Alex Taylor: Living A Larger Life Together

Alex Taylor talks about thinking in broader terms about technology’s impact on our lives and whether there’s a different way we can approach technology’s design. He asks the question: “are we thinking and doing well with technology and its design?”

Through two examples, he invites us to reflect on some of the core tenets in technology and design, ideas like human centredness, mediation and augmentation. He proposes such tenants are now limiting our imaginations. They have us narrowing our attention and reinforcing a utilitarian individualism. They leave little space for a design open to the always entangled interplay between human and nonhuman actors, or for questions about the structural arrangements that value (or devalue) capacities for being and acting in the world.

He argues that there is an alternative, much more generative way of thinking about technology and its design, one committed to capacities that are always in relation with others and always becoming. This is an expansive idea of capacities that recognizes the correspondences, interdependencies, continual attunements and co-makings between diverse human and nonhuman actors. It is to ask what it might be to create the conditions for more to happen, what a design would look like that holds open the space for relations to proliferate and much more varied forms of life to come into being. This, he proposes, is an alternative that is full with the hope of living a larger life together.