Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Design and Immateriality: What of It in a Post Industrial Society?

1988; The MIT Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1/2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1511384

1531-4790

Abraham A. Moles, David W. Jacobus,

Augmented Reality Applications

An immaterial culture is emerging. It exists only because a heavily material base supports it and makes it possible. It is from the very outset a phenomenon indeed, an epiphenomenon resulting from technology. The future of design, then, for an artificial reality depends on the design of the hardware and specialized techniques, that are the fundamental constituents of an artificial reality and that contribute to the creation of what one could call imago generalized images, not necessarily confined to a visual mode. Thus, a post industrial society (Bell) is a superindustrialized society, or one which has pushed to extremes the consequences of its industrialization. It is true that we are surrounded by so-called electric phantoms, to use a phrase of Villiers de l'Isle Adam, which more and more are invading both our work and recreational environments. One of the problems posed to the human spirit is its capacity to exercise control over reality, while adjusting to the blurring of barriers between reality and images, or between real objects and their appearances. As we enter the age of telepresence we seek to establish an equivalence between actual and vicarial presence. This vicarial presence is destroying the organizing principle upon which our society has, until now, been constructed. We have called this principle the law of proximity: what is close is more important, true, or concrete than what is far away, smaller, and more difficult to access (all other factors being equal). We are aspiring, henceforth, to a way of life in which the distance between us and objects is becoming irrelevant to our realm of consciousness. In this respect, telepresence also signifies a feeling of equidistance of everyone from everyone else, and from each of us to any world event. At the same time, we live in an age of communicational opulence. We now have at our disposal more sources of communication and interaction than we will ever be able to make use of in our relatively short lifetime. This is the age of a social system of networks, decorated with the futuristic name of the Information Society. Henceforth, the bulk of our effort will be spent more for manipulating information than for manipulating objects, which are now no more than products of