Journey in the Middle

With the globalization of technology and capital in the post-Cold War era, design has increasingly evolved into interactive media connecting people and the world in the process of unifying the global production and daily life. It has gradually shifted from humanism to technological aesthetics, with its core transitioning from “modern human” to “technological human.” In recent years, the rapid evolution of digital technology has been drastically restructuring human cognition. The interaction between daily life and technologies such as social media, algorithmic societies and big data has formed new production relations and lifestyles, yet it has also brought about a new binary opposition in capitalization and class solidification for human: the blockade of information and value transfer between high-tech and low-tech civilizations, forcing the latter to return to the remnants of their historical civilizations to rethink the future. As the world order begins to shift, historical civilizations revive. Although technology and capital can profoundly influence human cognition, they cannot eliminate and dissolve the diversity of human civilizations as well as the nature. Some fundamental questions are still worth reconsidering: What is the ultimate value of life? What is the better society? The epistemology inherited by the Chinese for thousands of years offers another understanding of the media between human and the world which is – there should be none, human and the world are one. Therefore people only need to maintain the concept of the “middle”. Keywords: ethical turn, technology ethics, traditional Chinese design, the Unity of Heaven and Human, media construction