Rethinking Technology / Rethinking Architecture

The Pokia

With the semester one marksheets still smouldering in the fireplace, yesterday it was back to the lecture room to start all over again – this time on 5th year/masters module ‘Rethinking Architecture’ (which should really be called ‘Rethinking Technology’ – a long story..). Not sure why they gave us a room big enough for 160 when there are only seven of us in the class, including me, but it certainly gave the ideas room to breathe. Let’s hope next week we’re back in the Dept around a table, as seminars are meant to be.

With definitions of technology out of the way – including a first draft of Heidegger’s notion of a world opened up by technology – the main focus of the session was on housekeeping: how to get through the multiple ‘paywalls’ of the university’s clunky (and soon to be defunct) WebCT system, and once there what to do with the riches to be found within. At least everything is up to date in there now, so we’re ready to get started. Next week it’s ‘Technology and the Body’ where we start with Tim Ingold’s handy aphorism: ‘A tool, in the most general sense, is an object that extends the capacity of an agent to operate within a given environment’. (1993: 433).

Ingold, T. (1993) ‘Tool-Use, Sociality and Intelligence’, in Kathleen Gibson and Tim Ingold (eds), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 429-45.