Medium Design

Praise

“Easterling is one of our most provocative theorists of infrastructures and the critical actions that might make them better. Here she gives us ways to remix, radically, their ingredients. Who else could parse the ‘canine mind’ of the canny designer and city-dweller to show that we already know how to break the deadlock formed by binaries and manipulative media loops? Read this immensely engaging book to find a new toolkit for infiltrating, occupying, and recasting the mediated and material world.”
—Caroline A. Jones, Professor in the Department of Architecture, MIT

“Easterling wants designers and architects and urbanists to think less about designing discrete things and more about ‘parameters for how things interact with each other.’”
—Hari Kunzru, Harper’s

“Medium Design actively works against popular culture’s hunger for simple solutions. While embracing a diversity of tactics for a diversity of crises, Easterling puts forward an expansive definition of ‘design’ that includes examples of systemic hacks like community land trusts and tactical refusals of market norms like social capital credits.”
—Ingrid Burrington, OneZero

“An insurgent energy and imagination crackle beneath the surface … this a hopeful and thrilling text.”
—David Terrien, ArtReview

“Keller Easterling is a thinker intent on peering behind the veil to inquire into the forces and conditions that give rise to forms and spatial formations: the infrastructural, political, and financial milieux that softly but surely govern the production of architectural objects.”
—Kearon Roy Taylor, Archinect

“Easterling’s work turns reason’s cunning—and therefore the indirect acts of history—into a vibrant political theater for our age.”
—Michael Osman, Los Angeles Review of Books

“At its best, Medium Design reads a bit like Sun Tzu. It is calm and distant from the fray of disasters and conflicts that define our collective action or inaction in the midst of climate crises and failed globalization. Easterling’s voice tends toward the wise and poetic.”
—V. Mitch Mcewen, Avery Review