Today I attended the 3rd seminar of the Series on The Objects of Design and Social Science at Goldsmiths (London). The speaker was James Auger from the Royal College of Arts and the topic was “Critical and evocative objects”. While I was intrigued by the projects he described, I was unsure at first about how they related to the theme of critical and evocative objects. The first project was an audio tooth implant which was started as a student project, and then was exhibited at the Science Museum and got a lot of attention in the press as it was presented as a prototype. The aim was to start a discussion about the enhancement of human body by technology as well as about communication. Auger, and Loizeau with whom he has been working on many other projects, aimed to question the development of technology for the sake of technology without understanding its ethical and social implications. While some of these questions have led to the development of participatory design approach aiming to understand the context of use and the needs of the users and to involve them in the design process, Auger and Loizeau take a critical approach which intends to raise questions and trigger a reflection that would lead to “better” and more “conscious” design.

The objects they create are speculative in the sense that they are produced to raise questions and open a conversation about their implications. Auger said they tried to create objects that look “real” even if they are only prototypes, so that people can desire them and react to them saying “I want it” or “I don’t want it”. He also highlighted (very rightly) that many technology firms kept developing technology for technology sake, excited by the development of new features without thinking of their use, nor their implications in how they shape our communicative practices and our interactions. He also argued that many companies just kept doing incremental changes to the technology - such as a mobile phone, and he suggested that their work aims to suggest radical changes and new ways of thinking.

Yet someone in the audience raised the question of “how do you know you’ve been successful”. I do not think Auger (who in his talk often mentioned that their aim in their projects was to create a meaningful discussion), provided an answer to that question. My take on it is that this important question involves in fact two sets of questions.

First, who is your audience? Is it the “public”? Yet as Auger noted, when you “give” the object to the public, it gets “out of control” and it’s hard to monitor and assess the impact. More profundly, I’m wondering whether the fact that people reacted to the object by saying  “I want it” or “I don’t want it” is enough to say that the object has created a discussion and thus has become a speculative and critical object. The second audience is the technology people - working in technology companies or in research labs like the Media Lab. My intuition is that there a real discussion could be started but Auger did not mention examples of such a discussion. The last audience might be academics - designers as well as social scientists.

The second question is what is the “aim” of the project: is it to do research in the sense that you want to “prove” something, “show” an effect or analyze the reactions of various audiences to the object? Auger used some vocabulary such as validation that might make you think that it’s what he had in mind. However, as highlighted by some participants’ comments, this is difficult to achieve. The best “model” would not be a deductive model seeking validation, but more of an inductive model which would observe the different reactions and analyze the interpretations. Another possibility would be to get closer to the art perspective and see the object as open to interpretations which would not necessarily look for “answers” or validations. (I know when Aileen reads this point she will come and challenge me and clarify the status of such an object from the art perspective… and in fact, I’m hoping she will. :-)…).

This talk led me to think about the nature of building_space_with_words and its relationship to research, which is one we have discussed on this blog since the beginning of the project. We’ve been discussing it again lately with Aileen as we are working on a paper for an audience of organizational scholars. building_space_with_words is a speculative object: it originally was a speculative object for Aileen and I and then it became another type of object as the installation was designed as an attempt to raise awareness and questions from the public. Recently as I reflected on how it could be connected to the organizational literature, I became aware that it became a speculative and critical object questioning the meaning and use of the metaphor of virtual space in organizational studies.

An interesting talk which raised many important questions. A podcast of it can be seen at:  http://www.materialbeliefs.com/stream/dss3.php

Here’s an interesting series of seminar organized at Goldsmith College - at the intersection of two practices and two discourses, design and social science - with the “object” as the boundary… material object, object of interest …

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The Objects of Design and Social Science
Common to both design and (parts of) the social sciences is a shared
pre-occupation with objects. On the one hand, design is concerned with
making and interpreting objects including the finished article (e.g.
consumer products), ‘experimental’ design aids (e.g. prototypes), and
projective representations (e.g. scenarios). Recently, design has also
begun to re-engage with more speculative objects whose ambiguous
functionality contributes to the exploration of the social and the
material, the political and the aesthetic. On the other hand the
social sciences also work with objects, including categorical objects
such as race, gender, and health, empirical objects ranging from the
mundane to the exotic, and conceptual objects such as the notions
social scientists use to understand and theorize the social. Here, the
sociology of science and technology has been especially productive,
introducing notions such as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989),
epistemic objects (Rheinberger, 1997), immutable mobiles (Latour,
1990), quasi-objects , black boxes (Latour, 1988) to name but a few.
Accordingly, a focus on material, empirical and conceptual objects
brings into sharp relief overlaps and disjuncture between the two
disciplines and a rich space for dialogue.

This seminar series will seek to bring into view and explore existing
objects of both design and social science as well as draw out objects
of novelty for both disciplines. In doing so we will seek to engage
with emerging issues and topics in both disciplines such as the
outputs of speculative and critical design, participation, engagement
and publics as well as addressing notions concerning heterogeneity,
process and event. This series will continue to serve as a platform
for opening up interdisciplinary research futures. (more…)

For those interested in the intersection of art, science and social science intersections, Lucy Kimbell’s movie about her Rat Fair (see her post on December 23rd) is online

Seven Minutes in the Service of Rats from Lucy Kimbell on Vimeo.

This film documents the Rat Fair event organised by artist Lucy Kimbell at Camden Arts Centre, London in 2005 attended by 40 rats and 450 people. Activities for rats and people included a rat beauty parlour, memory and agility tests, and roborat racing. The highlight was the world premier of the “Is Your Rat an Artist?” drawing competition for humans, rats and software, inspired by the Morris water maze used in animal experiments. The Rat Fair was the result of months of conversation with and observation of people and rats working together in the fancy rat and scientific communities.

Please see below. An interesting event on the collaboration between social scientists and artists in which, Lucy Kimbell, one of our blog members is involved. If you happen to be in London, make sure you attend and please post your thoughts afterwards.

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Tactical Play
A one-day colloquium for social scientists and artists about playful enquiry as a tactic for research
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
1 July 2009, 09.30am–5pm
Room GO1, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, University of London

Speakers include: Anne Douglas (Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen); Lynn Froggett (University of Central Lancashire); Pat Kane ( author of The Play Ethic); Lucy Kimbell (Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford); Justin McKeown (artist, Spartaction.com) and Christian Nold (artist, Softhook.com). Convened by Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight.

Informed by discourses of cross-pollination between art and social science, this colloquium will discuss the role of “play” as a tactic for social change within reflexive and performative social science methods and socially engaged art processes.

Positioning playful enquiry as both a method and meeting place between the disciplines, the event will seek to address the following questions through the presentation of case studies and open discussion:

- In what way do the essential characteristics of one discipline offer possibilities for “play” within the other?

- How is research through performance, fiction, collaboration and conversation employed by each discipline and what are the individual motivations for this?

- At what point does playful enquiry meet “hard edged” research, and what are the academic implications?

- In what way is “play” a politicised method, and how can members of each profession use it to antagonise the frameworks in which they operate?

To book a place go to: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/news/tacticalplay

Cost (includes vegetarian lunch): £35 standard, £15 students.

Numbers are strictly limited, please register early.

Yesterday I was in the space and two visitors asked me “what’s next”.The first one coming from “the art world” (sorry for the simplification) asked: “what will happen to the installation? where will you present it next?”  The second one coming from “the business world” (once again, sorry for the simplification) asked: “what are the outputs of this project?”… I also heard although it was not explicit “Can you implement them?”These questions are in themselves interesting as they highlight the multitude of interpretations and understandings, but there is nothing new here. What is more interesting is that it made me realized that the installation had become something in itself. The second visitor saw it as a presentation of research ideas, innovative, different, but still with some potential outputs. One of my academic friends also asked me what papers will come out of this installation: once again the question of the outputs. These questions made me realized that the nature of the project has changed and if originally there was this idea to present my research ideas in a different way, this has slowly vanished in front of the “project itself” - which still draws on research ideas but which has become something of its own.This does not mean that there are no potential outputs (we are working on two papers) but these are not essential to the project, and there are more related to our reflection on the process than to the content of the project.  Back to the point raised by Aileen and Ben Rubin on the relationship between the form and the content, I am realizing how the heaviness of the content has vanished in the work with the material to reach a form, hopefully to get some kind of balance between both. al   

I could relate something from the movie “The Matrix”. A virtual world and how things happens inside. I liked it and interested in research on this new idea on depicting virtual interactions in to physical world…I will do some more analysis and come some other time to understand in detail and see how ideas live in this virtual world…

Re-reading the introduction of Qualitative Analysis for Social Scientists by Anselm Strauss (1987) for my Ph.D seminar on Qualitative Methods, I noted this quote by Dewey (who did not conceive artistic and scientific activities as radically different):An “expression of the self in and through a medium, constituting the work of art, is itself a prolonged interaction issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both of them acquire a form and order they did not first possess” (Dewey, 1334, p.65)and Strauss adds: “In short, the researcher, if more than merely competent, will be “in the work” - emotionally as well as intellectually - and often will be profoundly affected by experiences engendered by the research process itself.” (p. 10).An interesting analogy between the work of the researcher and the worker of the artist, or maybe of their relationship to their work, their engagement with their practice. Moreover, this is one of these quotes that just say in “better words” the way you feel about a specific experience, in this case my work.   al

While reading Yasmine’s post on the situationists and the “psychogeographical” maps (February 2nd), it reminded me of a book by Latour, Paris, Invisible City.

In this book which mixes photos and texts, Latour takes on a journey beyond “Paris, the City of Light”, reminding us how beneath the surface, there are always much more going on and highlighting the complex networks of people, artifacts and socio-material practices that “make” a city. This is a great exercise of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973).  It reminds me also of Becker’s description of art worlds (1982): Artistic work, like all human activities, depends on the joint activity of a number of people. Producing an artwork requires more than just an artist; it requires an idea, a manufacturing/distributing network, time, money, “support” apparatus, an audience, critics, training, and civil order (Becker, 1982).

In some ways, Aileen and I are also aiming to develop a “thick description”, a good understanding of  the relationships between physical spaces, virtual spaces and interactions. (more…)

Hi,

for those of you in New York, two of our contributors, Bruno Latour and Natalie Jereminjenko are giving talks this week and next week in New York.

- Bruno Latour gives a talk “Globalization: Which Globe? Which Politics?”Thursday, February 5, 2009. Rennert Hall, the Kraft Center, 6:15pmFind out more about the event online here:http://www.heymancenter.org/events.php?id=117

- Tuesday, February 10, 2009, 6:30 – 8:30pm, Natalie Jereminjenko will moderate a discussion on Light Patterns: A Forum on the Design Challenges of Urban Ecology and Biodiversity at Van Alen Institute. More at http://www.vanalen.org/html/02_021009_FlightPatterns.php

If you have any events to share with us - in New York, but not only in New York, please do so.Also if you go to these events, please share your thoughts with us.al