5. Essays in Exploration: Resisting Reduction

These essays were finalist selections in the 2018 Resisting Reduction essay competition and are in conversation with Joi Ito’s manifesto by the same name. As essays are published, readers are encouraged to share and engage with each article and the ideas put forward by their authors.

Read:

Xenodesignerly Ways of Knowing

by Johanna Schmeer

Mar 14, 2019

Can we design ourselves out of the human-centered practices that have for years dominated the field of design, in turn developing a more inclusive, multi-perspective design approach that utilizes xeno discourses and conceptual design?

Gaming the System: Modeling Play in Creative Design

by Scott Penman

Mar 07, 2019

Current models of game‐playing AI reduce the complexity of the playing scenario, suffusing research with the zero-sum-based language of goals and competition. Through Play, we can resist this myopic orientation of goals in favor of a more creative model and vocabulary.

How to (Not) Raise a Reductionist: Reassessing the Paradigms of Child Rearing for an Age of Flourishing

by Ben Draper and Andre Uhl

Mar 01, 2019

At their earliest years, children are able to master some of the most complex motor tasks, through intuitive/playful engagement with the world. Does the control-oriented approach to child rearing - when the adult inevitably intervenes - normalize the reductionism we're to resist?

Material Matters in Children’s Creative Learning

by Louisa Penfold

Feb 19, 2019

Exploring how the coming together of a new materialist approach to education with the experimental practices of artists and designers can open up expansive possibilities for children’s creative learning.

Deep Learning with Biomimicry

by Emily Mendez and Emily Marcum

Feb 19, 2019Updated: Mar 19, 2019

A transdisciplinary discussion of artificial intelligence, biomimicry, data science, and software engineering research. Can we frame the development of evolutionary intelligence in these terms?

Exploring Decentralization: Blockchain Technology and Complex Coordination

by Mally Anderson

Feb 07, 2019Updated: Feb 19, 2019

Decentralization is the process of dispersing power away from a central authority. It has never been possible on a global scale—until now. But can it foster abundance without excess, multiplicity without superfluity, and complexity without chaos?

How AI Can Cure the Big Idea Famine

by Saahil Jayraj Dama

Jan 22, 2019Updated: Feb 04, 2019

Today too many people are still deprived of basic amenities such as medicine, while current patent laws continue to convolute and impede innovation. But if allowed, AI can provide an opportunity to redefine this paradigm and be the catalyst for change—if.

A Rumble in the Taupe Hum of Info-Capital: On Reduction and the Neoliberal City

by Matthew Claudel and Matthew Shafer

Jan 24, 2019

Techno-optimists on the vanguard of the so-called Singularity have given rise to a seductive machine: a networked society optimized for exponential growth. How do we manifest alternatives to reductive aggregation?

How Technology Reduces Us, and What We As Designers Can Do About It

by Michael Andrea

Jan 17, 2019

Resisting reduction as a concept is inherently about the experience of being human. What is it to be human in the modern world? Are all reductions of this experience to be resisted? If not, which parts of the human experience would we want to reduce, or enhance?

Is Silicon Valley Diverse Enough to Resist Reduction?

by Carsten Lund Pedersen

Jan 10, 2019

Silicon Valley conveys a monolithic reliance on exponential presumptions of AI, resulting in Singularity. Consequently, as a collaborative system, does it promote herd behavior in favor of reductionism?

Next:

“A Genealogy of Perfect Thinking, Told in Four Parts” by Jeffrey St. Onge

Upcoming:

“Playing Intelligence” by Michel Erler
“Defining the Dimensions of the ‘Space’ of Computing” by Weiwei Hsu and Hugh Dubberly
“Entangled Flourshings: Ideas in conversation with Resisting Reductions” by Dan Gavshon Brady, James Pockson and Merlin Sheldrake
“I Want You to Want Me to Want You [and vice versa]: The Simple Complexity of Sexual Consent” by Nora Bateson
“Practical Paradoxes when Resisting Reduction” by Ben Tolkin