介绍: Mortality in Design - 麻省理工学院人工智能研究专业

介绍: Mortality in Design
Connor Graham, Wally Smith,
Wendy Moncur, Elise van den Hoven

介绍: Digital Design for Mortals
Precisely what is unsettling about modern technological construction
就是它, instead of holding together earth and sky, mortals and divinities,
it penetrates the earth to extract resources, pushes beyond the sky with
rockets and satellites, attempts to suppress mortality with medicine and
药物, and precisely in this attempt to control the body, rejects the art
死亡的, and thereby and in the very process the remembering of the
divinities that is the most intimate part of human suffering.1

More than ten years old now, Carl Mitcham’s reflection on the
performance of vernacular architecture (the building of his own
房子, 实际上), is a powerful statement about the tendency of
modern technology to suppress human mortality and with it the
expression of the human spirit.2 His words can be read as a direct
reference to the much-reported death denial of the modern era,
particularly in developed countries.3 For example, Tony Walter, A
sociologist specializing in death studies, has described how mod-
ern death is medicalized and private.4 Mike Kearl, another sociolo-
gist and death studies scholar, first in 1989 and then again in 2010,
notes how the “cultural tendency to rely on others to define and to
organize one’s fate” has resulted in a rejection of death in a society
that rolls on, despite the demise of individuals.5 Kearl expresses
the overall sentiment thus: “Late modernity has banished the dead
from everyday life.”6

Whether through “rockets and satellites” or medical tech-
逻辑的, we recognize the force of this line of thinking—that
in technology, life is celebrated with aspirations for immortality
while death, 老化, and human mortality are refused and forgot-
ten. 然而, in this special issue, we consider a contrasting possibil-
ity that technologies can be conceived and designed to somehow
confront and deal with human mortality. Although examples
could doubtlessly be drawn from any branch of technology, 和
from any of modernity’s decades, our focus is on digital design of
the present era.

A first clue to this possible counterview to Mitcham’s posi-
tion is that technologies themselves express a distinct sense of
their own mortality. New gadgets, machines, constructions, 和
infrastructure all inevitably fade and abrade, becoming obsolete in
ever-turning cycles of innovation and production, yielding relics

Carl Mitcham, “Thinking the Re-Vernacu-
lar Building,” 设计问题 21, 不. 1
(冬天 2005): 34.
同上.

2
3 Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology
of Death and Dying (纽约: 牛津
大学出版社, 1989); Tony Walter,
The Revival of Death (伦敦: 劳特利奇,
1994).

4 Walter, The Revival of Death, 48, 64.
5
6 Michael C. Kearl, “The Proliferation of

Kearl, Endings, 46.

Postselves in American Civic and Popular
Cultures,” Mortality: Promoting the
Interdisciplinary Study of Death and
Dying 15, 不. 1 (2010): 47–63.

土井: 10.1162/DESI_e_00472

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in need of loving commemoration. 例如, modernist archi-
tecture of the twentieth century came inscribed with an overt
denial of history; and yet today, many of its buildings are them-
selves now faded and dated, their concrete crumbling and in need
of repair, their once monumental display of newness itself now
consigned to the heritage inventory.7

什么, 然后, of the digital, described as “all that which can
be ultimately reduced to binary code, but which produces a further
proliferation of particularity and difference”?8 What of the “stuff”
of newness today that brings its own kind of promises for a never-
ending modernity? A cursory look at everyday digital technolo-
吉斯, such as social media and games, suggests that they, 也, 喜欢
the technologies described by Mitcham, evoke a celebration of the
片刻, the “real instant,” at the expense of deeper reflections on
mortality.9 While postmodernity, which has accompanied the rise
of the computer, might recognize “other aspects of our humanness,
which lie beyond the empirical framework of naturalistic material-
主义,”10 digital technologies often seem to have continued to subdue
human mortality along with the advances in medicine and science.
And perhaps the digital goes even further, by embodying a sense
of immortality in its very essence. A technology built around bits
that are either 1 或者 0 but nothing in between promises a form of
recording that cannot fade or decay, as its analogue forbearers did.
然而, experience again shows how this promise is short-lived,
and the digital suffers its own kind of mortal fragility in the form
of bit-rot and planned obsolescence, eaten away by ceaseless cycles
of standards updates and the imperative for production driven by
neo-liberal capitalism.

