UC San Diego

This thesis draws together design history, pain science, and information studies to consider the ways that medical clinicians incorporated quantitative methods and tools from graphic and industrial design and, reciprocally, the ways in which designers used methods and ideas from the biomedical sciences in the US and UK between 1945 and 2015. The project is organized around postwar changes in pain science in clinical medicine and proposes that a measurement, representation, and move toward quantification in clinical pain medicine occurred in tandem with the turn toward computing in the arts and in graphic design. Subsequent advancements in personal and wearable computing shifted health and wellness personal technologies markets around concepts of “self-health.” The project culminates in the emergence of “the quantified self,” a concept interpreted in this project to the development of quantitative tools and methods in computing and computer graphics devoted to advancing a neoliberal model of knowledge and experience of the individual’s bodily pain.