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.””

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

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.    

Friday, Aileen and I were talking about the visitor account that is available on a computer at the installation site and how it was changing the affordances of the blog space - in this case increasing propinquity, and decreasing privacy. Interesting to see how a blog which is usually seen as public by essence has in fact degrees of privacy… Interesting also to increase propinquity (”traffic”) by adding an access in a physical location - as if the installation was becoming an extension of the blog, a door to its conversation space.

This blog was conceived as a semi-public space with a certain number of contributors who can write posts, while others can only post comments. We decided to create this account for visitors to interact with the maze and “build the space with their words” and suddenly the space changed with a diversity of potential authors and discursive practices - shorter messages, some “chat” style on the day of the opening night (the maze had then become a giant bulleting board), and others related to the experience of the space (the latests posts are more of this type).

One person mentioned to us if we were not willing to have these visitors’ posts posted on another page; he was worried that it might kill the discussion between the original contributors. We thought of it but Aileen and I agreed that it was part of the experiment and that it would be great if visitors read some of the posts and posted comments, and that it will be also great if the contributors to the blog kept posting while the installation (and the blog consequently) is open to the public.

The reading of the visitors’ posts is also a great source of learning. To see how people interpret our work and what it evokes to them - in some cases, their views of space. One visitor added the tag “body”: it was interesting that despite many of the discussions we had on this blog about materiality (particularly on how virtual was not synonym to immaterial), about sensory experiences, this tag had not been created.

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…)

As I was re-reading the introduction to the Design and the Elastic Mind catalogue (adapted in Seed)  by Paola Antonelli who curated the exhibition at MOMA last year (Feb-May 2008), a few passages seem relevant to the discussion on this blog. Let me share them with you.

- On the collaborative process and the interdisciplinary dialogue:

“Much of this is being done by bona fide designers, but scientists and artists have also turned to design to give method to their productive tinkering, what John Seely Brown has called “thinkering.” They all belong to a new culture in which experimentation is guided by engagement in the world and by open, constructive collaboration with colleagues and other specialists.”

“The figure of the designer is changing from formgiver to fundamental interpreter of an extraordinarily dynamic reality; one increasingly informed by science and mediated by technology.”

- On the importance of understanding and taking into account social practices:

“The most contemporary design theory is devoted to the quest for an environment, whether virtual or physical, built in human proportion.”

- On virtual space

“Without designers, instead of a virtual city of home pages with windows, doors, buttons, and links, the internet would still be a series of obscure strings of code, and appliances would be reduced to standardized skeletons of functions.  ”

It reminded me Milena’s post distinguishing between architectural and interpersonal cues (December 14). I guess I will add that the affordances of the technology are intertwined with the social and discursive practices of the people interacting in this virtual city.

Ciao,

al

As  I continue exploring Kolb’s work, here are a few interesting distinctions he makes (http://www.dkolb.org/sprawlingplaces/generalo/placethe.html):

1. distinguish an area, which is a stretch of space, from a place, which is one or more areas that are permeated with social norms or expectations for what “we” do there.
2. Places are areas of physical or virtual space permeated by social grammars, which prescribe divisions within the space and govern what is expected or appropriate to do and not to do there.

This notion of “social grammars” is very close to the notion of social designation that we defined with John Weeks (Fayard and Weeks, 2007) as an affordance for informal interactions.  Indeed our study of copier rooms in different organizations shows that ” settings such as photocopier rooms afford informal interaction to the extent that they bring people into contact with each other (propinquity), allow people to control the boundaries of their conversation (privacy), and provide legitimate rationalizations for people to stay and talk to each other (social designation).” It also reminded me of Alexander’s work and esp. a quote I posted on January 5th on the relationships between physical and social spaces. (more…)

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/ 

Hi,

Thursday I went to the Van Alen Institute (NY) to attend a workshop for the launch of the OOz project by Natalie Jereminjenko (one of the authors on this blog) http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/ooz/Natalie - who is a scientist, engineer and artist (I hope she’ll share soon her thoughts about the interactions between these different disciplines and about her very interesting projects). The OOz project explores the interactions between human and non-human agents, in this case, animals and ask us to question our mode of interactions with animals, and especially those influenced by the model of the zoo (e.g. animals in cages, “don’t feed the animals”).

The OOz project as well as many other projects by Natalie (such as the Environmental Health Clinic she opened at NYU) are projects that interrogate our interactions with the environment and try to think ways of stopping the mess we made with the climate and the environment.

