Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World reframes how we approach the world's most intractable problems — from climate cataclysm to authoritarian power — by shifting attention away from objects and solutions toward the relationships and matrices that connect them.
About This Book
Keller Easterling's central argument is disarming in its clarity: the search for solutions is itself the problem. Where most design thinking fixates on discrete objects, technologies, or ideas, Medium Design directs attention to the background — the relational matrix in which things exist and interact. This latent field, Easterling contends, is chronically underexploited. Through case studies spanning automation, migration, explosive urban growth, and atmospheric change, the book proposes a design sensibility attuned to productive combinations rather than clean resolutions. It is a work of spatial and systemic thinking that has genuine implications for architecture, urbanism, and political organisation alike.
Key Features
- 176 pages of argumentative prose and cross-disciplinary case studies in systems and spatial thinking
- Edited by Keller Easterling
- Case studies addressing automation, migration, urban growth, and atmospheric change
- Published by Verso, ISBN: 9781788739320
What You'll Discover
- Why framing global dilemmas as problems to be solved — rather than conditions to be modulated — constrains rather than enables meaningful change
- How the "medium" — the relational background between objects, events, and ideas — carries latent design potential that dominant modes of thinking routinely ignore
- A model of innovation based on sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies, rather than the pursuit of entirely new ones
- Forms of activism oriented toward modulating power and temperament within organisations, drawn from the logic of medium design itself
About the Author
Keller Easterling is the editor of Medium Design and a thinker whose work operates at the intersection of architecture, urbanism, and systems theory. Her research addresses the spatial and organisational logics that shape global infrastructure and political life.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 176
- Dimensions: 21.08 x 14.22 x 2.03 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781788739320
- Publisher: Verso
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and urbanists interested in systemic design thinking; theorists, academics, and practitioners working across infrastructure, climate, and political organisation; design students seeking frameworks that move beyond object-centred problem-solving.