In our discussion on Continuous City, Aileen and I discussed the role of technology in the play - how technology was “given” agency. I wanted to follow up on this idea of agency which was highlighted by Bruno Latour (1992, 1996, 2005) . Latour questioned the second-order role given to technology which is seen as passive, a tool used by human beings who are agents. He argues that agency is not a property or a capacity that belongs only to human beings, but that it emerges from the interactions between humans and non-humans, and in that sense, is relational. In a similar vein, Lucy Suchman invites us to redefine our notion of agency based “on foundations quite different from those of a humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate things” (Suchman, 2007).

In organization studies, scholars like Orlikowski (2007) also revisit the notion of practice and suggest that while most organizational scholars focus on social issues, they tend to forget materiality - either disregarding it, downplaying it or taking it for granted. Orlikowski claims that organization studies need to take materiality seriously into account as every aspect of organizing involves some “stuff” - whether visible like bodies, offices, desks, phones, computers, books, papers or invisible like data and voice network, electricity water and sewage infrastructures. She argues that “materiality is not an incidental or intermittent aspect of organizational life; it is integral to it” (Orlikowski, 2007: 1436). Our work with John Weeks on space and informal interactions belongs to a similar approach as we claimed that most organizational scholars ignored space (one aspect of materiality) while it played a key role in understanding interactions in organizations.

I personally became interested in this materiality issue while sitting in Francisco Varela’s class during my MA in Cognitive Science and then two years later when I read Being There: Putting Brain, Body and the World Together Again (Clark, 1996) and Cognition in the Wild by Hutching. Clark (a philosopher) develops a theory of cognition as the interactions between the brain, the body and the world. Cognition is not only the results of the computation of internal representations, but it is shaped by “the social and ecological settings in which we must act” (Clark, 1996: 221). Similarly, Hutchins (a cognitive anthropologist) who argues that in order to understand cognition, one needs to go out of the lab and study it “in the wild”, highlights the importance of social and material context. In Cognition in the Wild he studies cognition in the Navy and shows that navigation is an activity distributed between different individuals and different artifacts. His work greatly influenced me when I started doing an ethnography of air traffic controllers in the Control center for Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports with Wendy Mackay. Our observations showed how air traffic control was a distributed activity involving not only the internal representation of one controller, but the internal representations of different controllers in the team as well as the paper flight strips, the annotations on them, their arrangement on the board, and the Radar. 

The agency of technology has become even more relevant with the development of ubiquitous computing and the increasing role of online communication in human relationships. Turkle’s work which shows how people use computers not merely as tools to do things but how they interact through them - not only to communicate with others, but also exploring different identities - and to a certain extent with them. More than just prostheses, extensions of the self, technology - computers, cell phones, Ipods - have become our companions and they have changed our way of interacting.

I think it is fair to argue that artists also reflect upon the nature of technology and its agency. For example, in plays like Weems’ Continuous City, technology becomes central - not only as a material to support the actors’ interactions but also in some ways it becomes the main actor on the stage (see our discussion on the post of November 23rd). Re-reading Orlikowski’s point about the invisible “stuff” in organizations such as data’s networks I thought of Natalie Jereminjenko’s  Dangling String (see November 3rd).In a similar way, Terrain’s by John Klima is “the culmination of Klima’s explorations into ‘the real world as it exists in data’” (http://www.cityarts.com/terrain/index.html). It is digital interactive display that represents virtual data into physical forms and allows the “human” to interact real time and thus transforms the physical presentation.Hansen and Rubin’s Listening post (see November 3^rd) also explore how technology shapes our interactions and how online communication which can be seen as connecting us, allowing us to build communities, can also become a cacophony where voices talk in the void.Hence, technology becomes the matter with which artists work and play, but also the matter they question and reflect upon. By developing interactive installations like Klima’s Terrain or Train, (http://www.cityarts.com/train/index.html) or Utterback’s (see all the installations at the Act / react exhibition http://www.mam.org/act/index.htm or Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMa curated by Paula Antonelli http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/) they also in some ways revisit the idea of agency and create networks of human and non-humans from whose interactions’ agency emerges. What Aileen and I want to explore in our current work are the interactions between materiality (technology, space) and social interactions: what are the socio-material practices that we develop in online forums, blogs?In the installation, our aim is to “embody” online interactions by representing them through the structure of the maze and the discourse projected on it. The structure of the maze will represent different potential interactions and people will walk through a maze of words (discourse projected on semi-transparent panels). The public (in the maze or anywhere else) can create the projected discourse by posting on the blog. 

