The Power of Maybes

Machines, Uncertainty and Design Futures

Betti Marenko (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

176 Seiten

2025
Bloomsbury Visual Arts (Verlag)
978-1-350-37727-1 (ISBN)

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This cutting-edge study brings together philosophy and design to explore predictive computational processes and looks to ‘uncertainty’ as a central, epistemic tool for facing algorithmic challenges.

In a world of endless predictions and precision algorithms, The Power of Maybes offers a daring new way forward.

What if uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve, but a gift? This book reclaims hesitation, ambiguity and not-knowing as powerful tools to resist the rigid control of digital systems. Where machines seek to lock down knowledge, capture potential, dictate futures and foreclose possibilities, The Power of Maybes presents the radical idea that embracing uncertainty is essential in our age of planetary computation and offers ways of cultivating it as a form of resistance.

By reframing the unknown as a powerful resource, Marenko offers a bold approach to living and thinking alongside machines without surrendering to their grip. Blending philosophy, design and critical tech studies, it challenges dystopian fears and utopian hopes about technology, and champions new ways of being—open, ungridded, unscaled. It’s a call to cultivate the unknown and nurture potential. For those ready to reclaim their agency in an algorithmic age, The Power of Maybes is a guide to living with oceanic uncertainty—and finding power in it.

Betti Marenko is Reader in Design and Techno-Digital Futures at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK. She is a transdisciplinary theorist working at the intersection of process philosophies, design theory and critical technologies studies. She co-edited Deleuze and Design (2015) and Designing Smart Objects in Everyday Life (2021), and her work has been published in New Formations, Design and Culture, Design Studies, Digital Creativity, Leonardo and Technophany.

Foreword, Adam Nocek
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Hybrid Futures
A Note on Method

Part I
1. Machines Work
2. Algorithmic Subjects
3. Resisting Reduction

Part II
4. Metic Wayfinding
5. Oceanic Uncertainty
6. Unknowing Stratagems

Conclusion: Whatever Designs

Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	20.09.2025
Reihe/Serie	Beyond the Modern
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	158 x 238 mm
Gewicht	500 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Design / Innenarchitektur / Mode
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
	Mathematik / Informatik ► Informatik ► Theorie / Studium
	Naturwissenschaften
ISBN-10	1-350-37727-9 / 1350377279
ISBN-13	978-1-350-37727-1 / 9781350377271
Zustand	Neuware