record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00689
Thesis Title
Through the Optic of Design: Self-tracking and the Permanence of Change
Author
James Dyer
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
PhD
Year
2018
Number of Pages
208
University
University of Huddersfield
Thesis Supervisor
Spencer Roberts
Supervisor e-mail
s.roberts AT hud.ac.uk
Other Supervisor(s)
Alex Coles
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Art Design and Architecture
Copyright Ownership
Languages Familiar to Author
English
URL where full thesis can be found
Keywords
self-tracking, wearable technology, speculative genealogy, design fiction, process-philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead
Abstract: 200-500 words
The approaching study speculates on the emergence of self-tracking. With the use of smartphones and wearable devices, self-tracking is the quantification of steps walked, calories consumed and burned, stairs climbed, PH levels of urine, social interactions, and many other everyday happenings. Whilst self-tracking has become increasingly popular, critical discourses are only just beginning to respond. However, the few monographs, and the increasing numbers of academic papers and conferences attempting to address the subject, deliver similar unimaginative representations of self-tracking. Generally, they embody a set of quasi-substantivist assumptions. For example: the volleying debate of whether a kind of human essence is being enhanced or corrupted by these new self-tracking technologies does not take into account the ontologically ticklish notion of the assumed essence of humanness itself. Similarly, these discourses typically treat interactions as the collisions of boundaries, such as the body bounded by its flesh and the device bounded by silicone and brushed steel. From a meta-theoretical perspective, it is something substance-metaphysical that orients these approaches. In this sense, contemporary discourses of self-tracking are often wedded to a series of essentialist, absolutist, and deterministic tropes, as well as to neo-humanist and more traditionally humanist forms of discourse. For many studies, these are the material and socio-cultural assumptions of a definitive reality. Curiously, the way that self-tracking is positioned in the context of such writings plays against the predominant tendencies of much contemporary philosophical thought. Arguably, contemporary thought is more posthumanist than humanist, it draws attention to mediation more than media, qualities of indeterminacy more than determinacy, and of dynamism more than stasis. The lack of imagination and the disengagement of established discourses of self-tracking with contemporary thought has resulted in the most pertinent philosophical insight of the phenomena of self-tracking being overlooked: namely the permanence of change. The present study begins to unfurl the potential of an alternative transdisciplinary interpretation of self-tracking via contemporary new media theory, critical design theory, and process-philosophy. In a time punctuated by fiction, speculation is positioned as an imperative of responsibility because it critically factors the nascent potential in the present actual. If self-tracking, as a kind of speculative enquiry, lies beyond the remit of critical thought, the potential for events such as self-tracking to become something other, will be numbed. Consequently, when fantasy is suppressed in “the real”, the complexity of an increasingly quantified life is deadened to a routine of “healthy” conformity and the strange vibrancies of the unanticipated remain underexplored.