Reading Response #1

to Artful Design Chapter 1:"Design is____"

Xinyu Wang

27/09/26

Music 256A,Stanford University

Reading Response:The Art of Humanizing Electronics

This week's reading made me pause on Principle 1.14: Design is the Art of Humanizing Technology. Ge writes that design is never complete until it accounts for the person experiencing it. For anyone who loves electronic music like me, this idea feels almost autobiographical, because the whole history of the genre(Maybe all genres...) can be read as a long, collective effort to finish a design that started out cold.

In the early 1950s, composers at the WDR studio in Cologne built pieces out of pure sine tones, filters, and tape reverb. Stockhausen's Studie I and II are fascinating, but they sound more like experimental pieces than music meant to move someone. In Ge's terms, "the technology was there, but the design was not yet complete". What completed it was the listener. Over the following decades, people kept hearing something human inside these mechanical sounds: a strange warmth, a sense of longing, even humor. That recognition pulled new people into the medium. Tangerine Dream turned sequencers and oscillators into long, drifting soundscapes that felt like meditation. Kraftwerk made the robot their subject and, paradoxically, made records about machines that were full of melancholy and play. And Talking Heads, New Order and The Human Leagues made it even more touching...Each generation added a layer of human meaning, so the "design" of electronic sound was never finished by a single inventor. It was finished, and keeps being finished, by everyone who listens and responds.

I feel the same thing when I listen to LCD Soundsystem, especially "All My Friends.(My fav ALL MY GLASTO FRIENDS version)" Technically, the song is almost stubbornly simple: a single piano figure hammered out for over seven minutes, with drums, bass, and synths stacking on top until the whole thing feels like it might tip over. None of these production choices makes me emotional on its own. What gets me is what the machinery is carrying. The song is about getting older, about looking back at nights with friends and wondering what you traded away for the life you have now. James Murphy doesn't hide the technology. The repetition is obvious, almost mechanical. But that repetition starts to feel like time itself passing, like memory circling back to the same moment. The relentlessness of the arrangement becomes the emotion.

This is exactly where Ge's principle lands for me. He describes design as making useful things that also make us feel, and feel human. A drum machine and a looping piano are useful tools, but in "All My Friends" they become a shared space where the designer and the audience meet. Murphy put his own anxieties about aging into the structure of the track, and when I listen, I bring my own. The emotional weight is not in the waveform or the mix. It lives in the overlap between his experience and mine, and that overlap cannot be measured or quantified.

What I take from this is that humanizing technology is not about hiding the machine or making it look friendly. It is about designing so that the machine becomes a vessel for something personal. After all, the technology is the medium, but the listener is the one who completes the design----And, if we made a fool on the road, there's always this.

Reading: Ge Wang, Artful Design, Chapter 1, p. 46.