Malcolm McCullough

A theory of place for interaction design.

Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing

Digital Ground

The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts andformats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appeareverywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Sensors, processors,and memory are not found only in chic smart phones but also built into everyday objects. Amid thisflood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out.So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed formspersist, and that to notice them can improve other sensibilities. In AmbientCommons, Malcolm McCullough explores the workings of attention though a rediscovery ofsurroundings. Not all that informs has been written and sent; not all attention involves deliberatethought. The intrinsic structure of space -- the layout of a studio, for example, or a plaza --becomes part of any mental engagement with it. McCullough describes what he calls the Ambient: anincreasing tendency to perceive information superabundance whole, where individual signals matterless and at least some mediation assumes inhabitable form. He explores how the fixed forms ofarchitecture and the city play a cognitive role in the flow of ambient information. As apersistently inhabited world, can the Ambient be understood as a shared cultural resource, to besocially curated, voluntarily limited, and self-governed as if a commons? AmbientCommons invites you to look past current obsessions with smart phones to rethink attentionitself, to care for more situated, often inescapable forms of information.

Attention in the Age of Embodied Information

Ambient Commons

In this investigation of the possibility of craft in the digital realm, the author discusses the emergence of computation as a medium, rather than just a set of tools, suggesting a growing correspondence between digital work and traditional craft.

The Practiced Digital Hand

Abstracting Craft

Something good about the smart city: a human-centered account of why the future of electricity is local. Resilience now matters most, and most resilience is local—even for that most universal, foundational modern resource: the electric power grid. Today that technological marvel is changing more rapidly than it has for a lifetime, and in our new grid awareness, community microgrids have become a fascinating catalyst for cultural value change. In Downtime on the Microgrid, Malcolm McCullough offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the cascade of white papers on smart clean infrastructure. Writing from an experiential perspective, McCullough avoids the usual smart city futurism, technological solutionism, policy acronyms, green idealism, critical theory jargon, and doomsday prepping to provide new cultural context for a subject long a favorite theme in science and technology studies. McCullough describes the three eras of North American electrification: innovation, consolidation, and decentralization. He considers the microgrid boom and its relevance to the built environment as “architecture's grid edge.” Finally, he argues that resilience arises from clusters; although a microgrid is often described as an island, future resilience will require archipelagos—clusters of microgrids, with a two-way, intermittent connectiveness that is very different from the always-on, top-down technofuture we may be expecting. With Downtime on the Microgrid, McCullough rises above techno-hype to find something good about the smart city and reassuring about local resilience.

Architecture, Electricity, and Smart City Islands

Downtime on the Microgrid

William J. Mitchell

In Digital Design Media, Second Edition, architects and related design professionals will find a complete conceptual guide to the multidimensional world of computer-aided design. In contrast to the many books that describe how to use particular programs (and which therefore go out of date very quickly), Digital Design Media constructs a lasting theoretical framework, which will make it easier to understand a great number of programs—existing and future—as a whole. Clear structure, numerous historical references, and hundreds of illustrations make this framework both accessible to the nontechnical professional and broadening for the experienced computer-aided designer. The book will be especially valuable to anyone who is ready to expand their work in CAD beyond production drafting systems. The new second edition adds chapters one merging technologies, such as the Internet, but the book’s original content is as valid as ever. Thousands of design students and practitioners have made this book a standard.

Malcolm McCullough

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