http://web.mit.edu/d_rosen/www/d_rosenberg_smarchs_2009.pdf

http://plannedsp.blogspot.com

http://unspecifiedform.blogspot.com

arguments that are v. relevant to your discourse, best, steven

I like your point re. the involvement of users as co-designers of the process. I guess it is hard for architects as well as it is for designers to let go complete ownership and involve users to the point where they become co-designers. I remember debating this idea with engineers, computers scientists when I was working on participatory design projects. Users are nice but they don’t really know what they want, they don’t know what is good design, they don’t know what is possible, etc. To some extent these statements are probably true but that’s why the dialogue and the co-design makes sense.

I am not sure I understand what you mean by “those which facilitated predictability of the process”?
As for what were the walls in the installation buidling_space_with_words, this is an excellent question! I am not sure… The panels were metaphors of walls but there were also constraining people’s movements, paths, and affording certain moves. There were also the “walls” enacted by the discursive practices that emerged from the blog discussion as well as the “walls” created by the technology - how to post, how to log in, etc.

Last, I can’t agree more with your last point on hanging a picture frame. I always give the example that although there’s always a social interpretation of physical objects, environment, at the end of the day, one cannot go through a closed door.

Thanks for reviving that discussion,

al

For some reason, it felt like connecting dots, or building a lego-like figure… I knew I can never build her life in its entirety, but I liked the idea of alternative lives since whenever I started building with a different object in mind, her life looked different as well.

As I started observing the installation from the upper floors of MoMA, it came clear to me that I was initially perplexed by the way the objects were grouped/categorized. They are never like that in my house, or anywhere else I’ve been to. I immediately compared Dong’s installation to the sight of the interior of historic landmarks. They are usually organized to mirror a day in the life of the people who used to live inside the house/building. Dong’s installation was different. It was (at least to me) like an unrolled life, stretched to its limits, where ’similar’ objects were attracted to each other like magnets, and any attempt to consciously separate them resulted in fighting this magnetic force. Even if all visitors reconfigured the objects in the installation, it felt as if they were going to return back to their initial configuration.

To end this comment, while I understood the context (even more as I read Dong’s essay), the objects felt decontextualized to me. For example, imagine a book in which all words are grouped according to their root…

Dong mentioned in her essay that her mother, at one point, forgot the premise of “waste not” and continued collecting ‘things’ for the sake of collecting. This made me think (like an engineer) that there is a threshold of objects/possessions a person can have, and still have a relationship with them. Which begs the typical question, if today’s society and technology help increase this threshold or not.

Best,
Bojan

on the materiality of objects, you should definitely go to MOMA to see “Waste Not”. This shows you their “weight” and “power” (at least you can imagine what it meant for Song Dong’s mother and the cathartic power of putting this installation together with him).

Reading your “morbid” thoughts, I also thought of this great book by Annemarie Mol, The body multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. It is an ethnography of atheroscleroses in a Dutch hospital. Mol claims it is “empirical philosophy” (p.1). She makes a strong ontological claim as she argues that the disease, atherosclerosis is enacted differently through different objects, different practices (the patient, the GP, the vascular surgeon, etc.) and “reality multiplies” (p. 5).

On the importance of embodiment and flesh:
“the humane does not reside only in psychological matters. However important feelings and interpretations may be, they are not alone in making up what life is all about. Day-to-day reality, the life we live, is also a fleshy affair. A matter of chairs and tables, food and air, machines and blood. And bodies” (p. 27).

If I were still sitting in the office next to yours, I will just knock at your door and drop the book for you to peruse. I am now sitting in London and I can’t do more than sharing the main ideas and the link to the book… http://www.amazon.com/Body-Multiple-Ontology-Practice-Cultural/dp/0822329174

Or you wait until you come to London or I come and visit in NY…

I guess this is one of the limit of “building space with words”

al

I’m still struggling in trying to ‘objectify’ myself, and Milena’s reference to Bloom’s and Spelke’s work made me really think about the distinction between ‘things’ and humans. Morbidly enough, a dead person’s body is mainly seen as an object (and treated as such), but what makes it human is the magical power of ‘life.’ And when designing ’smart’ objects (smart meaning they can think), designers supposedly infuse an ‘elixir of life’ into the objects, and the more they ‘behave’ like humans, the more they are seen as humans (giving them a human-like physicality goes a long way in this case). I remember that Hutchins argued how many times technology is designed to mimic or replace certain human behavior, whereas the true potential is hidden in going beyond that in facilitating new activities. Maybe something similar can be said and argued about the e-book readers.

