Visualizing Assemblages: Modesty, Ethics, and Attachment Inform a Critical Design Practice.

Visualization is a form of design practice that deploys representational processes of enormous rhetorical and analytical power. What is often left out of the picture is the network of processes which it assembles and the non-visual effects it produces. This book asks how visualization can operate as a critical design practice that attends to the representational and performative processes it arranges. To look at this form of power in design, the book reviews Bruno Latour’s interpretation of design as a form of modest restyling and arrangement. It also addresses this question through the use of an alignment between Latour’s development of actor-network theory and Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory which allows to both describe how things and processes mobilize knowledge and how human subjectivity emerges from human-nonhuman entanglements, respectively.