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,...

'Heady, exhilarating, often astonishing' New York Times'Iridescently original, deeply disorientating and yet somehow radically hopeful ... worth reading and rereading' Brian Eno'Be prepared to re-evaluate your relationship with the amazing life forms with whom we share the planet. Fascinating, innovative and thought provoking: I thoroughly recommend Ways of Being' Dr Jane Goodall, DBERecent years h...

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...

'This is the book we need right now' CAROLINE CRIADO PEREZ‘Lucid, funny and fascinating’ ADAM BUXTONThe tech disruptor. The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist.You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate.Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Flori...

"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...

The Earth has reached a tipping point. Runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction of planetary life, the acidification of the oceans—all point toward an era of unprecedented turbulence in humanity’s relationship within the web of life. But just what is that relationship, and how do we make sense of this extraordinary transition?Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars. They challenge the theor...

'An illuminating work of massive insight' Alan Moore'A sensational book. Heartily recommended' Rufus HoundIt is the century about which we know too much, yet understand too little. With disorientating ideas such as relativity, cubism, the id, existentialism, chaos mathematics and postmodernism to contend with, the twentieth century, John Higgs argues, cannot fit easily into a traditional historical narrative. Time, then, for a new perspecti...

It's lucky you're here. But for a series of choices, accidents and coincidences - any of which could have gone otherwise - your life would have been very different.The same goes for reality. We live in just one of many possible worlds - but we can imagine parallel universes in which dinosaurs still rule the Earth, the Russians got to the moon first, everyone's a vegetarian or time itself flows backwards. And that's just for starters.What if the laws of physics were di...

An original deep history of the internet that tells the story of the centuries-old utopian dreams behind it—and explains why they have died todayMany think of the internet as an unprecedented and overwhelmingly positive achievement of modern human technology. But is it? In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin Smith offers an original deep history of the internet, from the ancient to the modern world—uncovering its surprising origins in nature a...