BTW, just remembered a similar discussion on objects and humans with a friend of mine who was trying to teach me how to meditate. The idea was to achieve de-objectification by, in my view, forgetting about the objects in your possession, and in particular, forgetting about your body and the affordancies/constraints coming with it. I don’t think I ever did that. And now I think this is really off topic

Best,
Bojan

thanks Milena for your comment. I can’t prevent myself of thinking of Turkle’s notion of evocative objects and how their physicality is associated with emotions, feelings, memories that they evoke. We go back again to the Proust’s madeleine that we discussed a while ago with Yasmine (it seems that this is an important theme of this discussion).

Thanks for reminding us Spelke’s work. I’m wondering if Bojan really meant to consider human beings as objects or if he wanted to highlight our embodiment, the importance of materiality. It’s interesting because his comment is in some way reverse to the actor network theory approach which claims that objects can be actors, that non-humans can be actants… Bojan once to remind us that humans are embodied, “materials” in some ways.

It reminds me the book by the philospher / cognitive scientist, Andy Clark: Being there.

http://www.amazon.com/Being-There-Putting-Brain-Together/dp/0262531569/ref=pd_sim_b_12

I read it a while ago - after I read Cognition in the Wild by Hutchins - and thought the argument really compelling.

Thanks Milena, I don’t think it’s a bit off topic. On the contrary!

al

also as background what you say about forgetting that we ourselves are objects is interesting, there’s some work in cog sci from paul bloom in particular suggesting that in our naive ontology we don’t actually categorise humans as objects.

the claim is following Spelke’s work on infant object perception that we think of objects in terms of boundedness - one thing doesn’t penetrate another; cohesiveness - if you pull one bit of something the rest comes with it; continuity - objects move through space without disappearing and reappearing elsewhere; and contact - one thing moves when another thing acts on it.

Notice that humans don’t obey these principles [e.g. humans do move without anything touching them] and in fact as predicted we don’t think of humans as objects and we tend to be surprised when humans move solely in accordance with physical laws, if we see people falling or tripping over for instance, which according to Bloom explains slapstick comedy..

sorry if this is a bit off topic, it’s just what i’ve been thinking about recently..

Let me use an example from my childhood to explain this in greater detail (hopefully I’m not going to be very boring with this). More than twenty years ago I had a pair of Adidas Ivan Lendl tennis shoes (white leather with blue stripes). I liked these shoes very much. They were very comfortable and aesthetically pleasing to my eyes (back then I told my friends I loved the shoes because they were ‘simple’ and ‘walked’ as I wanted them to). I was able to recognize my Lendl shoes by merely touching them. One day, sadly, I discovered that the leather of the inside of the shoes started to tear apart (exactly at the heel of the shoe), so shortly after my feet started to hurt. I tried to ignore the pain for a while, but at the end I had to ‘retire’ my shoes. Last year I visited my family and helped my dad clean up the garage. And I found my shoes. They looked good from the outside, but as soon as I touched them, I felt the rip of the leather inside the shoes and remembered the pain it used to give me in the past. I didn’t have the heart to throw them twenty years ago, and I kept them in the garage last year as well. The shoes aged, as my memories had. But for that one moment last summer, I used all my senses to access a memory that is multidimensional and difficult to ‘store’ digitally. I could have tried to use ‘technology’ to capture my experience with the tennis shoes. For example, I could have written an essay twenty years ago, or I could have taken a photograph, among other things. And yet, it would not have been the same. I’ve had many shoes after my Lendl’s, and I still buy athletic shoes on a monthly basis (I quickly wear them off), but I don’t keep them as evocative objects. So I forget about them. I can’t store them since I have limited space and a temporary apartment. Interestingly, several years ago I started taking pictures of some of my shoes in order to show them to my brother (in case he wanted them). I haven’t done that in the last three years and I haven’t seen the pictures again.

