Filled with Wonder: Enchanting Androids from Cams to Codes

Dr Marenko gave a talk titled "Filled with Wonder: Enchanting Androids from Cams to Codes", comparing eighteenth-century automata and contemporary Android devices--both actors in what she describes as an imaginative material genealogy of technology. Whether they are mechanical or digital these devices provoke questions about both the artificiality of life and the intelligence of machines. For Marenko, mechanical and digital devices juxtapose the intellectual capabilities of machines against the artificial nature of human life.

-

Design and Theories of Things was a one-day research symposium co-sponsored by the Design History Society and Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, held in London on 9 June 2018. Co-organised by Leslie Atzmon and Betti Marenko, it brought together design theorists, historians and practitioners to investigate the significance of theories of things for design, historically and in contemporary practice.

Taking as its starting point the edited collection Encountering Things: Design and Theories of Things (Atzmon and Boradkar, Bloomsbury, 2017), the symposium extended the book’s inquiry into relationships between designed objects, materiality and agency. It asked what theories of things mean to, for and in design: when does an object become a thing; what happens when designed objects fail, acquire new uses or exceed designers’ intentions; and how might the agency and recalcitrance of things reshape understandings of design itself?

Contributions approached these questions through case studies spanning automata and digital technologies, failure and functionality, embodied cognition, fashion and visual culture, industrial policy and vernacular appropriation. Marenko’s contribution examined eighteenth-century automata alongside contemporary Android devices as part of an imaginative material genealogy of technology, exploring how artificial beings trouble distinctions between animate and inanimate, artificial and living, object and agent.

The symposium positioned theories of things as a productive interdisciplinary terrain connecting design history, design theory, material culture, anthropology and philosophy, and explored designed things not simply as passive objects but as active participants in social, cultural and technological worlds.