The Chimera Reified: Design, Meaning and the Post-consumerism Object
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it