ABSTRACT
In the years around the millennium the influence of digital technologies on the everyday lives of vast numbers of people across the globe was incalculable. On the most basic level, the appearance of information technology hardware – computers, along with other high-tech products of the era, including mobile phones and digital cameras – was transformed by product designers in the last decades of the twentieth century. The practices of software programming and systems design expanded rapidly in the early twenty-first century. The huge advances in digital and internet engineering that had taken place from the late 1980s onwards required people to develop close relationships with the screen-based activities that they engaged in, often for many hours of the day, and designers became increasingly responsible for the interfaces that facilitated those interactions. Artificial intelligence was one of the technological preoccupations of the turn of the century automotive industry, the ultimate aim of which was to produce a driverless car.
