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

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.

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 …

–

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…)

In the Wired UK edition from November, Andrew Blum wrote about the relationship between physical and virtual space in cities, how technology - social networking, mobile phones, etc. - are adding a layer to the physical cities. He argues that technology is not killing real communities but reshaping our interactions inside these communities (in organization studies, work on online communities such as open source (O’Mahony and Ferraro, 2007) or my work with Gerry DeSanctis on public online forums show the importance of geography and location for these online communities). It also reminded me a post  discussing an article in the NY Times on local communities blogs and how they ‘enhanced’ the physical.

Andrew Blum quoted Anthony Townsend, an urban planner and forecaster at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future who talks about “blended urban reality”: “neither cyberspace nor an urban landscape blanketed with blinking television screens, but the regular old city, albeit socially fused with real-time electronic interactions”. It evokes for me the move in organizational studies on the importance of materiality in organizations (despite the increasing number of “virtual” organizations, “virtual” teams and “virtual” communities). It also highlights the complexity and subtlety of the phenomenon, where usual interaction patterns, communicative practices are blurred and redefined - something we started exploring in building_space_with_words.

Townsend makes a surprising argument that as cities grow bigger, and mega-cities multiply, technology make them manageable: “Cities maybe be much bigger, but the social graph is the same” (Townsend quoted by Blum).
Yet Blum rightly reminds us that even if technology is a tool that helps coping with the city’s chaos and scale, it does not mean that physical space should be not taken into account, on the contrary I would argue.

“Density increases the need for thoughtful public space. For the cities of the future to work, the physical and the virtual have to stick together” - Stick together to allow people to develop a sense of place…

I’ve just read about this installation which was exploring the relationship between the physical and the virtual space:

Constellations is a network music installation by Atau Tanaka connecting the physical space of a gallery to the imaginary space of the internet through sound and image. Visitors in the gallery navigate an onscreen universe of planets, invoking audio to stream into the gallery. The planetary system is the interface to a library of soundfiles existing on servers throughout the internet. Each planet represents a contribution from a different composer. The sounds coming from the network space resonate in the acoustical space of the gallery, connecting these two universes.

I’ve just read an article in the Business Weeks on Data Visualization: Stories for the Information Age. Maria Popova, the writer argues that with the new technology and the abundance of information we have (e.g. the NY Times and the Guardian opening their archives) “artists and designers are turning to data visualization to interpret the deluge of information around us, often with unexpected results”.

She contrasts data visualization with infographics, defining data visualization as “an interpretation, a different way to look at and think about data that often exposes complex patterns or correlations.

Data visualization is a way to make sense of the ever-increasing stream of information with which we’re bombarded and provides a creative antidote to the “analysis paralysis” that can result from the burden of processing such a large volume of information. “It’s not about clarifying data,” says Koblin. “It’s about contextualizing it.”

She interestingly stress the importance of what she calls the “the importance of creative vision along with the technical mastery of software”, i.e. highlighting the contextualizing or story telling process: “Data visualization isn’t about using all the data available, but about deciding which patterns and elements to focus on, building a narrative, and telling the story of the raw data in a different, compelling way.(…) It’s about the most ancient of social rituals: storytelling. It’s about telling the story locked in the data differently, more engagingly, in a way that draws us in, makes our eyes open a little wider and our jaw drop ever so slightly. And as we process it, it can sometimes change our perspective altogether.”

I really like how she links the current practice of data visualization enabled by new technology and the storytelling practice. It’s all about the (re-)enactment of a sociomaterial practice. I also like this idea of trying to think of data as a material to tell stories in a similar way that Aileen and I thought of using words to build a space.

I just think it would have been nice to have a reference to the work of people like Tufte who has explored the role of “envisioning information” as a contextual and narrative process in his numerous books - one of my favorite being Envisioning Information. Indeed it would be interesting to look at the current work (see the spreadsheet in the BW website) in the light of previous works.

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

I arrived nearly 2 weeks in London and was planning to get a phone fast but realized one needed a bank account to have one, and this takes some time.

I could have taken a pay-on-the-go phone, but thought, “better just to wait, I can survive a few days without a cell phone”. I can, this is confirmed but along the way I also realized how my perception of the city changed. When I go and meet people, I always have this worry that I might be late, or they might and they won’t be able to call me. I could go to a public phone but it is as if the phone booths don’t seem efficient anymore.

I went to this meeting in Hampstead and I got lost and was late. There were no public phones around. I had a few seconds of frustration and then I thought, “I’ll get there when I get there”… I was 20 minutes late and apologized. It was OK but I don’t think the person I was meeting could really picture someone without a cell phone.

What does all this tell us? How connected, technology dependent we are. I guess so. It also shows the materiality of these connections - cell phone, public phones, etc. More deeply I realized that I had this mix feeling of being alone, not being able to talk or text anyone, and a sense of freedom. Text messages are often these tags we send to each other, sharing our perceptions, waving at the other. They create a second layer of space. Yet, once this habit is put on hold, there’s a sense of freedom, even maybe adventure to walk in the city “on your own”. From being “disconnected” I became “unconnected”.

al

John Weeks just sent me a link to a great platform designed by The Economist:  http://thinkingspace.economist.com/#/explore

I like the design - the general space, but also the pictures with the red dots that point to the evocative objects of the person thinking space. It reminds us the materiality of thinking.  It is also interesting to see whether people really have spaces (locations), or if their thinking spaces consist mostly of objects (mobile, that they take with them in different places). I also like the collaborative aspect of it: people can build their own thinking space.

Thanks John!