I could relate something from the movie “The Matrix”. A virtual world and how things happens inside. I liked it and interested in research on this new idea on depicting virtual interactions in to physical world…I will do some more analysis and come some other time to understand in detail and see how ideas live in this virtual world…

……So it is with more than a little sense of mission that she talks about bringing together the different strands of activity in the building. “I’ve always had this interest in meeting places and social spaces. This place is an interesting interface between patients and doctors and scientists. When I worked on the subject of genetics I was fascinated by the scientists – often they work in a bubble and, of course, there’s no reason why they should be directly involved in patient care. But everyone has so much to learn from each other.”

In the building this is reflected in many ways. There are shared entrances and social spaces. There is just one café, with furniture designed by Donachie using timber and craftsmanship sourced just a matter of miles away. At the centre of the building’s courtyard, Donachie has helped create a garden and built The Disc, a huge concrete circle which acts as a focal point, seating area and picnic spot. It has the capacity to warm up, using the waste heat from the centre’s labs and refrigeration units.”

and here’s the link: http://living.scotsman.com/visual-arts/Arts-Review-Artists-doing-the.4861951.jp

Hi,I just wanted to share a few thoughts I had yesterday after going to see a choreography by Pina Bausch at the BAM in Brooklyn (http://www.bam.org/view.aspx?pid=128).I think they fit quite well in the context of the discussion Milena’s posts started today (Thanks Milena for these two detailed and rich posts that helped a lot in clarifying a certain number of concepts). Pina Bausch’s show, Bamboo Blues (which I personally loved) is not at all about the issues we discussed in this blog. Among other things, it again reminded me of the importance of materiality.However, looking at the dancers on stage, I thought of how it was the antinomy is a way to what we were discussing here. Indeed it was all about bodies and movements in space and sound. I could not help thinking of my post of  December 11 on the NY Times article on the sense of touch. Dancers on the stage through their movements (in the context of the sound track) reconstructed a shared space (on the stage). Looking at them you realize the importance of embodiment as well as of sound… It also highlights the power of non-verbal behaviors and communication.  At one point I had started looking at the role of materiality in the online forums and for diverse reasons, I did not pursue. I might now go back to the data and my notes.  I am not sure what to do with us apart that it might show some of the limits of the comparison… which does not mean that the comparison is meaningless. It just reminds us what it can / might tell us, and what it can’t / might not. Ciao,al 

Hi again. Previously, I suggested that there are architectural features of the online environment that we adapt to and mould to our own purposes, cues that affect how we interact with each other on the blog.Here I’d like to return to the other kind of cue, which I had labelled interpersonal. First let’s take the e.g.s mentioned by Anne-Laure, so whether a poster is friendly and inclusive, or the poster engages in relationship management at the beginning and end of what they say. Note that the effects on behaviour and interactions of these particular kinds of examples aren’t restricted to online environments. The phenomenon described where an open message is replied to with a more colloquial style, conversely a terse one is responded to in minimal terms, is an instance of the widespread phenomenon of accommodation – it happens all the time in face to face interactions too. People accommodate accents for instance, and start to imitate patterns of speech of the person they are talking to, even if they are not conscious of doing so. And in the photocopier room you can imagine you will respond more chattily to someone who asks you how it’s going and makes small talk than you will to someone who just nods at you, starts to use the machine and seems distracted or in a rush to leave. In addition to discourse cues, other cues like tone of voice, facial expression and posture are also crucial to how we engage with people and the types of exchanges we generate. I am calling these types of cues interpersonal as well.

Now, when it comes to interpersonal cues in online environments, some of them are harder to render than others, and some of them are hard to render at all; because online we have only words to get across all of these nuances, and written words at that. So we need to find ways to express visually tone of voice, emphasis, smiles etc. mainly through alterations to presentation of the text. Meeting and greeting people at the beginning and ends of posts is a relatively straightforward way to translate certain kinds of relationship management to online contexts, though sometimes it can feel a bit stilted and contrived. Other ways of capturing particular emotions or attitudes have become almost conventionalised: italics for emphasis, asterisks for picking out an *individual* concept, all caps for SHOUTING, and of course smileys and other punctuation… It can be difficult to use these tools successfully though: writing colloquially is quite a particular skill [cf Al’s observations under reality vs realism: it takes a lot of work and editing to make your text read like a natural conversation].

I think there’s a lot more to say here but I’ve already gone on for too long, and it would be great to get some feedback before continuing. To sum up the story so far, distinguishing between architectural and interpersonal cues in virtual and physical environments gives rise to a four-way taxonomy: physical space architectural cues, virtual space architectural cues, physical space interpersonal cues and virtual space interpersonal cues. I’ve suggested examples in each of these categories; the characteristics of each environment form constraints on how each type of cue is realised but we can match up equivalent types of cue in each space.

Hope this makes sense. Looking forward to hearing what you think, cheers, milena.

