth theory, and the ways in which "alternative" narratives are disseminated.Like a giant tortoise shell, with a dome or without... the many different forms of flat earth are a map-like portrayal of dissent, a final bastion to refute modernity. What is flat ea...

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predic...

What it means to design at a time when, for many people, the future seems to have become an impossibility.When reality fails us, what can designers do? Question design’s relationship to reality, as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby do, in this exhilarating, yet thoughtful, journey to the edges of science, philosophy, and literature to find new ways of thinking about the possible—and about the meaning, function, and place of design in that speculative world of “not here,...

Noting fourteen key traits of genius, Yale University's "Genius Course" creator explores what we can learn from brilliant minds that have changed the world.Beethoven. Picasso. Jobs. The word genius evokes these iconic figures, whose cultural contributions have irreversibly shaped society.Yet Beethoven could not multiply. Picasso couldn't pass a 4th grade math test. And Jobs left high school with a two.sixty-five GPA. What does this say about our metrics for...

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos.What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings— beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence....

Best Books of 2016**BOSTON GLOBE * THE ATLANTICFrom the acclaimed bestselling author of The Information and Chaos comes this enthralling history of time travel—a concept that has preoccupied physicists and storytellers over the course of the last century.**James Gleick delivers a mind-bending exploration of time travel—from its origins in literature and science to its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick vi...

“The world's leading alien hunter” —New York Times MagazineFrom acclaimed Harvard astrophysicist and bestselling author of Extraterrestrial comes a mind-expanding new book on space exploration explaining why becoming an interstellar species is imperative for humanity’s survival and detailing a game plan for how we can settle among the stars.In the New York Times bestseller Extraterrestrial,

In Radical Evolution, bestselling author Joel Garreau, a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, shows us that we are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, we are engineering the next stage of human evolution. Through advances in genetic, robotic, information and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls.Taking us behind the scenes with today's foremost ...

"Civilization or the militarization of science?"With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as a starting point, Paul Virilio explores the dominion of techno-science, cyberwar and the new information technologies over our lives ... and deaths. After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugenics. We are entering the age of euthana...

**A playful, profound book that is not only a testament to one man's efforts to be deemed more human than a computer, but also a rollicking exploration of what it means to be human in the first place.“Terrific. ... Art and science meet an engaged mind and the friction produces real fire.” —The New Yorker**Each year, the AI community convenes to administer the famous (and famously controversial) Turing test, pitting sophisticated software programs against humans to ...

Using the designing and building of the Clock of the Long Now as a framework, this is a book about the practical use of long time perspective: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it in and out of sight. Here are the central questions it inspires: How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? Discipline in thought allows freedom. One needs the space and reliability to predict continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolut...