Technology Plays a Very Important Role in our Lives

This is Part of the Graveyard of Dead Abstracts project.

Technology plays a very important role in our lives, actively engaging in our everyday projects of becoming ourselves and understanding the world. Technology gives a form to our condition by satisfying our needs and our desires. It renders morphological our values and our ‘ways of living’ and then it passes these back to us in many complex ways. Artifacts which are designed to satisfy material needs thus gain potent psychological and social value. Technology’s rapid transformation does not necessarily negate its traditional role in the activity of working out important aspects of our condition, and in giving this condition concrete form, but the precise manner in which it frames our existence is modified – a phenomenon I think highly worth studying.

Hitherto in my research the particular technology that I have been concerned with is the system of shelter and containment that is architecture. The house in particular, the most intimate of architectures, has provided me with a fertile site for investigating technology’s role in our personal narratives. The house as technology has always been in a continual state of development and transformation, but this rate of change has sped up dramatically over the last century. This is fascinating to me, and hence unravelling what these changes in the house have meant and what they could mean in the future was the topic of my recently completed master’s thesis at Waterloo. The psychologically loaded space of the house was first invaded by technology at the beginning of the twentieth century with appliances such as telephones, toasters and vacuums. Later, more complex technology such as televisions, security systems and home networks similarly continued the transformation of this intimate landscape. Such devices imply new relations between the inside of the house and the outside and new engagements with industrial, economic, and information networks. Our new technologies imply new definitions of ‘home’. In my graduate research at _____________ I would like to explore such questions as how digital information can positively affect our experience of such strong emotional phenomena as domesticity, rather than eroding them. I would like to investigate what exactly occurs, phenomenologically and psychologically, when everyday objects become embedded with sensing and processing technology and become increasingly enabled to make decisions and take actions of their own. I am interested in how we engage with these new devices, these new elements of the domestic landscape. What happens to the role they played in our lives as symbols and foci of socialization and behaviour? How do we experience the space of digital information, and how can this space supplement or augment physical space? Although admirable work has been done in this area, notably at _______, I believe that these questions have not yet been adequately investigated and I am eager to contribute to that investigation.