换句话说, digital artifacts show clear signs of being
no more intrinsically permanent or immortal than other forms
技术的. This brings us to the aim of this special issue: 到
explore expressions of mortality in the design of digital technolo-
吉斯. For us, the notion of mortality in design means to somehow
confront and express the impermanence of human existence
underscored by the inevitability of death. 原则, this per-
spective is distinct from designs of digital commemoration which
instead offer another kind of immortality—a celebration of life
despite death. 在实践中, 然而, designs for mortality are often
juxtaposed with, and understood in relation to, various kinds of
immortality. 例如, although Siu’s Invisible Urn acknowl-
edges the fragility of the human, it also assumes the persistence
and immortality of government and certain aspects of human soci-
ety.11 Human officials are posited as continuing to manage burial
grounds where urns are placed while relatives’ commemorative
practices are presented as being subject to changing priorities and
移民. 因此, even in physical artifacts that recognize human
mortality, certain immortalities are expressed. 尽管如此,
despite its clear mutuality with immortality, we believe that the

7 Hannah Lewi, “Paradoxes in the

Conservation of Modernism,” in Back
from Utopia: The Challenge of the
Modern Movement, 编辑. Hubert-Jan
Henket and Hilde H. Henket (鹿特丹:
010 出版商, 2002), 350–59.
8 Heather A. Horst and Daniel Miller,
Digital Anthropology (伦敦: 伯格,
2012), 3.
Paul Virilio, Open Sky (伦敦: Verso,
1997), 18.

10 Stuart Walker, “Design and Spirituality:

Material Culture for a Wisdom
Economy,” 设计问题 29, 不. 3
(夏天 2013): 92.

11 Kin Wai Michael Siu, “Culture and
设计: A New Burial Concept in a
Densely Populated Metropolitan Area,”
设计问题 21, 不. 2 (春天 2005):
79–89.

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

notion of mortality provides a distinctive point of focus and moti-
vation for design. And it is this potential that we set out to explore.
The papers in this special issue present an interdisciplinary, 多-
sited approach to understanding Mortality in Design: seven papers
spanning architecture, 交互设计, 哲学, 社会学,
and science and technology studies (超导系统). 一起, these papers
concern a range of physical, hybrid, and digital designs that
express particular relations between the living and the dead. 他们
include discussions of bespoke designs for artifacts placed in the
home or worn on the body, prototypical digital designs for aug-
menting rural space, and speculative designs for future artifacts.
Although all of the papers in some way deal with deceased
humans or animals, they vary in terms of the extent to which the
dead are kept in their place.

Our aim in the remainder of this introduction to the spe-
cial issue is to draw attention to some significant issues emerg-
ing from the seven papers. In “Themes and Papers,” we identify
five broad themes that are mobilized: materializing, translating,
保存, remembering, and continuing. We then pick up some
larger emerging issues in the sections “Mortality or Immortality in
设计?” and “The Design Imaginary”—the first considering in
more detail the relationship between mortality and immortality
and the second looking at how work in this field is motivated by
particular visions, 梦, and ideologies.

Themes and Papers
The papers of this special issue express or explore five broad
themes of mortality in design.

Materializing concerns how design might address and
respond to the physical bodies of mortals. Mike Michael’s paper
proposes that certain designs potentially are able to serve as a
medium through which to “open up” the meanings of particular
事件, including death and, 更广泛地, ideas about human
mortality. He treats critically two physical technology designs by
James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau that center on disposal and
that exemplify and challenge the particular character of relations
between humans and non-humans—whether reciprocal, 依赖-
凹痕, or exploitative. Michael also shows that these relations rest
on a particular residual ontology that sees humans as superior to
动物. Using the designs to speculate about possibilities,
he shows how human–non-human relations can be extended,
inverted, and equalized. He also shows how they can be re-con-
textualized by thinking through the vitality and materiality of
dead bodies, as well as their embeddedness in ecosystems, infra-
结构, and socio-economic regimes. 这样, “human”
mortality is shown to be shared by all animals. This perspective

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

extends to the digital. How are the digital remains of the human
dead “special”? How are they contextualized and given meaning
by distinct systems and regimes?

Translating concerns the visions of mortality and immortal-
ity narratives that are represented and embraced through design.
Karla Rothstein’s paper straddles this next theme of translating
with the previous theme of materializing. She challenges tradi-
tional practices of bodily disposal by considering practical prob-
lems for cities and urban planners: making room for the dead. 她
paper carefully considers different methods of disposal and
reflects on the position of the dead in relation to the living. 她
physical design proposals illuminate (quite literally) 特别的
futures and are illustrative of the different roles and relations of
the dead throughout history: from protecting community lands in
the eastern Mediterranean during the Mesolithic period, to legiti-
mizing the boundaries of space for the living in modern cities like
巴黎, to symbolizing the mass, if impersonal, loss of the young
through the horrors of war.12 Rothstein illustrates the broader con-
texts in which the dead are situated: as part of a global transforma-
tion toward cities; as embedded in a planetary ecosystem; 并作为
potentially a key part of a city-level energy infrastructure. 在这个
方式, she reimagines the dead as part of a larger set of planetary
sociotechnical relations beyond the individual, 家庭, 和
even the human. She demonstrates through a design proposal how
the dead can once again form part of the physical architecture of
the city, rather than being spatially sequestered in cemeteries on
the edges of populated territory. She provokes speculation con-
cerning possible intersections with the digital in establishing the
presence of the dead among the living in physical and digital
空间. Rothstein also shows that urban space can offer continuity
with past disposal rituals while moving to more public, civic,
expressive, 包括的, and less individualized approaches to memo-
rializing the dead. How might a shift from individual and family-
based memorialization to a more civic scale be achieved? 在
处理, to what extent are the sacredness and certain vulnerabil-
ities of the human body supposed, and the permanence of infra-
structure assumed?

Preserving concerns the potential for artifacts to help us
protect and extend our vulnerable mortalities. The paper by Gail
Kenning and Cathy Treadaway explores how the progressive loss
of a loved one through changing personhood brought on by ill-
ness can be ameliorated through the use of sensory textile objects
in a family context. 具体来说, they consider how family mem-
bers confront the chronic illness of dementia through digitally
enhanced material objects—specifically, fabric blankets that
incorporate microcontrollers interfacing with digital sounds,
音乐, and photographs. These artifacts allow for enhanced

12 Timothy Taylor, The Buried Soul: 如何

Humans Invented Death (伦敦: 第四
Estate, 2003); and Kearl, Endings, 45.

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

communication between family members through touch and are
tailored to sustain and celebrate personhood. 在这种情况下, the vul-
nerability associated with mortality is keenly felt. The physical and
digital aspects of the object support a present-focused relationality
with the dementia sufferer while the person still lives, 和一个
remembering of the person after death actually arrives. The possi-
bilities of both the preservation and decay of the material and
digital components of the artifact invite speculation. What are the
consequences of the electrical and digital components breaking
down or no longer being possible to maintain or power? To what
extent is the ongoing “existence” of the deceased contingent on the
answers to these questions?

Remembering concerns the potential for digital technologies
to support the memory and revival of past lives. The two papers in
this theme explore not so much the achievement of digital immor-
tality, but rather the design of technologies that respond to more
fragile mortalities. Will Odom, Daisuke Uriu, David Kirk, 理查德
Banks, and Ron Wakkary continue the exploration of the domestic
space and family members’ relationships with their deceased
through a discussion of two hybrid object designs. They consider
how grieving and memorialization are literally placed in relation
to the living through digital displays, 媒体 (in this case digital
照片), and input mechanisms. In the design deployed in
英国, the digital component allowed the bereaved to collabora-
tively contribute to supporting the memory of the deceased, plac-
ing digital images in “a broader temporal space that encompasses
multiple lifespans.” In this way, the bereaved gained a measure of
control over how the deceased individual was being remembered.
This collaborative archival approach contrasted with the more
reflective, ritualistic engagement created through the artifact’s
deployment in Japan. In the latter case, control over the aspects of
the deceased’s life that were on display shifted to the artifact. 然而,
在这两种情况下, the material quality of the artifact shaped the mean-
ing of and interaction with the artifact: oak doors to evoke warmth
and open interaction, and symbolically shaped picture frames to
differentiate the dead from the living. Why and in what circum-
stances should the material “trump” the digital? To what extent
should the digital dead be conveniently designed and configured
by the living?

David Kirk, Abigail Durrant, Jim Kosem, and Stuart Reeves
move memory of the deceased out of the home to a physical site of
trauma in a rural location in Slovenia, where existing physical
memorials reside. Their design, in contrast with Odom et al.’s,
memorializes a collective and represents a layering of the digital
over a physical space through a mobile, locative audio-guide. 他们
describe how the audio presents spoken word testimony from a
survivor and could be accessed in fragments from different parts

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

of the site. Considering memory as social and collective, 他们
work through the implications for legacy and how it can be
达到了. They show that design of remembering, as in the case of
Odom et al.’s study, is a key concern. The digital nature of the
memorial allows oral narrative to be incorporated from an absent
survivor and allows individual, moving bodies to engage with it,
through their mobile phone. This work shows how a public, rural
空间, enhanced with the digital, can mediate memories of an
atrocity. It also leaves open the politics of how to decide which
嗓音(s) engage in the design process. What is the tension between
remembering and forgetting? To what extent should the dead be
included as a persistent, encountered presence at a memorial site?

Continuing concerns how digital technologies might extend
personhood and how their aesthetics and composition might rep-
resent human mortality. This theme thus takes us closest to aspi-
rations for digital immortality. Ștefania Matei considers how the
deceased can continue to exert moral influence through a distrib-
uted sense of collective agency involving digital infrastructure
and the living. She argues that both the commemorators and the
commemorated through the online donation site, Much Loved – 这
Online Tribute Charity, are incorporated into a set of relations
marked as both moral and responsible in character. Her suggestion
is that the socio-technical infrastructure of the website, 包括
discrete interface components that make visible the deceased, 这
donors, and the financial infrastructure contribute to a moral pres-
ence in the world that espouses particular senses of value. 这
deceased are extended through time, as they persist, perpetuate,
and reach out through socio-technical relations that can continue
to shape action and are a moral presence on their behalf. To what
extent are designs, designers, and donors moral agents in a config-
uration that incorporates the deceased? Under what conditions
might the dead have any agency—moral or otherwise?

Jayne Wallace, James Thomas, Derek Anderson, and Patrick
Olivier end the special issue by considering the temporal extension
of the deceased through artifacts worn on the body. Like Kenning
and Treadaway, they examine how touch can support an explicitly
ongoing interaction with deceased loved ones. Digitally enhanced
objects can support interaction with the living as they approach
death and can support commemorative and honoring rituals in
particular spaces attached to individuals or collectives. 这些
authors extend this focus to consider mobility and the personal,
bodily proximity of physical lockets and thus articulate how such
artifacts enable the dead to have a continuing, changing, physical,
and social relationship with living individuals. They show how
such lockets can be enhanced to support a reimagining of rela-
tionships between the dead and the living by including media-
tions of their bodies in digital photographs. How important are the

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

material and digital aspects of the design for giving the deceased
an ongoing, meaningful presence? What possibilities do the intui-
tive malleability and counter-intuitive perishability of the digital
offer up for the ongoing presence of the dead?

Mortality or Immortality in Design?
At its core, a civilization is a collection of life-extension technologies:
agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold,
architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting
和防御, medicine to combat injury and disease.13

Having overviewed the papers of the special issue, we now con-
sider some broad questions around the relationship between
mortality and immortality in design. We turn to the writings
of Stephen Cave, a philosopher tackling mortality from the per-
spective of “big history” in the popular text, Immortality: The Quest
to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization. Cave argues for four
“immortality narratives” that are descriptive of all stories across
time and cultures concerning “living on” after death. These nar-
ratives are staying alive, 复活, soul, and legacy.14 Cave’s
argument is that attempts to reach immortality have produced
what we call civilization. Although Cave clearly addresses immor-
tality, the same four narratives can serve to explore issues of mor-
tality. We further suggest that Cave’s narratives are informative
about and provide a loose framework for the momentum behind
some aspects and motivations of digital design—in how “users”
are conceived and even in the aesthetics and functions of the
design itself.15

Across the papers is a preoccupation with the body. 但在
contrast to the narratives of Cave, we see a profound acknowledge-
ment and admission of its physical decay, even if it might be trans-
formed materially in particular ways in the short term: through its
translation into energy in the case of the papers of Michael and
Rothstein and into forms that hybridize the material and the digi-
tal in other papers. This is not resurrection in any ritualized or
non-rational sense. The materiality of this persistence, in terms of
Cave’s four narratives, might represent his fourth narrative of a
legacy; with the paper by Matei engaging most literally with this
particular narrative. The papers also show that the deceased can
live on as a less material presence through digitally enhanced
artifacts, reminiscent of Cave’s third narrative of soul. This par-
ticular narrative could do more to acknowledge the role of material
things in mediating the dead. But what also emerges through the
papers is a non-binary notion of human mortality and immortality.
This conception of mortality is presented as structured more by
the material world and less directly by the economic realities of
global capitalism.

13 Stephen Cave, Immortality: The Quest
to Live Forever and How It Drives
Civilisation (伦敦: Biteback Publishing,
2012), 37.
同上.

14
15 理查德·H. 右. 哈珀, Texture: 人类

Expression in the Age of Communications
Overload (剑桥, 嘛: 与新闻界,
2010).

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

The papers of Matei and Wallace, taken with Michael’s
observations about relations, provide some important insights into
agency and time, concepts highly relevant to Cave’s narratives, 和
some tentative insights into how the mortal human is conceptual-
化的. Extending Cave’s narratives, the papers show how the agency
of the deceased is highly dependent on the technology associated
with them—whether a screen or a wearable artifact—and with
how that technology frames and connects them with the living,
whether pervasively in physical space or by being worn on the
身体. The digital technologies presented in the special issue afford
a vision not only of lingering intentionality, but also of ongoing
effect—for example, by being remembered in particular ways. 和
the issue shows how the digital—given its profound association
with kinship ties, the packaged product of convenience, visual
consumption, and extension through time—affords and shapes the
dead’s engagement with the living in ongoing action and interac-
tion through the senses, particularly vision, and proprioception:
screens, 空间, and artifacts.16 The variations in the digital’s role, 在
the design and the interaction and sensual engagement that it
affords, help shape relations between the living and the dead as
reciprocal or dependent, loose, or even potentially exploitative.

Given these observations concerning mortality and the
exploration of visions of human mortality, our first broad question
concerns what these papers reveal about the design process and
the human designer responding to the ephemerality, 转移, 和
vulnerability of the mortal human? The papers certainly offer
some creative responses on how to remediate and position the
dead ontologically, spatially, socially, and even environmentally
和, in the case of the first two papers, how they challenge exist-
ing mortuary rituals and norms of the sacred in the process. 他们
illustrate speculative, 活动家, and participatory approaches to
设计. They also show how both digital media (例如, 录音
and photographs) and physical media (例如, blankets and lockets)
give the dead a continuing presence; and that hybridization of the
digital and physical imbues this presence with new meanings
through digitization, fusing two distinct visions and vulnerabili-
ties in the process.

More specific questions about the mortality of the human
and the human designer receive less attention, although we cer-
tainly gain insights. Even if design is capturing “rituals cast in
空间,” how does it express intention, or make visible and articu-
late vulnerability?17 Matei takes a particular position on collec-
tive agency, and the papers of Kirk et al., Odom et al., and Wallace
等人. all treat mediations or remediations of identity. Kenning and
Treadaway expand the treatment of mortality to deliberately con-
sider different aspects of human vulnerability—namely, 人-
兜帽. They consider how digital design might respond to it, 因此
producing new vulnerabilities in the process. Along with Michael

16 Brian Massumi, Parable for the Virtual:
Movement, Affect, Sensation (达勒姆,
NC: 杜克大学出版社, 2002), 58.
17 Frank E. 棕色的, Roman Architecture
(纽约: George Braziller, 1961);
Dominik Bastianello, email message
to Connor Graham, 行进 13, 2014.

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

and Rothstein, Kenning and Treadaway also shift attention to
the kinds of assumptions that are made about persisting human–
human relations and human–technology relations and the vul-
nerability of these relationships in the designs presented in the
other papers. Inspired by Latour,18 these observations cause us to
consider the degree to which designers’ agency is present at all in
(digital) design for mortality, subdued as it is by spatial con-
菌株, 数字基础设施 (例如, wireless networks), global cap-
italism, and preconceived notions of the function of furniture,
tourist spots, and jewelry, as well as by the durable (并且经常
rightful) norms related to memory of the deceased and the senti-
ment of different actors: the bereaved, the commemorating, 和
those merely interested.

The Design Imaginary
The second broad question we see as emerging from the special
issue focuses on how designers might conceive of mortality both in
their design work and in relation to various others, 包括
users of technology and the ones represented through it. 这
question goes well beyond the important practice of taking “the
user” seriously in “a fragile encounter” between “other and self” or in
the levels of “openness and closure” in this encounter; it engages
with the very nature of human mortality and the configuration of
the designer, the designed-for, and the design.19

In the designs presented in this issue, the digital has
been part of a means of securing ongoing legacy and presence for
the dead, even if some caveats are offered. The display designs
presented in the paper of Will Odom and his colleagues place the
dead carefully in the home so that they don’t become too invasive,
while the audio guide design in the paper of David Kirk and his
colleagues is careful to place the atrocity in the past. Imagining the
obsolescence that these designs might suffer by being put away or
forgotten is not difficult, partly because of the designers’ sensitive,
careful efforts not to disrupt existing space and to engage the mov-
ing body. In these cases, the designers’ sensitivity, their careful
engagement with the living, and their acute awareness of the senti-
ment attached to human mortality mean that the dead are kept at
arm’s length. 因此, these designs provoke the question of whether
people—designers and users alike—really want to engage with
the dead. In sharp contrast, the designs for the treatment of dead
bodies reported by Michael and Rothstein are less cautious about
existing norms and of breaching existing modes of behavior, 和
are instead more exploratory and confrontational. And Ștefania
Matei’s analysis more deliberately shows that the digital dead can
“reach into” the living world, even if only through a network. 福尔-
lowing from her analysis, and also through the designs discussed
in the papers of Gail Kenning and Cathy Treadaway and Jayne
Wallace and her colleagues, we can observe the vision of a more

18 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of

the Anthropocene,” New Literary History
45, 不. 1 (2014): 1–18.

19 Mark Steen, “Human-Centered Design as
a Fragile Encounter,” 设计问题 28,
不. 1 (冬天 2012): 74.

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

unruly, less polite human dead. In these articles, the digital
visually and tangibly mediates distinctly different images of
the dead and their bearing on the present and the responsibilities
of the living. How the designs of Kenning and Treadaway and
Wallace and colleagues engage touch, as well as sight and pro-
prioception, is also highly significant in contrast to the more visu-
ally oriented designs of Odom et al. and the more conventional
web service that Matei reports on. The paper of Wallace et al., 在
closing the collection, illustrates how the digital, despite its poten-
tial role in an ongoing relationship between the living and the
dead, can be as fragile and as subject to destruction and deteriora-
tion as the material.

