Stephane Vial - Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception. Published in one volume with A Short Treatise on Design

Design Thinking, Design Theory

Ken Friedman and Erik Stolterman, editors

Design Things, A. Telier (Thomas Binder, Pelle Ehn, Giorgio De Michelis, Giulio Jacucci, Per Linde, and Ina Wagner), 2011

Chinas Design Revolution, Lorraine Justice, 2012

Adversarial Design, Carl DiSalvo, 2012

The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, Mads Nygaard Folkmann, 2013

Linkography: Unfolding the Design Process, Gabriela Goldschmidt, 2014

Situated Design Methods, edited by Jesper Simonsen, Connie Svabo, Sara Malou Strandvad, Kristine Samson, Morten Hertzum, and Ole Erik Hansen, 2014

Taking [A]part: The Politics and Aesthetics of Participation in Experience-Centered Design, John McCarthy and Peter Wright, 2015

Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation, Ezio Manzini, 2015

Frame Innovation: Creating New Thinking by Design, Kees Dorst, 2015

Designing Publics, Christopher A. Le Dantec, 2016

Overcrowded: Designing Meaningful Products in a World Awash with Ideas, Roberto Verganti, 2016

FireSigns: A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design, Steven Skaggs, 2017

Making Design Theory, Johan Redstrm, 2017

Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design, Daniela Rosner, 2018

Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design, Kristina Hk, 2018

Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things, Bruce M. Tharp and Stephanie M. Tharp, 2018

Pretense Design: Surface over Substance, Per Mollerup, 2019

Being and the Screen: How the Digital Changes Perception, Stphane Vial, 2019

Stphane Vial

translated by Patsy Baudoin

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published in France by Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis:

Ltre et lcran, 2nd ed. 2017, Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis

Court trait du design, 2nd ed. 2014, Presses Universitaires de France/Humensis

This book is published with the support of the University of Nmes, France.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vial, Stphane, author. | Baudoin, Patsy, translator. | Folkmann, Mads Nygaard, 1972 writer of supplementary textual content. | Lvy, Pierre, writer of supplementary textual content.

Title: Being and the screen : how the digital changes perception : publishedin one volume with A short treatise on design / Stphane Vial ; translated by Patsy Baudoin.

Other titles: Ltre et lcran. English

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2019] | Series: Design thinking,design theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019005611 | ISBN 9780262043168 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: TechnologyPhilosophy. | DesignPhilosophy. | DigitalelectronicsPsychological aspects. | Perception (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC T14 .V53413 2019 | DDC 601dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005611

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Latitia, because I met her on-screen

The computer is an enigma. Not in its making or its usage, but because man appears incapable of foreseeing anything about the computers influence on society and humanity.

Jacques Ellul, The Technological System (1977)

For me, the computer is the most remarkable tool we invented. Its the equivalent of the bicycle for the mind.

Steve Jobs in Julian Krainin and Michael R. Lawrence, Memory and Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress (1990)

Computers dont just do things for us, they do something to us.

Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

d_r0

Pierre Lvy

Mads Nygaard Folkmann

As professions go, design is relatively young. The practice of design predates professions. In fact, the practice of designmaking things to serve a useful goal, making toolspredates the human race. Making tools is one of the attributes that made us human in the first place.

Design, in the most generic sense of the word, began over 2.5 million years ago when Homo habilis manufactured the first tools. Human beings were designing well before we began to walk upright. Four hundred thousand years ago, we began to manufacture spears. By forty thousand years ago, we had moved up to specialized tools.

Urban design and architecture came along ten thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. Interior architecture and furniture design probably emerged with them. It was another five thousand years before graphic design and typography got their start in Sumeria with the development of cuneiform. After that, things picked up speed.

All goods and services are designed. The urge to designto consider a situation, imagine a better situation, and act to create that improved situationgoes back to our prehuman ancestors. Making tools helped us to become what we aredesign helped to make us human.

Today, the word design means many things. The common factor linking them is service, and designers are engaged in a service profession in which the results of their work meet human needs.

Design is first of all a process. The word design entered the English language in the 1500s as a verb, with the first written citation of the verb dated to the year 1548. Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary defines the verb design as to conceive and plan out in the mind; to have as a specific purpose; to devise for a specific function or end. Related to these is the act of drawing, with an emphasis on the nature of the drawing as a plan or map, as well as to draw plans for; to create, fashion, execute or construct according to plan.

Half a century later, the word began to be used as a noun, with the first cited use of the noun design occurring in 1588. Merriam-Websters defines the noun as a particular purpose held in view by an individual or group; deliberate, purposive planning; a mental project or scheme in which means to an end are laid down. Here, too, purpose and planning toward desired outcomes are central. Among these are a preliminary sketch or outline showing the main features of something to be executed; an underlying scheme that governs functioning, developing or unfolding; a plan or protocol for carrying out or accomplishing something; the arrangement of elements or details in a product or work of art. Today, we design large, complex processes, systems, and services, and we design organizations and structures to produce them. Design has changed considerably since our remote ancestors made the first stone tools.

At a highly abstract level, Herbert Simons definition covers nearly all imaginable instances of design. To design, Simon writes, is to [devise] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon,