The Battle For Your Attention

The Social Network Show welcomes Malcolm McCullough to the August 20, 2014 episode.

Malcolm McCullough, Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan and author of several books talks about the demands on our attention in a world flooded with media, coming to us in all different forms. Hear Malcolm talk about the flood of media and information surrounding us all the time; hear what he says about mobile technology; hear about what the attention overload does to us.

Malcolm McCullough, Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, is a widely recognized scholar on digital media culture, with nearly fifty invited talks, in over a dozen countries. His most recent book, Ambient Commons—Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (MIT Press, 2013), explores information environmentalism and the benefits of attention to surroundings. His previous book Digital Ground—Architecture Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing (2004) became a standard in many interaction design programs. Abstracting Craft (1996) is now a cult classic and once earned McCullough a nomination for a Chrysler design award (2002). Digital Design Media (coauthored with William Mitchell, 1991), won an American Institute of Architects international book award and pioneered electronic prepress. At Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Planning since 2001, McCullough teaches design studios, and courses in urban and tangible computing. Previously he served on the architecture and design faculty at Carnegie Mellon, and before that for ten years (1988-98) at Harvard. Long ago he was a pioneer of computer-aided design (CAD), at Autodesk in the 1980s. An amateur historian and backcountry enthusiast, he has traveled extensively in the continental United States. He is currently researching a book on responsive surfaces in architecture.

Learn more about Malcolm here and check out his books