In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In the bubble" is a phrase used by air traffic controllers to describe their state of mind, among their glowing screens and flows of information,..." (more)
Key Phrases: proactive computing, smart mobs, digital portfolios, United States, New York, Ivan Illich (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"'To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently,' John Thackara writes. I agree! In the Bubble is the first strong, thoroughly documented statement on the importance of the local and the embedded in our fluid, hyper-connected world. A fundamental contribution to a new design culture."
—Ezio Manzini, Milan Polytechnic, author of The Material of Invention and Sustainable Everyday

"In the Bubble is often delightful, stimulating, and surprising. Thackara may well emerge as a visionary voice for the wired era. For planners, designers, and anyone with an interest in the future, this book is a rich resource of inspiration, ideas, and guiding principles as well as sharply observed cautionary tales. It suggests that what the tech revolution most needs, and may already be moving toward, is a sense of purpose."
— Bill S. Kowinski, San Francisco Chronicle

"An excellent new book... so push aside that colorful pile of photo-packed publications and pick up In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World, in whose pages 'design' is understood to be more about process than product, more about systems and services than about surfaces and packages, more about work to do than things to buy."
— ArtsJournal.com

"Design with a conscience: that's the take-home message of this important, provocative book. John Thackara, long a major force in design, now takes on an even more important challenge: making the world safe for future inhabitants. We need, he says, to design from the edge, to learn from the world, and to stop designing for, but instead design with. If everyone heeded his prescriptions, the world would indeed be a better place. Required reading—required behavior."
—Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group, author of Emotional Design

"I eagerly devoured every last page of John Thackara's lofty, captivating book."
—Bruce Sterling, author of The Hacker Crackdown and Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years

"If there is one pervasive criticism of global capitalism that cuts across all ideologies, it is this: goods have become more important and are treated better than people. We are producing higher quality computers than children. John Thackara's brilliant book about quotidian design describes design innovation driven by social fiction instead of science fiction. This is design focused on what Fernand Braudel called 'everyday life': the demands and pleasures of caring for others, raising children, meaningful work, and journeying. These inspired and innovative technologies return people to the heart of the world and help them create a fulfilling life."
—Paul Hawken, Natural Capital Institute, author of The Ecology of Commerce

"If you've ever found yourself saying, 'bad TiVO,' design critic John Thackara is talking to you."
— Fast Company

"One of Thackara's powerful concepts is that of the macroscope: instead of a microscope, which allows us to see tiny things, we need instruments to see distributed, long-term phenomena that pass unnoticed amidst the nonstop distractions of a modern go-go culture. In the Bubble is just such a macroscope, a deeply reflective meditation on the underlying changes in the structure of globalized society, and a revelation about what designers can do to make that shifting structure more robust and sustainable."
—J. C. Herz, author of Joystick Nation

"Thackara has built an intricate and compelling case for the continuing impact of local action in a networked world.... I hope he’s right."
— I.D. Magazine

"Thackara's deeply informed book presents a breathtaking new map of the design landscape. With not a whisper of evangelistic zeal, In the Bubble offers an engaging narrative as well as design principles that speak to sustainability, joy, and quality of life in increasingly complex times."
—Brenda Laurel, author of Utopian Entrepreneur, chair of the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design

"The future is created at the intersection of business, technology, design, and culture. In the Bubble is an insightful and delightful explanation of this nexus and of how each force affects the others. Designers often miss a great deal in their educations about the real people who will use and inhabit their work. Thackara astutely illuminates a lot of what designers don’t know they’re missing."
—Nathan Shedroff, author of Experience Design

"There is more behind In the Bubble than tech-frustrated activism. Technology’s ideal role, the author explains, is captured in the zen of the air-traffic controller... It’s a graceful confluence of cutting-edge technology and dynamic human intellect... Thackara brings his idealism down to earth with a rich narrative full of cleaner, simpler design innovations currently blossoming around the world from misting showerheads and cheaper IV bags to e-learning on buses and 'genetic' urban planning. Unplug your answering machine. Get out and join the revolution."
— Fast Company

"We all envy John Thackara's digestive system. He is able to take in the most disparate events, locations, trends, and apparent minutiae and deliver back a synthesis of the way the world moves for the use of designers and of those who use design as a powerful life-forming tool. And to help us swallow what might otherwise be too abstract a meal, he serves it to us with parables that make the book not only an enriching but also a fun read."
—Paola Antonelli, Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

"Whatever you are designing, you will want to keep this book next to you. When you are wondering what to design, you will want to pick it up and browse through it again, to remind you of all the new possibilities for design. When you worry if your design is good enough, you will want to check through the passages that you have marked, to be sure that you have provided for all the complexities that count. When you have an 'Aha!' and are confident that your design is great, you will want to check that you have matched the attributes of 'Flow.' When you have an idle moment, you will want to read through the notes, which are a good book about design in themselves."
—Bill Moggridge, Cofounder, IDEO

Product Description

We're filling up the world with technology and devices, but we've lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World.