Taking a step back, what becomes visible across all of the
papers is a picture of designers’ dreams, ideologies, and visions
around mortality, and how they come into play around particular
digitized spaces and artifacts. We suggest that these might be con-
sidered as forming a particular design imaginary. Just as Baren-
dreght argued that McLuhan’s Global Village drove post-war
technological progress, including the Internet in the United States,
here we see the influence of a design-specific imaginary relating to
humans and their mortality that is brought into being through the
imaginative creation and deliberate construction of contemporary
designed artifacts and spaces.20 In this new design imaginary, 这
dead are acknowledged as enduring, but critically also as finite
and secondary to the living, even sometimes as resources to sup-
port ongoing life. This contrasts sharply with times and cultures
when ancestors have been deemed as important as the living, 和
the continuation of such ideas in the present day. And with this,
we also see the technology of digitization transforming, 或者至少
fortifying, the human mortal body into a more persistent and con-
figurable social presence. This is not quite the collective, 建立-
列出, institutional, future-oriented sociotechnical imaginary of
Jasonoff and Kim which posits beliefs regarding the way the social
world is or could be—deeply embroiled with and achieved
through technology.21 Here, we see something both more specula-
tive and focused on designer intentions.

As long ago as 1988, Don Norman coined the term “design-
er’s conceptual model” to capture this similar speculative sense of
designer and design intention.22 But the design imaginary evident
across the papers goes well beyond this relatively contained idea.
Like sociotechnical imaginaries, a design imaginary encapsulates
hopes of progress, such as reconceiving human mortality in soci-
埃蒂, as well as fears of possible harm, such as human mortality’s
threat to ongoing existence. This sense of the design imaginary
evokes and draws on Michael M. J. Fischer’s analysis of the Web as

20 Richard Barbook, Imaginary Futures: 从

Thinking Machines to the Global Village
(伦敦: 冥王星, 1996); Bart Barendregt,
“Diverse Digital Worlds,” in Digital
Anthropology, 编辑. Heather A. Horst
and Daniel Miller (伦敦: 布卢姆斯伯里,
2012), 203–24.

21 Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim,
编辑. Dreamscapes of Modernity:
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the
Fabrication of Power (芝加哥, 伊尔:
University of Chicago Press., 2015).
22 Don Norman, The Design of Everyday
Things (纽约: 基础书籍,
2013), 13.

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

“a cultural, ideological, even ritual, 空间 (骗局)fusion, 至少在
美国, between a ‘cowboy-hacker-individualist-anarchist-liber-
tarian’ ethic and a series of market and political mechanisms for
restructuring labor in new forms of manufacturing and services.”23
The term also, like Fischer’s work, acknowledges such technosocial
design as historically embedded and thus associated with certain
visions of a time shaped through technology: from “utopian and
colonizing talk of the electronic frontier” to “gradual coevolution
and integration of the Internet with other institutional worlds.”24

In proposing this sense of a design imaginary around mor-
tality, we are not suggesting a singular unifying vision across the
文件. 相反, different and even competing notions of
mortality are juxtaposed. Mortality is something to be debated (作为
in Michael), to be engaged with convivially (as in Kirk et al.), 或者
be understood and designed for (as in Wallace et al.). And with
these views particular understandings of aesthetics analyzed by
Koskinen as typical of “new social design” are folded into the
design imaginary.25 In this way, digitally enhanced artifacts and
environments are pegged to other human forces—forces with
which living individuals and small groups actually engage. 如何-
曾经, we also contend that the very nature of the digital—even its
aesthetic—is such that it is also often impermanent and liable to
change in response to larger, more abstract, less visible forces than
human action and intention, such as the market, Internet policy,
and “the elusive workings of algorithms and protocols” over
which we have no control.26 Thus, the digital’s design imaginary is
not only human but also circumscribed through a historical tech-
nological context.

