Global Issues in Design and Visuality in the 21st Century
Global Design & Visuality
Headline: Cubicles Rise in a Brave New World of Publishing
The New York Times
The open-plan office space complete with cubicles has broken down the once hallowed walls of Manhattan's literary elite: publishing houses. Editors, who once prided themselves on their well-appointed offices reminiscent of British gentlemen's clubs, must eschew their former reclusiveness in favor of chummy shoulder-to-shoulder camaraderie. The change is driven by falling profit margins and the desire to maintain headquarters within Manhattan, close to the literary agents and media outlets that are the wheels on the publishing vehicle. Many editors consider the idea of open-plan offices and cubicles anathema to the intellectual work publishing entails. Those needing more quiet spaces are forced to work at home in the evenings or slink off to the tiny conference rooms known as "quiet cars." Open-plan offices are becoming standard in many industries, despite any real evidence that the design contributes in any real way to work quality or efficiency. Open-plan offices are the design equivalent of the tail wagging the dog.
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Design is pervasive and quickly becomes embedded in society in...
Brave New World and the Island The Need for a "Way Out" in Brave New World and the Island The future looks grim for mankind in the dystopian novel Brave New World and the film The Island. In both works, a terrible dependency upon technology and "science" has caused mankind to lose its "soul" and forget the transcendental values that make life worth living. Both works are effective in displaying the negative
There will always be savages, and the attraction of savagery. Huxley wrote Brave New World as a warning. Today, in the age of test-tube pregnancy, genetic manipulation, powerful drugs and the mass media, it appears that his warning has gone unheeded and that America is on the road to the scientific utopia he describes. Certainly the world of the savages has been left behind, and for good reason. Modern Americans
Brave New World: Oh Wonder! That Has Such Similar People (to us) in it! Aldous Huxley is often cited as an architect of a society that is eerily prescient of our own future. "In a number of specifics Huxley's prophecies are tellingly accurate," writes literary critic Kirkpatrick Sale, such as "the ubiquity of sports, television in hotel and hospital rooms, a general ignorance of history," and "psychology and chemistry as important change
Brave New World Largely, the World State is able to control society through technology in this fiction, set in the year 2540, or for 632 years after the creation of the first Model T. car by American industrialist Henry Ford. This is the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre, a savage reservation in New Mexico, a Utopia, where no family life has existed for more than six centuries. Human life is
He went to jail for refusing to pay taxes, to protest America's involvement in the Mexican War"(Henry David Thoreau," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia, 2007). While it could be argued that refusing to pay taxes hurt Americans who had nothing to do with the government's decision, Thoreau would counter that if no one obeyed their conscience, and everyone simply conformed to societal dictates, positive change would be impossible in the
living in the kind of horrific society that Aldous Huxley warned about almost a century ago. In Brave New World, Huxley wrote about a world where people are only concerned with satisfaction of desires. They are constantly entertained through visual and tactile means in addition to being constantly drugged. Although we have not yet reached a pointer where we are artificially reproducing, there are still far too many similarities.
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