Much of the academic and commercial work that seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

Michel Waisvisz's The Hands is one of the most famous and long-lasting research projects in the literature of digital music instruments. Consisting of a pair of data gloves and exhibited for the first time in 1984, The Hands is a pioneering work in digital devices for performing live music. It is a work that engaged Waisvisz for almost a quarter of a century and, in turn, has inspired many generations of music technologists and performers of live music. Despite being often cited in the relevant literature, however, the documentation concerning the sensor architecture, design, mapping strategies, and development of these data gloves is sparse. In this article, we aim to fill this gap by offering a detailed history behind the development of The Hands. The information contained in this article was retrieved and collated by searching the STEIM archive, interviewing close collaborators of Waisvisz, and browsing through the paper documentation found in his personal folders and office.

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How can we treat technological matter as yet another material from which our notions of possible future instruments can be constructed, intrinsically intertwined with, and informed by a practice of performance? We strive to develop musical-performance instruments not only by creating technology, but also in developing them as aesthetic and cultural objects. A musical instrument is not an interface and should not be designed as such; instead, new instruments are the source of new in new music. Like any traditional instrument, a new instrument's potential for producing quality musical sound can only be revealed when it is played. We present an instrument-design process conducted by a visionary and an agenda-setting musician. The resulting objects are experimental prototypes of technological matter, which allow analysis and meaning to be specified through physical and tactile interaction with the objects themselves. As the instruments evolve through various stages, their capability is continually enhanced, making them all the more desirable for musicians to play.