Reviewed by: The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s by Larry D. Busbea Pollyanna Rhee (bio) Larry D. Busbea The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020 344 pages, 116 black-and-white photos, 10 color plates ISBN: 9781517907105, $30.00 PB Larry Busbea begins with a large, perhaps unanswerable, question. "Where do we—as subjects and objects—begin and end?" Busbea, an art and design historian at Arizona State University, attempts to formulate a response to that very question in his new book, The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics, and the Human in the 1970s. While focused explicitly on the 1970s, Busbea observes that the decades after the end of World War II inspired copious projects by architects, designers, technologists, and social scientists that scrutinized, conflated, and exploded the boundary between a human being and the environment. These inquiries ultimately culminated in a belief that "aesthetics and design could play pivotal roles in emerging conceptions of humanity and the world in which we exist" (xiii). The two words central to Busbea's study—responsive and environment—point not simply to the boundary between human and environment, but to the belief that the boundary was actually malleable and contingent. Like the question that begins the book, the words responsive and environment are ambiguous and evocative. They are also ubiquitous. Closely examining the words, Busbea finds "slippages" that help constitute what he describes as an "environmental research manifold" or "a virtual object that might substantiate the relations among, or account for the patterns produced by the disciplinary syntheses and interferences that comprised the environment" (xxi). Clarifying the contours of the environmental research manifold acknowledges that what links the projects under consideration is less a developed body of work or a coherent movement than a set of tropes, ideas, and technologies acting as a connective tissue across disparate contexts and individuals. Each of the six chapters focuses on a primary group of figures, texts, and designs grouped under an organizing concept, including invisible environments, pattern watchers, responsive environments, soft control material, or cybertecture. One real worth of the volume is how closely Busbea attends to often overlooked or forgotten works themselves. He also collects an impressive set of individuals working under the broad umbrella of the responsive environment. The benefit of this approach for design historians comes from the connections across academic institutions, research groups, and art galleries. The projects encompassed by this environmental research manifold include those by figures who remain touchstones in architectural and design scholarship as well as those who are now obscure. These figures all worked within a broader milieu where questions about how to define "the environment" and the place of technology in society permeated scholarly societies, research groups, intellectuals, and scientists.1 The task of defining environment was one problem, especially since it was "at once ubiquitous and elusive" (xiv). Rather than considering environment as the natural world, the environment is often cast as intensely embedded within computing and other technologies as part of a continually calibrating system. Busbea's book comes as historians of science, economic historians, and social theorists have started to look closely at the post-1945 years as the beginning of interest in the environment. In addition, the divide between subject and object fascinated individuals in psychoanalysis and the human sciences as well.2 So what responsive environments did these preoccupations produce? What did these projects look like, and how did they define responsive environments? With some notable exceptions, the resulting works embraced emerging computing technologies, newly formulated management techniques, and communications theory. In retrospect, many of the projects under consideration seem less like idiosyncratic manifestations of their time than precursors to smart devices and artificial intelligence-based assistance tools present or even ubiquitous in our world that measure, calibrate, and document everything from the number of steps we take to our favorite songs of the week to managing global financial transactions. Rather than being simply technological innovations, these works had massive conceptual ambitions, namely, to expand the potential of human beings by constructing responsive systems that would make possible unmediated experiences, not just between human beings, but between people...
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Jan 1, 2022
Fariha Iffath + 1
Open Access
