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Instances of ‘hostile design’ appear across urban space, aimed at pushing particular behaviour – and, ultimately, particular people – out of public areas. But notions of hostile design and related concepts require theoretical clarification. Empirical study is also urgently needed on how such designs influence attitudes, behaviours and health, with implications for cities’ approaches to everything from homelessness to heatwave relief. This critical commentary reviews the main examples of hostile design, considers what, at minimum, must be addressed by theoretical accounts of this phenomenon, and identifies empirical research projects that are just waiting to be performed.

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Thinkers from a variety of fields analyze the roles of imaging technologies in science and consider their implications for many issues, from our conception of selfhood to the authority of science. In what follows, I encourage scholars to develop an applied philosophy of imaging, that is, to collect these analyses of scientific imaging and to reflect on how they can be made useful for ongoing scientific work. As an example of this effort, I review concepts developed in Don Ihde's phenomenology of technology and refigure them for use in the analysis of scientific practice. These concepts are useful for drawing out the details of the interpretive frameworks scientists bring to laboratory images. Next, I apply these ideas to a contemporary debate in neurobiology over the interpretation of images of neurons which have been frozen at the moment of transmitter release. This reveals directions for further thought for the study of neurotransmission.