These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if "tech" ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.

Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?

In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now—not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, "the schlock of the new" but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology—ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles—above all, lightness—inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 331 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (April 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262701154
• ISBN-13: 978-0262701150
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #267,583 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Technology or people?, August 3, 2005

By	Ickx Michel "Michel Ickx" (Monmorency, France) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Hardcover)

In the Bubble

This is a very intelligent book written by a remarkable designer who is fascinated by the impact of technology on our lives. The author is neither a technophobe, nor a technophile. Techno wise would be a better description. The title of the book comes from an expression used by air traffic controllers when there are in the flow and in control of all the surrounding instruments.

Throughout the 10 chapters which cover as many aspects of, or approaches to technology, John Thackara shows a constant capacity to think "out of the box" about our complex artefacts and technical prosthesis. He never looses sight of what should be the centre of progress, namely the user.

His concern is clearly expressed in every angle from which he develops his observation. Using both the microscope and the macroscope, under criteria such as lightness, conviviality, smartness or flow, he maintains the interest of the reader through a fascinating journey of increased awareness into our everyday experiences.

If all designers and producers where able to listen to people as he does, we would indeed feel the full benefits of a more humane technology. It is not surprising that "Doors of Perception" where John gets people to share many intuitions reflected in the book, is a yearly conference held at the crossroad of different cultures.

This book is an absolute must for all of us who are deeply frustrated by an ever more complex world which so often fails to bring this feeling of being "in the Bubble" and yet who cannot put our fingers on how to change it for the better.

Perhaps the most important lesson learned is that most of those frustrations are not so much caused by the perversity of our fellow citizen, experts and leaders, than by initial flaws in the design of those systems and processes which we accept as normal and unavoidable.

The good news of this very positive book is that, if we put ourselves in trouble by bad design, the damage can be easily repaired by better design. This is of course a lot easier than to expect people to abandon their legitimate desire to obtain maximum benefits from our social tools.

This is the most challenging, thought-provoking and convincing of all the recent publications and "best sellers" about our technological civilization that this reviewer has read.

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Shoulda/Coulda/Woulda, December 9, 2005

By	Gordon E. Anderson (New York City) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Hardcover)

This book has lots of interesting little tidbits, but it falls way short of its promise. In a nutshell, Thackara rushes WAY too quickly to grind a variety of axes, and as a result skips over the basic drivers of the world's situations.

At best he's clever, but at worst he's completely clueless about some of the subjects he uses as "proof" of his claims. For example, consider the passage (p70) "proving" that the world does not need additional fiber optic bandwidth:

"Only a tiny fraction of these costly fibers are currently 'lit'--as little as 3 percent by some estimates."

This kind of thing is famous within the fiber optic industry as a flag flown by the clueless. Even though many fibers are unlit, this does nothing to alleviate the very real problems of fiber exhaust on the main long-haul routes. Moreover, where high wavelength-count Wavelength Division Multiplexing is available, it is much more economic to run traffic over a single pair of fibers in the form of additional wavelengths (rather than mutliple separate fibers), to fully leverage optical amplification.

After you've seen enough ramrods like this in the book, you tend to doubt some of his more basic points.

Come to think of it, what is that point? That growth is "bad" and should stop? OK, agreed. But unless the real impact and long-term costs are somehow "felt" by designers, merely attempting to shame the world into designing better and getting his message "into our heads" is going to be like pissing in the wind.

This is why Bruce Sterling's "Shaping Things" is a far better book. Sterling "gets" that most designers are not in a position to arbitrarily add costs to their own projects, no matter how important the consequences to world may be. Rather, he points to the notion of a "Spime" which may ultimately be a key towards "closing the loop" on the complete lifecycle of a product or design.

But, there are a number of epigrammatic phrases and interesting points that are made. So if you're interested in this book wait for the trade paperback to come out.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A freestyle design symposium echoing many voices, December 13, 2007

By	Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract.com" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World (Hardcover)

John Thackara calls himself a "symposiarch," someone who puts together groups of creative people, assigns them a lofty theme and then observes the colloquy. This book is a little like a classical Greek symposium. It's a loosely structured conversation with many voices, a freestyle rush into 10 clusters of ideas on how designers - architects, industrial designers, artists, engineers, urban planners and others - should be thinking about today's big design issues, including sustainability, needless complexity, and the frenetic pace of the social and business worlds. Does Thackara have answers? Not really. His flamboyantly expressed suggestions would probably collapse if examined carefully. But, surprisingly, the book is no weaker for that. It is not a design manual or manifesto. Rather, we find that it's a work designed to get you to free-associate and open your mind to new possibilities. If your creativity is cooling, this book may do what Kafka suggested all literary creations should do: break up the frozen sea inside you.