Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet (Hardcover)

Description:

The network economy presents itself in the transactions of electronic commerce, finance, business, and communications. The network economy is also a social condition of discontinuity, indefinite limits, and in-between spaces. In Cornucopia Limited, Richard Coyne uses the liminality of design -- its uneasy position between creativity and commerce -- to explore the network economy. He argues that design, with its open-ended and transgressive explorations, provides a new way to think about the world of commerce; design’s inter-territorial precinct, its in-between condition, offers a way to frame the problems of the Internet economy -- for profit vs. for free, private vs. public, security vs. open access, defense vs. permeability.

Design, says Coyne, has a natural affinity with the edge condition and the position between polar opposites. Edgy design starts with an idea, brings to mind its opposite, and then works with what emerges from the friction between the two. The designer of a Web portal, for example, might take on the problem of security by focusing on the limits of permeability. Design is edgy, and risky, argues Coyne, in the same way that breaches in network security are risky. In Cornucopia Limited he examines the threshold between conditions exemplified by the boundary between design and commerce. Coyne uses five metaphors of design to develop his argument: the household (in economics, historically opposed to the market), with its relationship to the street mediated by various portals; the machine, rampant and glitchy; the game, competitive but simulated; the gift, precursor to commerce; and the threshold. The threshold condition, Coyne says, is the site of edgy design and a portal into the new. The threshold, he argues, provides the most potent metaphor for understanding the liminal dwellers of the network economy.

Richard Coyne is Professor and Chair of Architectural Computing, University of Edinburgh.

 

Table of Contents:

Preface	ix
	Introduction: Premeable Portals	1
1	Home Economics	17
2	Rampant Machines	35
3	The Lost Game	67
4	The Gift of Information	99
5	Liminal Computing	151
	Notes	189
	References	245
	Index	273

描述：
網絡經濟體現在電子商務、金融、商業和通信交易中。網絡經濟也是一種不連續、無限制和中間空間的社會狀態。在《豐饒有限》一書中，理查德·科因利用設計的中間性 - 它在創造力和商業之間的不安定位置 - 探索網絡經濟。他認為，設計以其開放和越界的探索提供了一種思考商業世界的新方式；設計的中間領域、其中間狀態提供了一種框架來解決互聯網經濟的問題 - 利潤與免費、私人與公共、安全與開放訪問、防禦與滲透。

科因表示，設計與邊緣狀態和極端對立之間的位置具有天然的親和力。例如，網絡門戶的設計師可能通過關注滲透性的極限來解決安全問題。科因認為，設計是邊緣和冒險的，就像網絡安全漏洞一樣冒險。在《豐饒有限》中，他探討了設計和商業之間的邊界所體現的條件。科因使用五個設計的隱喻來發展他的論點：家庭（在經濟學中，與市場歷史上相對立），與街道之間的關係通過各種門戶進行調解；機器，猖獗且故障；遊戲，競爭但模擬；禮物，商業的前身；和閾值。科因說，閾值條件是邊緣設計和進入新領域的入口。他認為，閾值提供了理解網絡經濟的邊緣居民的最有力的隱喻。

目錄：
前言
引言：前言性門戶
1. 家庭經濟學
2. 機器
3. 遊戲
4. 禮物
5. 閾值

理查德·科因是愛丁堡大學建築計算學教授和主席。