“in any context, large or small, designing the medium is managing the potentials and relationships between objects, the activity or disposition immanent in their organization. The disposition of any organization makes some things possible and some things impossible. Like a growth medium, it determines what will live or die. Like an operating system, it sets the rules of the game that link and activate the components of an organization”
– Keller Easterling (2018) https://strelkamag.com/en/article/keller-easterling-medium-design
“Maybe it is not the existence or content of a problem but the interplay between problems that is important. Medium design would then be something like playing pool, where knowing about one fixed sequence of shots is of little use. But being able to see branching networks of possibilities allows you to add more information to the table and make the game more robust. In pool, you don’t know the answer; you only know what to do next. The balls are sometimes attached to known forms or rules of play, but the art of pool involves assessing their collisions. The player “knows how” to respond to a string of changing conditions over time with an organ of interplay”
