I have mentioned several times the role of writing and the research we’ve been doing with Anca Metiu on the role of writing for knowledge sharing and the expression of emotions. Our argument is that a lot of the debates about online communication focuses only on the media, forgetting the modality - writing - which supports key mechanisms involved in the expression of emotions and the sharing of knowledge. Here is an interesting article by Nicholas Carr where he raises similar issues for reading.Carr cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain who argues that “We are not only what we read. We are how we read.”  Therefore she worries that  when we read online, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” and not interpret and make sense of the text.

Carr also cites a very interesting example of how Nietsche’s style changed when he started using a typewriter instead of a pen:

“Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.””

As a follow up on Blum’s article on how digital media might enhance our urban experience, adding social layers to it, I found the Museum of the phantom city  project by Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder as they offer people to walk in the city adding layers  to it -not functional ones, but imaginary ones:

“iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition. We are inspired by the work of artists and urbanists like Janet Cardiff and the Situationists, who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange again. How might mobile media be used to reveal dimensions of the city veiled from everyday experience – to manufacture an augmented reality? ”

Playing with the affordances of the mobile media: using our Iphone to navigate the city, but not only a tool for “simplifying”, making the city manageable, but also for complexifying, adding imaginary layers and opening up questions for us.

I also like the idea of using this application as a “probe” for users and for architects and planners to reflect on the city.

I’m currently not in NY but I’ll try when I’m back. If you’re in NY, I’ll be curious to know about your experience.

Please go and check an interesting project - exploring on how to reinvent office spaces in public spaces - in which Laura Forlano is involved.

“This festival liberates workers from the traditional offices spaces and invites them to relocate their work in urban public settings, relying on three sets of tools: lightweight infrastructure, social software and facilitators’ guides that will jumpstart collaborations to inspire creative workers, activate street-life and intensify the use of under-performing public spaces.”

More information at http://www.sentientcity.net/exhibit/?p=53

Just read this article on NY Times on John Adams’ diary entries during his journey from Boston to St Petersburg in 1809 (Thanks Bojan for the link!)

“The diary, which Adams maintained until April 1836, is a rarity among the many he kept, in that the description for each day is no more than one line long. Historians believe he used the descriptions as references to longer entries in other journals.

Jeremy B. Dibbell, an assistant reference librarian at the society, said a graduate student at Simmons College here saw the diary a few months ago in the society’s archives and thought it looked like a Twitter feed, though written in Adams’s meticulous script and bound in leather.

Word spread, and the society decided to tweet the entries. They average 110 to 120 characters, below the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter, and there is nary an LOL or BFF among them.

Like most Twitter feeds, Adams’s will chronicle the substantial, including his arrival in St. Petersburg, and the mundane: the diary makes many references to weather, seasickness and card-playing, for example, on the voyage across the Atlantic.”

Why posting this? because I find it interesting to see how technology affordances were re-enacted with different media and technology. It also reminded me another NY Times article (sent to me by Anca, thanks Anca!) on twitter and the telegram (often limited to 150 characters like twitter).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/us/06adams.html

Hi,

just read an interesting article, My Living Room, in the Urban Omnibus by James Reeves, writer and designer.

James Reeves describes his perception of New York as he has just moved to Helsinski and that leads him to reflect of what makes him feel comfortable in New York and what is different in Helsinki. He highlights how cities, places in general (and our perceptions of it) emerge from structures, material dimensions (size of the blocks, street labels, stoops vs. court yards, etc.) but also social affordances - which includes mores and practices: cheap food, stores open all night long, etc. in NY which allows a certain life style and a certain type of interactions, and defines your personal space in a different way - your apartment is not the walls of the space you rent, but it extends out in the street. It reminded me my friend John Klima who always told me that “the city was his kitchen”.

Reeves notes:

“There are probably just as many people who prefer a city like Helsinki over New York, so perhaps it’s easier to tackle the question from another direction: is a personal connection to one’s environment simply a function of time and familiarity, or is it possible to arrive in a new city and, after taking a look at its buildings and establishments, immediately have a gut feeling that says, “Yes, this feels good. I could get comfortable here”? ”

I guess this article also touches me as I’m moving soon from NY after 3 1/2 years and my walks through Brooklyn and Manhattan take another dimension. I could empathize with his feelings as he’s reflecting on the places he knows, his routines as I feel the same when I go down Smith Street in the morning, stop by at Victory to get my coffee, or bike up to Prospect Park. Like Reeves I feel like I might not have taken enough photos and I do take some. My next stop is not Helsinski, but London - more exciting than Helsinksi many might say. I’ll tell you more in a couple of months.

