ABSTRACT
Sciences must develop new methods of representing systems, new ways
of seeing and interpreting what we see, and new ways of communicating
new kinds of synthesis.
(Jeffrey Johnson in Robertson et al. 2007: 285)
Two dialogues are brought to bear on the project of this book. One is between
performance and design, focus of the Emergent Objects research project led by the
author for Designing for the 21st Century.1 The design of a dancing robot, SpiderCrab,
addressed complexity to achieve ‘performative merging’ between it and human
agents: the sensation that the robot was a truly improvising and responsive partner.
