Bibliographic record
Abstract
The design and production of short-lived electronic consumer goods are not only creating enormous environmental and social damage, their very transience indicates that, as objects, they possess little enduring value. This paper considers the design of these goods within contemporary society and suggests a direction that is more consistent not only with the priorities of sustainability but also with more profound understandings of meaning. A brief overview of electronic products is given in terms of their instrumental, social and positional attributes, along with some of their social and environmental consequences, and a simple conceptual ‘post-consumerism’ electronic object is presented that encapsulates various aspects of contemporary critique. This is followed by a consideration of the meanings of contemporary electronic goods, and the changes needed in our approaches to design, production and disposal to address concerns linked to deeper notions of human purpose. Based on this examination, which draws upon philosophical and environmental critiques of technology, new priorities for design practice are developed that are in accord with theoretical arguments for comprehensive reform of design and manufacturing. The potential implications for electronic goods are demonstrated through a second conceptual object.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.077 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".