IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

Notes
Introduction
1. Statistic quoted in Design Council, Annual Review 2002 (London: Design Council,
2002), 19.
2. Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996),
chap. 1.
3. Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (New
York: Random House, 1972), 23.
4. In 1970 Herman Kahn, the first modern ‘‘futurist’’ (and allegedly the role model
for Dr. Strangelove in Stanley Kubrick’s film), anticipated that Japan’s unique cultural
values would enable its economy to reach and surpass that of the United States in per
capita GDP. Herman Kahn, The Emerging Japanese Superstate: Challenge and Response
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970).
5. The European Commission, which is responsible for 5 percent of the continent’s
research spending, is looking for ways to manage technology research as a selforganizing
complex network. Peter Johnston, who helps run the Commision’s Information
Society Technologies program, says that the value of EU support to research
cooperation in the EU lies as much in the social capital and cohesion it generates as
in the knowledge capital it produces: ‘‘The effectiveness of research now depends
critically on the strength of networking between research institutes and between research
disciplines.’’ Peter Johnston, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Complexity Tools in Evaluation
of Policy Options for a Networked Knowledge Society, ed. Peter Johnston (Brussels: European
Commission Directorate General, Information Society Technologies, 2003), 3.
6. Daniel Cohen, Our Modern Times: The New Nature of Capitalism in the Information
Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).
7. During the early years of the twentieth century, several thousand people were developing
applications of the internal-combustion engine, often unique ones. Most
of the endeavors went under, and a decade later only a handful survived. But one of
these applications, the automobile, became an icon of modernity and a driver of