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1	The Soft Megamachine: Lewis Mumford's Metaphor of Technological Society and Implications for (participatory) Technology Assessment January 2014 (has links) abstract: This dissertation explores the megamachine, a prominent metaphor in American humanist and philosopher of technology, Lewis Mumford's Myth of the Machine series. The term refers critically to dynamic, regimented human capacities that drive scientific and technical innovation in society. Mumford's view of the nature of collectives focuses on qualities and patterns that emerge from the behavior of groups, societies, systems, and ecologies. It is my aim to reenergize key concepts about collective capacities drawn from Lewis Mumford's critique of historical and modern sociotechnical arrangements. I investigate the possibility of accessing those capacities through improved design for Technology Assessment (TA), formal practices that engage experts and lay citizens in the evaluation of complex scientific and technical issues. I analyze the components of Mumford's megamachine and align key concerns in two pivotal works that characterize the impact of collective capacities on society: Bruno Latour's Pasteurization of France (1988) and Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1962). As I create a model of collective capacities in the sociotechnical according to the parameters of Mumford's megamachine, I rehabilitate two established ideas about the behavior of crowds and about the undue influence of technological systems on human behavior. I depart from Mumford's tactics and those of Canetti and Latour and propose a novel focus for STS on "sociotechnical crowds" as a meaningful unit of social measure. I make clear that Mumford's critique of the sociotechnical status quo still informs the conditions for innovation today. Using mixed mode qualitative methods in two types of empirical field studies, I then investigate how a focus on the characteristics and components of collective human capacities in sociotechnical systems can affect the design and performance of TA. I propose a new model of TA, Emergent Technology Assessment (ETA), which includes greater public participation and recognizes the interrelationship among experience, affect and the material in mediating the innovation process. The resulting model -- the "soft" megamachine --introduces new strategies to build capacity for responsible innovation in society. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology 2014 Social structure Public policy Philosophy of science crowds Lewis Mumford megamachine science and technology studies sociotechnical technology assessment
2	George Tsutakawa's fountain sculptures of the 1960s: fluidity and balance in postwar public art. Cuthbert, Nancy Marie 20 August 2012 (has links) Between 1960 and 1992, American artist George Tsutakawa (1910 – 1997) created more than sixty fountain sculptures for publicly accessible sites in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. The vast majority were made by shaping sheet bronze into geometric and organically inspired abstract forms, often arranged around a vertical axis. Though postwar modernist artistic production and the issues it raises have been widely interrogated since the 1970s, and public art has been a major area of study since about 1980, Tsutakawa's fountains present a major intervention in North America's urban fabric that is not well-documented and remains almost completely untheorized. In addition to playing a key role in Seattle's development as an internationally recognized leader in public art, my dissertation argues that these works provide early evidence of a linked concern with nature and spirituality that has come to be understood as characteristic of the Pacific Northwest. Tsutakawa was born in Seattle, but raised and educated primarily in Japan prior to training as an artist at the University of Washington, then teaching in UW's Schools of Art and Architecture. His complicated personal history, which in World War II included being drafted into the U.S. army, while family members were interned and their property confiscated, led art historian Gervais Reed to declare that Tsutakawa was aligned with neither Japan nor America – that he and his art existed somewhere in-between. There is much truth in Reed's statement; however, artistically, such dualistic assessments deny the rich interplay of cultural allusions in Tsutakawa's fountains. Major inspirations included the Cubist sculpture of Alexander Archipenko, Himalayan stone cairns, Japanese heraldic emblems, First Nations carvings, and Bauhaus theory. Focusing on the early commissions, completed during the 1960s, my study examines the artist's debts to intercultural networks of artistic exchange – between North America, Asia, and Europe – operative in the early and mid-twentieth century, and in some cases before. I argue that, with his fountain sculptures, this Japanese American artist sought to integrate and balance such binaries as nature/culture, intuition/reason, and spiritual/material, which have long served to support the construction of East and West as opposed conceptual categories. / Graduate George Tsutakawa American modernism modern design silicon bronze sculpture welded sheet metal sculpture West Coast modernism Pacific Northwest Seattle public art Century 21 Fulton Mall postwar shopping center design Asian American art World War II Japanese internment Nisei Kibei machine aesthetic abstract art spirituality in art Lawrence Halprin environmentalism in art International Style architecture postwar urban planning Ala Moana Center Northgate Shopping Center Zen in America Bauhaus in America Walter Gropius Victor Gruen Mark Tobey Japanese American Henry Moore Sigfried Giedion Lewis Mumford Alexander Archipenko Paul Horiuchi Johsel Namkung Dudley Carter Freeway Park, Seattle Bentall Centre, Vancouver Seattle Public Library secondary Orientalism organicism in art modernist architecture

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The Soft Megamachine: Lewis Mumford's Metaphor of Technological Society and Implications for (participatory) Technology Assessment

George Tsutakawa's fountain sculptures of the 1960s: fluidity and balance in postwar public art.