By 2007 the Tracey book (now titled Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art ) was off to press, January saw me in Cambridge delivering a paper at New College at the Third International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society called The Joyful Passion of Production: Spinoza and Disruptive Technologies. This paper was written in response to my discovery of the potent combination of Spinoza and Deleuze, a pairing which rips into the very conception of fixed and unchanging positions. I wonder, in the paper, whether combinations of technology and society, which have negative communications values in one place may be beneficial to others? This may seem absurdly abstract until, as a graphic designer you consider such daily problems as: How do we indicate danger? How do we communicate safety? My own position is that we can tell our stories best when we tell them through technologies that compose with the society we are talking to.
Abstract:
Spinoza conceived the concept of ‘Passions’ to talk about how an idea affects us: he talks of Sad Passions that reduce our abilities to act and of Joyful Passions that free us to act more fully. While Spinoza is explicitly talking of the gestalt of ideas acting on people his concept of Passions speaks to a problem we are all sadly too familiar with: overwhelming numbers of new broadcast and production technologies – vertical channels, virals, feeds, POD, Interactive TV, etc. – all vying for time, money and attention that none of us possess. In this paper I will be looking at a set of thought tools that may be used to examine production and broadcast technologies and be used to select those tools, in any particular circumstance, to decide which technologies which will add to the power and effectiveness of our communications and which, buy their very nature, will actively speak against us.
Keywords: Communications, Theory, Graphic Design, Visual Communication

At the same time I was writing a paper for the cybernetics journal Kybernetes on the potential for evaluating VisCom values through cybernetic practices. Personally I suspect that VisCom is part of a feedback cycle, so this would seem to be a logical path for investigation. The paper is called It's all about communication: graphics and cybernetics.
Abstract:
The paper seeks to serve a dual process, first, to raise awareness of the epistemological weaknesses inherent in the ways that visual communications designers address their own practice, and, second, to suggest that cybernetics has some of the answers to these weaknesses. Design/methodology/approach – These objectives of this paper have been addressed through an examination of the cybernetics, critical theory and visual design theory. A comparison of the points of convergence (often of aims) and those points of divergence (often in its ontological reading of the world) is illuminating, especially when post-structuralist semiotics – as a system of knowledge exterior to both design and cybernetics, yet capable of commenting on both – is used as a point of triangulation. <There is more but you get the point>

By the time I got to deliver my paper (Bikes don't break legs.) at DeSForM 07 in December I had managed to make a major synthesis between the two strands represented in the papers above. Through the agency of a philosophical and systems science theory called Emergence I was able to investigate how technologies, societies and cultures can merge as design. Emergence demonstrates that the evolution of complex systems can be created through simpler and lower level processes. This seems to me be a pretty good model for design as an activity, and for the effects that design has.
I don't believe the paper is available outside of the printed proceedings, so is included as a download here.

I delivered a companion paper at the The 6th International Conference on Design History and Design Studies in Osaka. The paper suggests a model of culture for Visual Communication. The paper proposes that culture is our phenomenological experience of the massively networked responses of other actors to the actions of ourselves and others.