My current preoccupation with the role of emotions in shaping people’s interactions with technology is in part driven by John McCarthy’s and Peter Wright’s book, Technology As Experience, which draws on John Dewey’s pragmatism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on aesthetics to highlight the role of emotion in everyday experience. McCarthy’s and Wright’s interests lie mainly [...]

By chance, I came across this link to a Mister Glasses video of “What good is your modern architecture if it can’t repair a broken heart?!?”, which provides a fitting epilogue to the previous post. Okay it’s not hilarious, and the acting is more wooden than steel or concrete, but it’s got potential.

A common failing of research in the field of sustainable design (and elsewhere) is that we assume the people who will use buildings either share the same views and values as us, or believe they should change their views and values to align with ours, which we think are so obviously right. When designers conjure [...]