Designing responsibility

Abstract

Technology can mediate not only our nihilism, but also our responsibility. In order to achieve the latter rather than the former, we need to move away from the model of freedom we have been following from Aristotle to Marx to today, that more leisure means more freedom. Through the insights found in postphenomenology and in Nietzsche, we can see why more leisure has tended to result in only more nihilism and perhaps we can even see a way to freedom through designing responsibility instead. Examples of such designed responsibility will be explored by looking at contemporary interactive artworks and consciousness-raising video games, with the focus on how alterity relations can awaken us to responsibility