Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life: Intelligences, Agencies, Ecologies

Marco C. Rozendaal

ISBN 10: 1350514160 / ISBN 13: 9781350514164

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2025

About this Item

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life: Intelligences, Agencies, Ecologies
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350514160
• ISBN 13: 9781350514164
• Binding: Paperback / softback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 520 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined.

By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact.

Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

About the Authors

Marco C. Rozendaal is Associate Professor of Interaction Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

Betti Marenko is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK. She is a transdisciplinary theorist working at the intersection of process philosophies, design theory and critical technologies studies. She co-edited Deleuze and Design (2015) and Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life (2021), and her work has been published in New Formations, Design and Culture, Design Studies, Digital Creativity, Leonardo and Technophany.

William Odom is Assistant Professor in Design at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Canada.