Escalante
Image: John Thackara portrait, copyright Ilvio Gallo.
Let me explain… Macroscope is a term from the designer John Thackara. Thackara says,
A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.
Scientists have microscopes. Astronomers and Peeping Toms have telescopes. Designers have macroscopes.
The way I think of a macroscope is it’s something that shows you where you are, and where you are within something much bigger — simultaneously, so you can comprehend something much vaster than you in a very human way.
Dan Hill’s environments that show the environmental impact of the things around that that I showed right at the beginning, those are kind of macroscopes, because they let you comprehend the small thing, a kettle or a home, and the entire global ecology all at once.
Macroscopes give you the big picture, and we need that in order to make good decisions about the everyday. It’s a quality of design thinking that means we, as designers, are particularly suited to making and understanding macroscopes.
Now I believe there’s an article in the magazine, Scroll, that’s being distributed here, that I wrote about macroscopes, so I’m not going to go on too much about it.
But I do want to show you two examples that I ran across in a recent talk I gave about macroscopes just because I really enjoyed them, and I like showing stuff that makes me laugh.
The talk was space themed, and I was trying to find examples of macroscopes, and I was doing a lot of research about the Moon landing and I ran across this…