And finally, the design imaginary emerging in this special
issue confirms and elaborates a point raised earlier about the mor-
tality of digital technology itself. The digital is rendered as tran-
sient as the flesh because it is constantly undergoing change. 作为
the papers reveal, this transitory nature is further complicated
when the digital becomes interwoven with the material—whether
through its layering with physical spaces and technologies (例如,
public displays) or through the material forms borrowed by digital
空间 (例如, architectural metaphors). Despite the past and contem-
porary imaginations of immortality associated with it through its
inherent, possibly endless reproducibility, the digital also has an
affordance for decay. Digital spaces might be distinct in the imagi-
nations associated with them and the subjective experiences they
offer and generate. But they are still subject to aging and decay
through time, 环境, and their own distinct exposures,
which creates a very distinct sense of mortality.

23 Michael M. J. Fischer, “Worlding

Cyberspace: Towards an Ethnography
in Time, Space and Theory,” in Critical
Anthropology Now, Marcus George, 编辑.
(圣达菲, NM: School for American
研究, 1999), 261–62.
同上, 246.
Ilpo Koskinen, “Agnostic, Convivial, 和
Conceptual Aesthetics in New Social
设计,” 设计问题 32, 不. 3
(夏天 2016): 18–29.

24
25

26 Amanda Lagerkvist, “Existential Media:
Toward a Theorization of Digital
Thrownness,” New Media & 社会 19,
不. 1 (2017): 96–7.

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设计问题: 体积 34, 数字 1 冬天 2018

结论
This special issue centers on the “visions” related to human mor-
tality and how they are rationalized and folded into design. 这
response to the challenge of this investigation is sought not from
lawmakers, multinational corporations, and governments, 但
from designers and their design practices. 因此, we have focused
on two questions: 第一的, how do mortality and design, 尤其
digital design, interrelate? 第二个, how does human mortality
shape digital design, and vice versa? Digital design provokes a
series of questions regarding the human—the designer, 这
designed-for, and the designed-around—in relation to durability
and vulnerability. 因此, we have considered the human’s represen-
tation in digital systems, 环境, and artifacts by describing
design processes, design actors, and the design imaginary.

As a corpus, these papers encourage us to reconsider
Kittler’s observation about the dead’s relation to technologies
such as the digital: “The realm of the dead is as extensive as the
storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture. As Klaus
Theweleit noted, media are always flight apparatuses into the
great beyond. If gravestones stood as symbols at the beginning of
culture itself, our media technology can retrieve all gods.… In our
mediascape, immortals have come to exist again.”27 The dead
might well exist again through mediascapes, and digital might
offer the possibility of immortality through a continuing spirit and
legacy, increasingly propagated through a stubbornly enduring
online presence of the deceased across different Internet media
and services. The dead might be visible once again through the
emergence of deceased celebrities in civic and popular culture via
the magic of the digital.28 And to return to Mitcham, extending life
might even be made possible through these mediascapes—
through the apparent reduction of human experience to the digi-
tal.29 But such apparent immortalities are also mortalities: 他们是
all subject to the material world of the living and to the durable
imaginations associated with the digital and its appar-ently end-
less reproducibility and defiance of the passage of time. 也许
t he time has come to more deliberately desig n for such
mortality—and for the design imaginary to recognize the range of
human and digital vulnerabilities.

Acknowledgements
We kindly thank anonymous reviewers for their hard work, 哪个
made this special issue possible. This special issue was supported
by funding and administrative assistance from the Centre for Lib-
eral Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS), Nanyang Technological Uni-
大学 (NTU), 新加坡, and by administrative assistance from
the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore,
新加坡. Special thanks is reserved for Natalie Pang for her work
to secure funding support from CLASS, NTU.

27 弗里德里希·A. Kittler, “介绍,“ 在
Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, 反式.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael
Wutz (斯坦福大学: 斯坦福大学
按, 1999), 1–19.

28 Kearl, “The Proliferation of Postselves

in American Civic and Popular Cultures”;
Alexandra Sherlock, “Larger Than
Life: Digital Resurrection and the
Re-Enchantment of Society,“ 这
Information Society: An International
杂志 29, 不. 3 (2013): 164–76.
29 Mitcham, “Thinking the Re-Vernacular

Building.”

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