In some way, objects, as my old Adidas shoes, compress our memories while preserving some of their tacit dimensions. We use material objects as memory shortcuts in creating meaning of our environment. Printed books have similar capacity. They can stimulate more of our senses by having a distinct texture, sent, or stains from their daily (ab)use in proximity of coffee drinkers. How do we capture this in digital form? Or should we? Is my blog going to age the same as my shoes, my records, or my first grade alphabet book? Is my digital photo library going to have the fingerprints of my friends on the photos? I’m not quite sure. My blog is going to have the comments of the ones who read it. Perfectly stored and ready to be accessed at any time. My digital photos are also going to be there, forever, perfectly ordered, with my personal comments and comments from my friends. They will have information regarding the time the photo was taken, the type of camera, exposure, etc. And all this memory can be accessed with perfect retrieval. In some perverse way, the materiality of objects gives them ability to age with respect to their form. With digital objects, in my opinion, it is the content that ages the most.

I can live without many of my physical objects (as Anne-Laure does these days), but most of the time I choose not to. Information technology helps me deal with it, but it doesn’t substitute everything. Nor I want it to. I full-heartedly embrace the digitization of our spaces, and at the same time I long for and romanticize the fragility of our physical objects. I have many of my books in digital form (related to Milena’s question), but when at home, I read the printed ones. Still, while on the go, or when I need a quick search, having books in digital format is indispensible.

Well, it is about time to end this extended comment. I just want to add that we often forget ourselves as being objects, among other things. We look at our reflection in the bathroom mirror every morning. We shower, wear clothes, age, and use our presence as objects (increasingly in digital form as well) to make sense of ourselves and of our relationships with other objects. Being objectified, we are living memory containers. And when we need to refresh our memory or even permanently delete parts of it, we get a new haircut, new shoes, new email address (not a new facebook account though, at least not that often). Same as when we throw out our old winter jackets and audio cassettes.

Sorry for the lengthy comment, but it is a rainy Saturday in Brooklyn

In the call for the book, there are several themes:

One is entitled “My home is my computer > compression of space: A home is not a house anymore. What defines “home”? Photo albums, books, CDs, DVDs,, TV set, Hi-Fi sysem, documents, letters and much more fill the shelves and cupboards of our houses. They were part of the construction what we defined as home. Nowadays we carry around a big part of our home in only one device”. Yet does this one device has the same symbolic value that all these other objects? What means more to us? The pack of pictures that we carry in our bag, or stuck in the middle of our favorite book, or the 1000s of pictures accessible on flickr or saved on our iphoto? An interesting question to explore.

Another theme is very relevant to our discussion:
“Belongings: The relation to belongings is reconsidered. To live one year just out of one’s suitcase / backpack is not a challenge anymore. You do not even miss the things which you left behind. Questioning the meaning of assets often results in the disassociation from things and furthermore from a settled life”.

I can relate to this last paragraph as we are moving from NY to London in a few weeks and for the last 5 weeks, we’ve been camping in our apartment: one bag of clothes each, a few books, toys for the kids, a futon, and a table and chairs that friends lend us. All our stuff is in a container on a boat… and me who is attached to my stuff, I realized I don’t miss it. There’s enough a sort of pleasure to this emptiness… You feel lighter… Yet this ignores another role of the stuff - the symbolic, the emotional one… Yes, I can leave without all my books but I love them, and I’ll be happy to see them again, because the books as objects, with their stories, their marked pages, annotations have a meaning.

back again to our discussion on materiality…

al

maybe i’m particularly attached to how text is typeset and have developed reading strategies for actual books that i can’t imagine working on electronic versions, not to mention the attachment that one can form to particular editions and copies of one’s favourite books.

i guess i feel like technology might enable to carry with you the same information, but not necessarily the sense of place that being surrounded by your own library provides.