The dramatic acceleration of digital technologies and their integration into physical products is transforming everyday objects. Our domestic appliances, furniture, clothing, are growing in intelligence. Smart objects are increasingly capable of interacting with humans in a purposeful manner with intentionality. This collection of essays, descriptions of empirical work, and design case studies brings together perspectives from interaction design, the humanities, science and technology studies, and engineering, to map, explore and interrogate ways in which our relationships with everyday smart objects might expand and be re-imagined. By offering a critical assessment on the growing place of smart technology in everyday environments, this book outlines a transdisciplinary research agenda for the future of 'smartness' to help define, envision, and inspire future collaborative design practices. These essays propose an understanding and design of smart objects that embrace their hybrid nature as shifting and blending tools, agents, machines, or even 'creatures'. Authors argue that smart objects have the potential to enter into multiple kinds of relationships with humans, and form complex human-nonhuman ecologies that are both meaningful and empowering in the context of everyday life. This book also shines a light on the hidden infrastructures behind the functioning of smart objects with stirring debates tackling questions of technology, human values, and economic and ecological impact. Whether you are a design scholar, design practitioner or design activist this book will inspire through offering theoretical insights, design concepts and practical ways on how to engage in this research agenda for future smartness.

This is an interrogation of the theory and practice of design through the thought of Gilles Deleuze. What can Deleuze's creative, immanent and practical philosophy offer to a field not only concerned with innovation and the creation of possible worlds, but one that is fast becoming a way of thinking and critically responding to current issues and concerns? Is there a Deleuzian way of designing? Whether we are dealing with products or scenarios, packaging or experiences, objects or digital platforms, services or territories, organizations and strategies, design is never a thing, but a process of change, invention and speculation always with material, tangible implications that affect behaviours and lives. Drawing on a range of contributors, case studies and examples, this book examines ways in which we can think about design through Deleuze, and likewise how Deleuze's thought can be experimented upon and re designed to produce new concepts. This book taps into the emerging networks between philosophy as an act of inventing concepts, and design as the process of inventing the world. This is the first book to use Deleuze and Guattari to provide an entirely new theoretical framework to address the theory and practice of design. Contributors include academics, practitioners and those at the intersection between the theory and the practice of design. It redefines a practice based, industry led field that is rapidly changing and evolving, showing the plasticity and malleability of a relatively young discipline whose boundaries are far from fixed.