Jacob Gaboury at Jacobs Design Field Notes
Jacob Gaboury spoke on March 4th at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation's Spring program For Whom? By Whom? Designs for Belonging. Each informal talk in this pop-up series brings a design practitioner to a Jacobs Hall teaching studio to share ideas, projects, and practices. Jacob discussed his work on the history of queer computing. Jacob specializes in the seventy year history of digital image technologies and their impact on society's contemporary visual culture. His forthcoming book is titled Image Objects (MIT Press), and it traces a material history of early computer graphics told through a set of five objects that structure the production and circulation of all digital images today.
From the Jacobs description:
Inclusion, accessibility, and justice are unavoidable terms in debates on design and technology today. It has become clear that fostering belonging requires overcoming design’s perceived innocence — admitting historical and contemporary cases where design accidentally or purposefully excludes — to formulate more deliberate positions on designers’ role in shaping collective life. More than an effort to incorporate neglected populations within existing paradigms, today’s leaders work to reinvent design and technology to promote alternative methodologies, knowledges, and ways of life. From racist bots to #metoo, the urgency of this reinvention has only become more apparent. This Spring, the Jacobs Institute invites a group of thinkers and practitioners to outline design’s blind spots and exclusions and share their thoughts on possibilities for a future of belonging.