I guess these issues can also be linked to the different ways people experience online spaces. We had lunch with two friends yesterday and we were discussing social networking platforms and other online tools. Two of us did not feel comfortable with facebooks and the type of interactions it supported but we loved skype which we perceived as a one-on-one communication tool which allowed us both fast (”peripheral” in some ways in the sense of “peripheral vision”)  and long (in-depth) interactions with people we know and like… More to be discussed here.

al

Many topics have been raised by this post by Aileen (posted on March 13 ). One issue has been the status of the art work (especially when it emerges from the collaboration of an artist and a scientist, social scientist, etc). Lucy Kimbell’s post on the difference between art and design  is very relevant to this discussion:”One of the things that comes up in discussions of design is if, and how, it’s different from art. At last week’s European Academy of Design in Aberdeen, there was talk of critical design, a term associated with Dunne and Raby (see my earlier post about the conference) as well as other practitioners. One of the claims Fiona Raby made in her keynote at EAD was that in contemporary art, now you can do pretty much anything, nothing is shocking or draws attention, whereas it can be a radical gesture to present an artefact in the context of design, inviting audiences to imagine something in use through proposition and speculation. Here’s a contribution to that discussion. It’s a work called Aurabox (2005). It looks a bit like something you might buy at IKEA. But what is not (yet) at IKEA is the two embedded LED lights indicating the status of the object’s aura, either on or off. It’s inspired by Walter Benjamin’s idea inThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) that “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”. Here’s a short film showing the Aurabox in the group show Product and Vision in Berlin in 2005.    

Hi,

Milena was telling me yesterday that she found interesting that the blog “seems to be taking a turn for physical space…and urban environments which is really interesting too”.
My first reply was that I liked the idea that the discussion was evolving and taking its own path. I also highlighted that for me while issues about physical space were coming up, it did not mean that the “virtual space” topic has disappeared, but it was discussions about online communication, mobility, etc.

Moreover, the two last posts by Yasmine and Claudia were for me about practices, perceptions, and not so much physical space per se: How do you keep a sense of home (place, identity) when you’re away, on the way? What is home if it’s not the physical house that one might associate with home?

Yet, Milena’s comment made me reflect on the evolution of our conversation and I wondered whether we have taken another path (which is not a problem in itself) forgetting the original question:

How to interpret the metaphor of the virtual space that so many people use? is it a metaphor or an oxymoron? Are some of the affordances of physical spaces (affordances which are not only material but also social) reenacted in online (virtual) spaces? Or do these spaces have completely different affordances / dimensions? (more…)

To the risk of putting myself on the wrong side of the architectural profession (to which I also belong), I’ll say that home isn’t about walls (brick and mortars, prefab…) and openings. It is about people’s (ritualized or memorable) interaction with architectural elements. You would recognize a place as a home, less because of the fact that an architectural element has a particular attribute, for example a window placed in a particular space, but because one has a particular interaction with it, for example  looking out of a window waiting for a particular person to come by. Sure, you could talk about that particular space’s affordance, a space provoking a behavior or the fact that a house was made according to a particular/personal program (hence a tight involvement with the making process and materiality). But think about Eileen Gray’s E-1027 house and Le Corbusier’s obsession to possess it. Home making articulates around the possession and dispossession of space. I’ve been researching home making when one spends shorter periods in different spaces (what is home when on the move?). One feels the need to adapt swiftly to spaces or denies it. The artist Do Hu Suh, places LA-Seoul home in abstract spaces, a way to create a comfort zone. It is a lighter building to transport than a home. The making process (sewn by old Korean ladies) along with the shape (the replica of a traditional Korean house) is a representation of home. The act of placing it in a foreign (less comfortable) space is home making. When assessing belongings, one assesses home, which in fact isn’t about a shell, but the evolving collection of things and recollections. Rambling. Moving… How much space does home take.

Hi, one of my students sent me this trailer yesterday on a documentary on objects and artifacts in our everydaylifehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9E2D2PaIcI  Fascinating! Of course, I thought of Don Norman’s work on the design of everyday objects and their affordances. It also made me think of our discussion about physical objects and how they matter (and how we sometimes forget them), and particularly how they matter in the context of virtual interactions.More at:  http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/about/ 

Before leaving, I posted a message about the materiality of technology and made a distinction between material and virtual.I had many occasions to think of this post while traveling. I don’t have a blackberry or an Iphone or any other mobile device to check my email. I did not bring my laptop (and even if I had it, I was not in places with wifi access). The hotels where we stayed did not have internet access.While there were several internet cafes in San Cristobal, I decided not to check my email at all. I did not have my cell phone either.Hence, because I lacked all these material artifacts - tangible (such as the laptop, the cell phone, the blackberry) and intangible (such as wifi access), I was - or at least, I felt - “unconnected” and  in some ways I lost my “virtual” connections to all my friends, colleagues and family.

 This distinction between tangible and intangible, and the definition of materiality as not only “matter”, but also as “substance” and “significance” (according to the definition of materiality in the Oxford English Dictionary) is an interesting one which was pointed to me by a colleague, Paul Leonardi. It allows us to better understand how technology in a broad sense (not only the interface, the hardware, but also the software) can be said to be material. Moreover, Paul Leonardi pointed that such a definition of materiality might not only allow us to describe information technology as material, but discourse as well. Interesting distinction, yet I would argue that discourse can also be material in the first sense - when it’s written in a word document, in a memo, in an email, on a blog or a forum.

Furthermore, the materiality of the practice is also shaped by the space, or the space influences the social practices involved in the virtual interactions. As noted yesterday, the plaza is the space where people meet, discuss, interact but you don’t see people (like those observed by Laura Forlano in Brian Park) checking their email, skyping their friends. To be involved in your virtual interactions, one goes to an internet cafe: a public space which contains the artifacts (tangible and intangible) that allows one to interact virtually - through emails, blogs, forums. Yet, if one has a blackberry, one could sit on a bench of one of the plazas and check her email, or post on a blog. Cheers, al