In this extraordinary book, a series of 'letters written at the beginning of an era in which the book has lost the significance it had and in which electronic correspondence, in which anyone may join, becomes the medium of the moment', John Chris Jones explores the potential of the internet as the instigator of a new kind of life. The book is in fact a record of an electronic text, an attempt to find a new form of writing which acknowledges the significance of the connectedness and immediacy of computer networks. In the author's words, it is 'a record of trying to think some of the unthinkables that our technologies have brought before us in this pause before the post-industrial breakfast...'. Based on an analysis of automation (the replacement of human skills by machines, as industrialization was the replacement of human effort), the possibilities opened up by the transmission of information by electricity, and a refusal to accept that the 'virtual' world is in any sense less real than the world excluding computers, Jones sees the internet as making possible an awakening from the 'frozen dreaming' of industrial life.
John Chris Jones Boeken



Design Methods
- 407bladzijden
- 15 uur lezen
Since its initial publication in 1970, Design Methods has been considered the seminal work on design methodology. Written by one of the founders of the design methods movement, it has been highly praised in international journals and has been translated into Japanese, Romanian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.
Designing Designing
- 384bladzijden
- 14 uur lezen
designing designing is one of the most extraordinary books on design ever written. First published in 1984 and reprinted with this title and cover in 1991, the book was the product of ten years of auto-critique, reflection and experimentation on writing on designing.Offering a savage auto-critique of his own work on “methods”, as well as of the wider methods and ends of advanced industrial societies as a whole, this book challenges the traditional product- and progress- orientated focus on design by insisting that the world now coming into being requires designing to be understood as 'a response to the whole of life.'But designing designin g is also unique in modern design thinking in its exploration of what writing on designing might be. Combining essays, interviews, reflections, performances, plays, poems, chance procedures, photographs, collages and quotes, Jones experiments with both form and content in an attempt to make a book which 'is not simply about designing but is instead itself an instance of the ideas and processes explored within it.'