Jesse Adams Stein

The Political Imaginaries of 3D Printing: Prompting Mainstream Awareness of Design and Making

Abstract 3D printing is not only a diverse set of developing technologies, it is also a social phenomenon operating within the political imaginary. The past half-decade has seen a surge of “futuring” activity and widespread public attention devoted to 3D printing, which is typically represented as a harbinger of economic revival and political transformation. This article explores how 3D-printed futures are imagined across a broad political spectrum, by undertaking a multidisciplinary analysis of academic and popular literature. Three influential political imaginaries of 3D printing are identified: the maker-as-entrepreneur; the economic revival of the nation state; and commons-based utopias. In spite of stark contrasts in political alignment, these imagined futures share one important thing: an increasing awareness of design, making, and production. This insertion of design into mainstream discourse is an important development for design history and theory, as it potentially enables an increasing public comprehension of the profound significance of design in the world, in both historical and contemporary terms.

Masculinity and Material Culture in Technological Transitions: From Letterpress to Offset Lithography, 1960s-1980s.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s the printing industry in advanced capitalist economies underwent dramatic technological change. While the transition from “hot metal” compositing to computerized typesetting has been extensively analyzed, there was another transformation occurring simultaneously: in the pressroom, letterpress was gradually replaced by offset lithography. Many letterpress machinists retrained, moving from a heavy, manual technology (with an entrenched patriarchal culture) to a method that was faster and less physically taxing. However, unlike their compositor counterparts, the press-machinists’ transition involved a continuity of traditional masculine craft identities rather than a rupture associated with “deskilling.” Intrinsic to this experience of technological change was a masculine embodiment that was attuned to and shaped by the materiality and aesthetics of printing technologies. This article establishes how masculine craft identities do not rely exclusively on skill-based mastery of traditional technologies, but also relate to other dimensions of technology, such as aesthetics, embodied “know-how,” and the physicality of industrial machinery.

Labor, entrepreneurialism and the creative economy in neoliberal times

Dr. Jesse Adams Stein is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney (UTS). She is an interdisciplinary researcher specializing in the relationship between design, labor and technological change, in both historical and contemporary contexts. She is the author of Hot Metal: Material Culture & Tangible Labour, published by Manchester University Press in 2016. jesse.stein@uts.edu.au Reviewed by Jesse Adams Stein

Domesticity, Gender and the 1977 Apple II Personal Computer

ABSTRACT This paper considers one of the first personal computers to be marketed to a mainstream American audience in the late 1970s: the Apple II. Lewis Mumfords notion of “ideological and social preparation” is adapted to describe this period as a preparatory phase for the later ubiquity and absorbing quality of our relationship with personal computers. In examining the Apple IIs design alongside a key marketing image we can discern that domesticity and gender were crucial points of negotiation during this period. In the late 1970s marketing for Apple the image of idyllic domesticity quickly became a major context for computer promotion, a development that had gendered implications. The example of 1930s streamlining in the design of domestic household appliances is used as a parallel with the Apple IIs startling application of a plastic case: the concealing plastic exterior simultaneously simplified and obscured the device, transforming it from a “machine” into a “personal appliance.”

Design in the Age of Darwin: From William Morris to Frank Lloyd Wright

in the short documentary commissioned for the exhibit, “we have to broaden the alphabet of modern architecture” in order to move “beyond the measly ABCs.” Or should we say “Mies-ly” ABCs? For Saarinen’s experimentation with varied and sometimes showy styles – often utilizing bright colors, rounded forms, and newly developed industrial materials – departed from the meticulous efforts of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the preeminent dogmatist of postwar High Modernism, to refine a universal, minimalist, rectilinear vocabulary for architecture. Just as Saarinen kept his attention on the needs of his clients, his soft and curvaceous Womb Chair prioritized the demands of human comfort over the sparing elegance of the cold, tubular-steel furniture produced by Mies. If Saarinen’s pragmatic outlook, contextual approach, and collaborative process put him somewhat at odds with the dominant ideologues of his day, his practices accord well with contemporary attitudes, suggesting that his influence might be stronger in this century than in his own.