Designing Culture, Creating Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Anne Balsamo, The New School’s Dean of the School of Media Studies

How does inter-disciplinarity impact innovation? Anne Balsamo shares an approach to the study and practice of technology-based innovation, to demonstrate how the real business of innovation is the reproduction of culture over time and over place. She discusses the role of the humanities and sciences in cross-disciplinary collaborations that focus on the creation of new technologies. And she explores how—given that the humanities seriously considers questions of ethics, cultural and social good, and intentional future-making—there is an important role for humanists in the process of creating new technologies. The presentation will be framed by work from her recent book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work, and will offer a specific example of ways in which questions of culture informed the development of new technologies.