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enormous finger, tiny rock

Small Gestures It's the little things...

  Launch Media

ABOUT 

Four Chicago-based thinkers and innovators explore the pros and cons of different sizes in journalism, design, and industry.

  • ABOUT Kris Cohen

    Kris Cohen studies intimacy and belonging in mediated environments such as the Web, publics, and works of art. He has written on web-based photography, conceptual art and copyright law, blogs, and the challenges to theory and criticism posed by writing in medias res. His dissertation sets out to conceptualize the changing politics and aesthetics of encounter by considering scenes of laughter, protest' and searching in ordinary life and others' works. Profile

  • ABOUT Zack Furness

    Zack Furness is a Professor of Humanities and Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago and the author of a forthcoming book entitled One Less Car: Bike Culture and the Politics of Cycling (Temple University Press). His recent work focuses on the use of bicycles as a political and cultural critique of automobility and ‘car culture’ in the United States. Zack is an active member of the Bad Subjects production team and a contributor to Mobilities, Social Epistemology, and Punk Planet. Profile

  • ABOUT Kevin Henry

    Kevin Henry is an industrial designer and design activist, educator, curator, and writer. He is the founding faculty member of the product design concentration at Columbia College in Chicago where he coordinated that program for its first ten years. He has lectured widely on topics ranging from sustainability and technology integration to the changing world of digital snapshot photography and revamping foundation programs for the twenty-first century.

    Profile

  • ABOUT Adrian Holovaty

    Adrian Holovaty is the founder of EveryBlock, a local news Web site. The developer of award-winning Web applications for The Washington Post, Lawrence.com, and the Lawrence Journal-World & News, Holvaty is probably the best-known industry advocate for the burgeoning discipline of journalism via computer programming. Holovaty co-created Django, an open-source development framework that makes it fast and easy for programmers to build database-driven Web sites. It is now used by tens of thousands of people around the world. He has co-written a book about it, The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right (2007), with Jacob Kaplan-Moss.

    Profile
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Big is sometimes a borrowing. Big is sometimes a manipulation of small, an aggregation.       

Recorded on November 1, 2008.

Thinking small is not necessarily the opposite of thinking big. Indeed, small may even be the New Big, but it requires that we reflect on the limitations as well as the possibilities of modest gestures. Is big an accumulation of many things small? 

Panelists discuss the social uses and meanings of simple, small-scale tools and technologies. The conversation focuses on the development of architecture, regions, people and social issues, which over the course of American history have moved from small to big. Essentially, the idea that big is the multiplication of small steers course to mass consumption, industrial planning, and the intersection between various phenomena. Small versus big is explored in the world of journalism, art, and industry.

Tags

Tools, Technology, Industrial Design, The Internet, size

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