As I am finishing writing this post, I am struck by how the questions we are exploring in BSWW are questions that I have been exploring from different perspectives at different moments of my life. I also find fascinating to note the similarities between the work of people working in so many different disciplines and fields - sociology, philosophy, organizational studies, anthropology, neuroscience and art. This is why I believe taking a multidisciplinary approach is so rich as it allows you to turn around the object of exploration and see if from different perspectives, through different lenses and deepen your understanding. I know this is again a long post but I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts on these issues. The great thing about this blog is that contributors all belong to different fields allowing us to share our various perspectives on issues related to interactions, space, virtual communication, and technology. 

Looking forward to your thoughts, al

Yesterday I went to see a multimedia play Continuous City at the BAM (Brooklyn, NY) (http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=123). I was looking forward to going as it was exploring many of the issues I am interested in, issues that we are exploring in Building_Space_With_Words: the interactions between the physical and the virtual space, connectivity, how technology shape our interactions, online communication, a sense of community, what is home. 

Yet, and despite the great technical ingeniousness (e.g. multitude of screens opening up and closing, several movies projected on different sides of the stage), I was somewhat disappointed coming out. First of all, as soon as I came in the Harvey Theatre and saw the stage with its screens and tables with computers and web cams, I immediately thought of a play I saw in Singapore in 2003 and that I loved: a stage with several tables and computers, screens, video projected interactions highlighting how our interactions in a global and connected world have become multiple and fragmented. The play I saw in Singapore was describing the world of call centers and off-shoring in India presenting to the audience the backstage of call centers in Bangalore and thus questioning the influence of global telecommunication and exploring virtual identities. It showed people in India learning how to speak with an American accent, learning things about popular culture (including TV shows and baseball teams) in order to “sound Americans” to the American calling them. It highlighted the de-doubling of personalities and presented the life of these people who have to hide their real identity and work in the middle of the night because it’s the middle of the day in America. This play involved several interviews, clips and to me this documentary part was extremely interesting. 

As the show unfolded I kept thinking of this previous play and had this feeling of “déjà vu”.  The funny part of it is that when I got home, I went on my computer and searched on google: “multimedia play call centers London based company Singapore”. I added the London based company because I remembered that the play I saw in Singapore was done by a London based company and I eventually found the play: Alladeen (http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/digital/Programs/TechAtTuck/InsideOutsourcing/HopkinsPressRelease.pdf). Two of the co-directors were indeed from Moritori, a London based company, but the director was Marianne Weems, who is also the director of Continuous City! That explained my feeling of ”déjà vu”: I lacked the surprise of the first viewer.I preferred Alladeen to Continuous City. I remember Alladeen more as a documentary - although it was presented as a piece of fiction but the “data” (the videos of interviews) were more central to the play. What I really liked in Continuous City were the short clips presenting people from around the world (often living in Toronto) telling us what was their definition of home. I wish we could have seen more of these clips as well as more clips from the different cities mentioned in the Weems’ note (Nairobi, Mexico City, Delhi and Rio) in the BAM program. It might my ethnographic mind but I wanted more of it. 

I personally thought the plot was weak and it just proved me once more how difficult it is to write a play with “a message”. Theatre, novels are works of fiction and when they are too laden with a message, they lost their artistic value. In that sense, the work of Pico Iyer on similar topics - the global soul, the sense of home - seems to use a genre that might be better suited to the discussion of these themes. Listening to the witnesses on the video I could not help thinking of his various books - The Global Soul, Video Night in Kathmandu, etc. - where Iyer explores what identity and home means in this global and mobile world. 

