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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 develop an application that enables collaborative browsing of a database of images of panels of The AIDS Memorial Quilt that have been “virtually stitched together.”  The application will be used with Onomy Lab’s Tilty Table, a tangible interactive device that serves as a display surface for large-scaled images.

By tilting the tabletop, users can explore the expansive virtual Quilt.  By twisting the tabletop, users move between levels of view ranging from an extreme wide-angle view of the entire 60,000 panel Quilt, down to a close-up of a single panel.  When a user rests on one image, additional information is revealed: names, dates, geographic location.  The size and form of the device encourages collaborative browsing in public venues.  We offer it as an example of a evocative public interactive.

This project demonstrates the notion of a cultural technology; the built-form of the device augments the cultural meaning of the historical material.  Specific innovations include:  the creation of a (1) tangible interactive surface and (2) an application for collaborative browsing and searching of large spatialized images, (3) the involvement of the users’ body in the interaction with digital material, and (4) the circulation of an archive of historical images to a broader, public audience. The horizon of this project seeks to contribute to our understanding of the way in which mixed-media technologies (digital and physical) can augment practices of cultural remembrance.

We are working in collaboration with the Names Project Foundation — the organization based in Atlanta Georgia that is dedicated to preserving the Quilt and receiving new panels — to make their database of 6000 digitized images of Quilt blocks viewable on this tangible interface.  Each Quilt block is comprised of eight individual Quilt panels; each panel measures 3 ft x 6 ft.  To date there are more than 60,000 individual panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

Next year, 2012, will mark the 25th Anniversary of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. We intend to have this application and device ready in time to commemorate that anniversary at the 2012 International AIDS Conference to be held in Washington D.C. in July of next year.

The project is supported by a Digital Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and from funds from USC’s Program of Advancing Scholarship in Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences.

We are looking for volunteers to work on this and related efforts to create a digital presence for the Names Memorial Quilt at the 2012 International AIDS Conference in Washington.  For more information contact:  Anne Balsamo at annebalsamo(at)gmail(dot)com

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.

Ways of the Hand is the name of a new transmedia project that investigates the importance skills of tinkering for the purposes of learning, community building, and the cultivation of the technological imagination.

I began this research in 2009 as part of a research project called “Inspiring the Technological Imagination: The Future of Museums and Libraries in a Digital Age.”  With generous funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, my research team hosted a symposium on the topic of “Tinkering as a Mode of Knowledge Formation.”

My blog report on this symposium featured several short video statements from symposium participants about the significant value of tinkering in a digital age.  Many of the symposium participants will contribute to the enhanced ebook called Ways of the Hand that will be published next year by the Annenberg Press at the University of Southern California.  This dynamic book will include video postcards from the Makers’ Movement, essays from professional tinkerers and teachers, and interactive applications designed encourage readers to explore the ways that our hands make the world.

click to enlarge

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.

In 2008-2009, my research team at USC developed a “creative inventory” of the use of digital media in museums and libraries.  The research was described in 15 blog postings that are available at the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub hosted by the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Members of the research team:  Anne Balsamo, Cara Wallis, Maura Klosterman, Susana Bautista, and Perry Hoberman

This research project was supported by a generous grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.