Whereas architecture and furniture design have successfully operated in the realm of cultural speculation for some time, product design s strong ties to the marketplace have left little room for speculation on the cultural function of electronic products. As ever more of our everyday social and cultural experiences are mediated by electronic products, designers need to develop ways of exploring how this electronic mediation might enrich people s everyday lives.

Hertzian Tales explores the way critical responses to the ideological nature of design ^[1] can inform the development of aesthetic possibilities for electronic products. It focuses on the role they play in shaping our experience of inhabiting the electrosphere, looking beyond the quality of our relationship with objects themselves to the aesthetics of the social, psychological, and cultural experiences they mediate.

The primary purpose of this book is to set the scene for relocating the electronic product beyond a culture of relentless innovation for its own sake, based simply on what is technologically possible and semiologically consumable, to a broader context of critical thinking about its aesthetic role in everyday life.

The project proposes an approach that uses the design of conceptual electronic products as a way of provoking complex and meaningful reflection on the ubiquitous, dematerializing, and intelligent artificial environment we inhabit.

The origin of Hertzian Tales comes out of two places: first, a frustration with the limited role currently played by industrial designers (compared to those of engineers and marketers) in the development of new electronic products;