Jason Zinovan’s critique in the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/theater/reviews/21cont.html?partner=rss&emc=rss) also regrets the absence of a real dramatic dimension. He notes that technology is at the center: “Technology is a vivid character in this play, but you wish it weren’t the only one”. Indeed, the use of technology is key to the play and one could claim that Marianne Weems by putting it at the center highlights the agency of technology as it has been highlighted by Bruno Latour (1992) and Sherry Turkle (1997; 2005). Technology becomes a character in Continuous City as JV, Sam, or Mike.

In fact, I thought many times of Sherry Turkle’s work watching the play. For example, when you see Sam, the little girl telling her nanny that if she wants to tell her something she can just send her a message on her computer and they end up chatting while they are in the same house. Puzzling to our definition of reality was also the last interaction between Sam and her dad Mike who is finally coming back home after weeks of travel when he’s been video- phoning Sam. Mike is very happy and tells Sam that he’s in the taxi and that she’ll see him soon and Sam startled replied “but I see you, you’re on the computer”. 

On the technology used in the play, video was the only medium used apart from 5 or 6 messages between Sam and her nanny. While there are many video tools nowadays, online interactions are still mostly text-based. However, the use of video is due to the constraints of the stage: it would be hard to show mostly text-based interactions on stage. I was struck by all these talking heads on the screen which are often what video ends up being but which is also why I personally very rarely use video on Skype. I chat or call. I use video only when I am calling with my children so that they can see their grandparents or friends, or if I’m interacting with my nephews and my godson. I will then make faces and show them things of my context in a similar way to which Mike, the dad, in Continuous City goes on “virtual shopping” with his daughter for lunch while he’s in Mexico or he plays virtual hide and seek while he’s in a park in China. I really like these two passages, which reminded me some of the experiments I did with my students while teaching a distributed class (using videoconference) between Singapore and France and the related research I did exploring how people modify their communicative practices to build a virtual space to interact on (Fayard, 2006; see also the work of Austin Henderson on this notion of a virtual space for interactions e.g Dourish, Adler, Belloti and Henderson, 1996;  Henderson and Henderson, 2000). Hence, although I was not completely convinced by the narrative of the play, it triggered many questions and reflections which are very relevant to our project and that I wanted to share with you.

I know Aileen saw the play yesterday but I did not have a chance to talk with her. She just left me a message on my cell yesterday saying that she thought it was amazing. I’m looking forward to reading her take on the play. And of course, if any one else has seen the play, please share your impressions with us. al    

Hi, I found this article really fascinating as it puts in perspective all the discussions and articles about virtual work, virtual space and new forms of working and interacting. We might be able to work from home, work at distance, virtually, across time and geographies, many different technologies are developed to support these distributed interactions. Yet, social interactions and physical environments still matter and people look for shared spaces offering them social interactions, the “human moment”. This does not mean that we should not work at distance, interact online, but it might highlight what these virtual spaces need to afford so that people can interact and build a sense of community or shared identity.

Laura Forlano (cited in the NY article below) examined in her dissertation mobile virtual work practices in the media and information technology industries. As part of her doctoral work she did a very interesting ethnographic study of people working from cafes and parks.

Here is the article that you can also find at

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/20/business/businessspecial2/20cowork.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=businessspecial2

 ”They’re working on their Own, Just side by Side” by Dan Frost, NY Times, Feb 20, 2008

