FCJ-136 Toward Environmental Criticism

The rise of the ambient brings new directions in environmental criticism. Not only the city but also its media demand assessment, and not only in the usual manner of environmental impact assessment (not our concern here) but also for the outlooks they shape. In the humanities, environmental criticism generally has origins in literary studies. In architecture and urbanism, it takes root in cultural landscape history. In the information discipline, however, it hardly exists. The more that the information sphere pervades the world, and indeed sometimes monitors and operates the world, the more this oversight must change. The discipline of interaction design already surpasses architecture and urbanism at methods of more immediate contextual inquiry, however, at least into the physical and organizational formats of tasks. It has also begun to understand how with ambient media, people do not necessarily recognize themselves as ‘users.’ Now it also begins a critique of physical embeddedness with respect to environmental sensibilities outside the efficiency of the information task. How does inhabitable information advance or obstruct larger changes in worldview, and how do the particular concerns of interaction design imply responsibility or neglect of that question?