On the State of Things. A Little Philosophy of Design

Vilém Flusser (1920–1991), a younger contemporary of Walter Benjamin, one of the pioneers of media studies, created an unusual intellectual genre. In the form of brief and elegant philosophical essays, he reveals the meaningful structures of our everyday world, its most important areas and the transformations occurring with them. Flusser's analysis unfolds as a phenomenology of the ordinary things and mechanisms around us, of design and urban planning. At the same time, in encountering the advent of a new digital era, he discovers how pure digital form increasingly threatens to leave the materiality of our world behind. In the paradoxical style of Flusser's thinking, there is a connection between his lived experience of the political catastrophes of the 20th century, an insightful historical perspective on the past, and an understanding of the risks of a new civilization for the future of human freedom.