Contemplating his career path a couple of years ago, a young computer programmer named Brad Neuberg faced a modern predicament. “It seemed I could either have a job, which would give me structure and community,” he said, “or I could be freelance and have freedom and independence. Why couldn’t I have both?”As someone used to hacking out solutions, Mr. Neuberg took action. He created a word — coworking, eliminating the hyphen — and rented space in a building, starting a movement.While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas.“It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering Northern California, who rents a desk for $175 a month at one of Mr. Neuberg’s original sites, the Hat Factory. “And if you’re not nourished, how can you be creative?”Coworking sites are up and running from Argentina to Australia and many places in between, although a wiki site on coworking shows that most are in the United States. While some have grown-up-sounding names, most seem connected somewhere between the communalism of the 1960s and the whimsy of the dot-com days of the ’90s, like the Hive Cooperative in Denver, Office Nomads in Seattle, Nutopia Workspace in Lower Manhattan and Independents Hall in Philadelphia.The coworkers, armed with Wi-Fi laptops and cellphones, are in some ways offering a techie twist on the age-old practice of artists or writers teaming up to rent studio space.Most coworkers say they were drawn to the spaces for the same reasons that inspired Mr. Neuberg: they like working independently, but they are less effective when sitting home alone.“Even people who are antisocial feel a need to be around other people for at least part of the day while they’re working,” said Laura Forlano, a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who has studied people working in communal offices and cafes.Coworking comes in many flavors. The Hat Factory in San Francisco is a live-work loft that’s home to three technology workers who open up during the day to other people. Some companies, like Citizen Agency, a San Francisco Internet consulting firm that has done the most to evangelize coworking, have an open-door policy, in which people rent desks but others are free to drop in and use the Wi-Fi or the conference room.Some companies rent out desks to the nomadic workers, hoping some of their Internet mojo will rub off. Yet others have started coworking spaces as businesses unto themselves, like a community version of the corporate business centers operated by the Regus Group.Tara Hunt, a co-owner of Citizen Agency, which calls its office Citizen Space, has listed (in a blog, of course) some principles of coworking. They include collaboration, openness, community, sustainability and accessibility.Many of the ideas come from the open-source software movement, in which people share their work freely with little regard for financial gain. Taking a nod from that movement, the people involved in coworking share their experiences and ideas on a Web site, coworking.pbwiki.com.Despite such ideals, the arrangement does not always work perfectly. Thor Muller, the chief executive of Get Satisfaction, a San Francisco start-up, said he had opened his offices to friends to come in and work. One day, a friend started aggressively recruiting Satisfaction’s employees for his own start-up, and he was banned from the office.“There should be honor among start-ups,” Mr. Muller said, still rankled.Ms. Hunt and Chris Messina, her partner in Citizen Agency, said they have had to make sure that people respect their space and leave it clean.“Someone wanted to bring her dog in, and we had to say, ‘That actually doesn’t work for us,’ ” Ms. Hunt said. And Mr. Vlahides at the Hat Factory griped about “some humorless European guys” who sat at the common table and talked loudly on their cellphones instead of going outside. Citizen Space lets people drop in without paying, but if someone uses the space regularly, the group asks the person to pay for a key. For $350 a month, a worker can rent a desk and get a key to Citizen Space for 24-hour access. For $250 a month, you get only a key. The space has seven desks, a large table for drop-ins, a private conference room, whiteboards and other office amenities — some less typical, like beer and wine.Ms. Hunt and Mr. Messina say they don’t make a profit on the space. “We could get our own office with 800 square feet and spend the same money,” Mr. Messina said, “or we can be here, and have a space where people can come and work and have meet-ups that serve the community, and it gives us the opportunity to meet some fascinating people.”Mr. Messina and Ms. Hunt are so passionate about coworking that they even sell their technology customers on it. While consulting with a San Francisco bag maker, Timbuk2, they persuaded the company to create some coworking desks in its offices, attracting technology folks to help stimulate ideas.Other coworking spaces are set up as businesses. Roman Gelfer, a former equities trader, and Sasha Vasilyuk, a writer, started Sandbox Suites in San Francisco last October, renting out 4,300 square feet on three floors. Their rates start at $135 for a once-a-week drop-in slot and go up to $495 a month for a private desk.“If you build a space from the ground up for coworking and networking as well, you could do a better job, and I definitely believe it’s a great business,” Mr. Gelfer said.Still, he allows free events in the space, like hackathons — weekends in which programmers get together and build, say, Facebook applications.The Hat Factory has a more informal feel. One might call it messy. The lore is that the room, in an industrial loft, once belonged to a woman who made hats. It’s now occupied by a Web video producer, a guy who runs a Web video start-up called Viddyou and a Yahoo employee. About seven others work in the space, which is open during daytime business hours.The Hat Factory vibe is more like a dorm than an office, with Mr. Vlahides throwing candy across the floor to tease the resident cat, and bedsheets hanging from the ceiling.A coworking site in Brighton and Hove, England, called the Werks, is an example of how the networked world can spread an idea across borders. James McCarthy, a founder, had left his job in information technology at American Express and with a partner rented a 6,000-square-foot building that once belonged to Barclays Bank.They rent to artists, software developers and designers, among others, with hopes of someday being profitable but also allowing free drop-ins to spread the word.Similarly, Fernando Maclen in Buenos Aires had read online accounts of Citizen Space and a coworking space in Vancouver, British Columbia, and for a college class wrote a paper about how he would create a coworking site.“In less than three months, I made my business plan (based on the experiences posted by the coworking group) and asked my parents for financial support,” he said in an e-mail message.Mr. Maclen’s space in Buenos Aires is now half full with eight workers, but he said that his own small design studio had benefited “200 percent” from the arrangement.“We, as a design firm, have our own projects, but we outsource parts of them, very often to designers inside the coworking space,” he said. “They do the same with us. We complement each other. The speed is incredible. We don’t waste time with endless phone calls or IM chats, we simply walk to the office next door and there they are.”The coworking wiki page lists many countries where people would like to start sites, or work in one if someone else would get it going.People who are coworking feel a bond to other coworkers.One day last month, a technology worker from Montreal, Duncan Ward, set up his laptop at Citizen Space in San Francisco. “I just came to town for a week to do some networking for my start-up,” he said. He had heard of the site from a friend who was setting up a coworking site in Montreal.As for Mr. Neuberg, who started the movement, he is no longer coworking, although he still promotes it. Like many other talented programmers , he took a job at Google.  al

