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…)

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…

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,

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

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

I’ve been reading a lot of practice theory lately - it’s a recent fashion in organization studies literature which I need to pay attention to since I am in a business school. Having come from art and design where people talk about their “practice” all the time, it’s interesting to see how a re-valuation of practices is going on elsewhere, at least in management academia (although I don’t see our MBAs talking about “my practice” any time soon). AL’s already mentioned Wanda Orlikowski from MIT; others within the broad field of management include those who view strategy as practice (including my colleague at Said, Richard Whittington, see the website for this community of scholars.  I note that at the European Academy of Management conference in Liverpool later this year has, in addition to the strategy as practice crowd, a new track which is marketing as practice. I’m currently drawing on this work, and the underlying theories of practice including Schatzki et al (2001) and Reckwitz (2002).  I’ve also recently been reading “The Design of Everyday Life” by Elisabeth Shove et al (Berg 2007) which combines theories of consumption with practice theory to look specifically at how and why people renew/refurbish/replace their kitchens so often and the practices around which they do so; digital photography and DIY. The last but one chapter covers Product Design and traces the object-focus evident in theory and practice; to different kinds of User-Centred Design; to propose a Practice-Oriented Product Design in which designers are attentive to the practices of end users. The authors’ manifesto for Practice-Oriented Product Design is here. It starts as follows…”Designers fear they are the lackeys of capitalism. Of course they are. But they are also architects of society.” Anyone who has been through an art school training whether in art or design or something else will have been taught how to look at objects and how to make objects. One of the current questions in design education is to what extent this tradition prepares designers for designing assemblages of humans and non-humans, arranged as “services” or “experiences”. Or as practices.

We’d like to welcome two new contributors who accepted our invitation to join our conversation:

• Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design at MOMA. Paola’s experience in architecture and design, and her reflections on design as art (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paola_antonelli_treats_design_as_art.html), on space and technology makes her a perfect contributor to our conversation. The exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind she curated at MOMA last year dealt with many of the themes discussed on this blog. We are also looking forward to her insights on multidisciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, social scientists, designers and architects.
• Maciej Fiszer, visual artist, stage designer and scenographer. We are curious to hear more about his work on space and our interpretation / perception of space. Moreover, we are very interested in hearing about his collaboration with choreographers, theater directors and anthropologists. He also provided us very useful feedback when we started exploring different materials and ideas for the maze. 

Check the Who’s who page for more information.Cheers,   Aileen and al 

Aileen and I are very happy to welcome you to our conversation about space, physical and virtual and how it shapes and influences interactions and communication. It started with my sharing with Aileen my willingness to bring together two streams of my research - space and informal interactions and discourse and online communication - to present them in a “different way”. I was thinking of creating an environment where people reflect on how space, physical and virtual, influenced their communicative practices. I had some ideas of how to do that and Aileen gave me feedback on these and offered new ones.  That’s how our collaboration started. Our main question is how do people build a sense of “place” which supports their interactions, when the only material they have is words?  We suggest to take the metaphor of virtual space seriously and explore the question of how to build space with words. To do so, we need to consider interactions and communication in both physical and virtual spaces.  We both believe on the importance of sharing different perspectives in allowing us to deepen our understanding of things and this is why we would like to invite you in our conversation. Being involved in the conversation including commenting on the posts as well as posting a new message - which may include a description of a project you have been involved (art, design, architecture, field study, etc.) that relates to space and communication, an article you read, an experience you had a photo or a video that you find relevant.Looking forward to the conversation.al & Aileen