These are topics dear to my heart, but the OOz project also raises questions related to topics we discussed on BSWW. First of all, I’m sure the concepts of human and non-human agents remind you of our discussion about technology and the notion of non-human agents proposed by Bruno Latour (see the post of November 29). Natalie is also questioning our definition of agency asking to rethink our relationship to animals as a relationship of reciprocity and not of superiority and fear (trying to keep them as far as we can). It’s interesting as Latour also referred animals, and particularly primates, to question the definition of agency. In a 1994 paper, Latour argues that the studies showing how primates develop complex social interactions question our usual definition of social interaction and social structure. He claims that these studies call for a reassessment of the usual distinction between the human agents and the others defined by the ability to enact complex social interactions. In OOz, Natalie introduces two types of non-human agents: animals and robots which look like animals (e.g. goose robots http://www.vestaldesign.com/design/ooz-goose/) with which, through which we can interact with animals. 

At the beginning of her presentation, she showed a small video animation about interactions in a museum. The museum is an institution with quite well-known scripts that, yet, have evolved with the technology. People don’t talk in museums. They go and look at the art silently. At the beginning of the room, there usually is a panel with the curator’s text - her / his discourse about the art work. People go in the room, read the panel and then go and look. Often, several people stand in front of the panel, but they rarely talk (a similar pattern occurs in front of the art works). Lately, the written discourse has been replaced by a sound device which leads to even less interactions  as these sounds device are individualistic. Natalie’s question is how the environment, space, a device, can shape the structure of the interactions? What happen if you change the device, and you make it a sound shared device? Will people start interacting? Will they move differently in the space? This seemed very close to the questions we asked with John Weeks in the context of the workplace: what happens if the copier machine is in a tiny room, with no other resources at the end of a corridor, or if it’s on a central corridor (e.g. nearby the elevator or the staircase) and/ or if it shelters other resources - such as the fax machine, the supplies cabinet, the mailboxes? 

In the context of online forums the question becomes: what happens if the founder or the first participants post very friendly messages, where they always say hi, ask for feedback, and say by or if, on the contrary, they post dry and short messages, with no relationship management? What kind of interactions will emerge in the forum? Can these interactions evolve in a different direction? If yes, what will trigger the change? I remember noting in some forums, the change of style for some participants depending on the style of the message they were replying to. For example, one participant (let’s call her Jeanne) posted a message and got two replies: one quite developed with some relationship management (Hi Jeanne, I found your question really interesting… Here are some thoughts. I hope this helps. Please let me know what you think, Joe) and another much dryer (Hi [no name]. Here is [the answer]. Mark).  What was interesting was how Jeanne’s responses differ depending on the style of the replies: she kept her nice friendly style in her response to Joe and adapted a dry minimalist style in replying to Mark. This was one example among others. More generally, forums develop their “style” (rarely explicitly defined, but implicitly emerging) and if one participant does not follow the “rules” of the forum’s language game, other participants will react - either telling them clearly that this not a suitable way of interacting, or just by ignoring them. These are the examples I am thinking of when I am suggesting that through discourse we are enacting affordances that trigger (or don’t trigger) interactions. 

Last, as I have lately been reflecting on the different disciplines I have been influenced by, I wanted to share with you this anecdote: listening to Natalie’s Thursday talking of bats, Thomas Nagel’s famous article “What is it Like to be a Bat” (1974). I could not helped smiling when Natalie refers to Nagel’s article!

 Have a nice weekend,

al 

 Contemporary artists question our perceptions of affordances, interrogating the functions of objects and the meaning of situations. One might think of the extreme questions by surrealists’ works such as  Marcel Duchamp’s fountain or Rene Magritte’s “This is not a pipe”. A similar questioning is at the core of Claudia’s work on chairs: what is a chair? Is a chair an object that affords sitting? Then what does it  becomes when you hang it from the ceiling, when you put it on stilts and take a way the sitting part, or when you make a cascade of  chairs? http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/34724.html  I also interpret Sophie Calle’s Prenez soin de Vous as an exploration of the “affordance” of the phrase “take care of yourself” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.artWhat does this phrase afford to Sophie Calle? She does not know. She does not know how to interpret it and thus she asks 107 women to interpret it for her - to tell her what they read, what they understand, what they feel. Does this phrase affords “support”, “caring”, “affection”? For the author of the words, if you take the literal meaning it does, for all these interpreters it does not.Yet this might show the difference between texts and artifacts: artifacts afford in the sense that they suggest and/ or limit actions; affordances are not infinite. Text can be endlessly interpreted and in some ways there are no limits.Then you’d tell me does it make sense to talk about the affordances enacted through discourse? I guess it does as here we are not looking at the content per se, at its interpretation, but at the discursive practices and how they help creating a sense of space that trigger some type of interactions and allow the building of a sense of shared identity. As you can see, I am exploring here. Any thoughts and comments are welcome. Thanks. al