Hi, as mentioned earlier, Building_Space_With_Words (BSWW) emerged from my attempt to explore the relationships between two parts of my research. The first one is my work with John Weeks on Space, Informal Interactions and Affordances. I am describing this work more in details below. My interest for space and informal interactions also led me to study interactions of commuters in train (I was myself commuting 2 1/2 hours /3 hours / day - fortunately only 3 days a week! I was lucky many people on the train were commuting on a daily basis). To learn more about this short study, see http://www.bazartropicando.com/thetrain/TCE.htmlThere is an increasing recognition of the importance of informal interactions in organizations, but research examining the effects of the physical environment on them has produced contradictory results, and practical attempts to control the level of informal interaction by design have been marked by unintended consequences. Some of my research with John Weeks (IMD), based on observations of people interacting in the copier rooms of different organizations, lead her to explore the properties, or affordances, of space that trigger informal interactions. These observations were interpreted using the concept of affordances developed by ecological psychologist James Gibson. The affordances of an environment are the possibilities for action called forth by it to a perceiving subject. Thus, to humans, handles afford grasping; paths afford locomotion; slippery slopes afford falling. While research on affordances has typically focused on individual behavior, we extend it to social behaviors, such as informal interactions in organizational settings (Fayard and Weeks, 2007). The affordances of an environment arise from its social meaning, conventional rules regarding use, and its physical properties.We identify the social and physical characteristics that produce the propinquity, privacy, and social designation necessary for an environment to afford informal interactions.  Propinquity refers to the fact that informal interactions can occur only in places where people encounter each other. All else equal, the more traffic that flows through and past a place, the greater the chance of an encounter. The architecture of a space - how accessible it is, how enclosed, how large - influences both the opportunity and the social obligation for interaction.  Privacy, the ability to control the boundaries of interaction, has two dimensions:  spatial and temporal. People must have confidence that they are heard by those to whom they are talking, but not overheard by others. Privacy also implies control over access to oneself: to the extent that being in a place obligates us to interact with those we would rather avoid, or prevents us from exiting an interaction when we desire, it is not a private place. Lastly, some spaces feel like natural, comfortable places for informal interaction, and this depends on a set of imperfectly shared expectations and understandings, social designation, about what is appropriate and normal in these spaces.  Our work aims to show the importance of space, highlighting the need to develop a conception of space as jointly physical and social in its influence. My question in this project is: do these affordances make sense in virtual spaces?Do people reenact them through language, through discursive practices? If they do, how do they do that? How do their practices evolve?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