Hello, this post grew as a response to paragraphs 4 and 5 of Al’s post of 6 December. I wanted to comment on how we translate from the physical domain to the virtual domain the question about changes to the environment affecting interactions. And I realised I had more to say than I expected, and decided it was worth trying to set it all out in a post of its own to clarify my ideas and to see if other people find this way of looking at things useful. Then the post grew some more and I split it into two… So here’s the first instalment:

I’d like to try and draw some distinctions that might be helpful in thinking about the different features of online environments that affect the kinds of interactions that take place in virtual space, and how we go about making comparisons with co-located exchanges.

In previous posts, Anne-Laure has mentioned examples of how the physical space in which an interaction occurs can change how people engage with each other. Take for instance her research on the photocopier room, where the kinds of things that affect exchanges and how the room is used might include whether it is at the end of a corridor or on a common landing, whether there are other machines there, whether people have other reasons to be there, how private or public the space is, etc.

Then we ask the question, What are the equivalent cues in an online environment?

One example Al discusses is a case where the different styles of two respondents to a question [one open and friendly and one more brief and direct] elicit different kinds of reply [discursive and chatty or dry and minimalist, respectively] from the same person.

Now, clearly the style and type of discourse used in online forums have an effect on interactions. In fact, style and type of discourse have an effect on face-to-face exchanges too, along with many other cues like tone of voice, facial expression, body language, etc. I want to call these kinds of features of exchanges that affect interactions, whether online or face-to-face, interpersonal cues, and will return to them later.

First, though, I want to consider features of the online environment that I will call architectural cues, which may affect virtual interactions in ways that seem to me to be more directly comparable with the sorts of cues discussed for the physical world in the examples of the photocopy room or museum.

For while it is true that when we interact online we are “Building space with words”, we are not doing so in a vacuum but within a space that is to some extent defined and shaped by the constraints and format of the software programme and blog template that we’re using. These features can affect interactions in the same way that location, size, other activities etc. affect interactions in the copier room.

If the blog is our “room”, here are some examples of the kinds of architectural cues it contains that I think affect interactions and can be manipulated to create different sorts of exchanges. This is just an initial list with some immediate observations. I hope as you read this you will think of more examples and instances of your own experiences online of how features of a blog have shaped your interactions with it and other users, and add them in the comments:

Links

- Whether a blog has sidebar links to other sites of interest relevant to its readers can affect usage and interactions directly and indirectly. Links to external sites make the blog not just a destination in its own right, but a gateway to other resources, a portal, an information filter. [Compare, whether a copier room is at the end of a corridor, or only has one machine in it, or whether it’s used by people from different floors or departments of an organisation.] Extra links mean there are more reasons to visit a blog, and varied links can ensure people from different backgrounds want to look at them or add to them, which increases the number of disciplines potential contributors come from.

- If the links are static and remain the same, eventually people may bookmark them and visit external sites directly without going through the blog. If the links change regularly [quick hits, or news related links with a particular slant, etc.] then the blog itself becomes the only place where that particular set of pieces of information is available, and the first place you’d look to find out certain kinds of things, which adds to the sense of community.

Comment options

- Ease of commenting affects exchanges, whether you comment at all, how you comment and what you say. Factors like whether you have to log in, whether you have to leave a name or are allowed to comment anonymously, whether you have a unique identifier so that you can maintain your online character without being impersonated. Or whether word verification or comment moderation is enabled [often on Blogger for instance I’ve seen people comment on the word verification sequence itself if there seems to be a random connection between the word that the letters sound like and the subject of the post or of their comment].

- Within comments, it may make a difference how easy it is to use html tags to make what you say clearer; whether for instance there is a blockquote tag that allows you to cite the section of the text that you are responding to so that you can focus on that part specifically and cut down on having to paraphrase what someone else said, or point to a certain paragraph or line to pick it out. [In practice where this feature is available comments  look more like when people do email replies by writing answers to individual points directly underneath the relevant bit of text which is more conversational than a whole load of text at the top of the message.]

Feeds

- Options of notification of updates can affect interactions, speeding up responses, alerting readers to new content, making them feel more connected to other users of the space across different timezones.

- The ease with which you can track which threads have been commented on, and by who [as we have in this Wordpress blog] facilitates joining in conversations rather than having to trail through old posts to see if anyone has said anything on a previous entry. A new widget on Blogger has a rolling headlines or recently updated feature that allows sidebar links to show titles of new posts and when they were put up, which gives you a sense of what is happening in the online community you are part of and what are the hot topics at any point in time.

More generally, it occurs to me that it might be worth talking to people who design blogging software to see what type of interfaces they are developing and what has been particularly successful in facilitating online interactions and what the current big stumbling blocks are perceived to be. All of this should give us more ideas about the features of online environments that help or hinder our interactions.

Part 2 to follow shortly. Sorry this is long. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Cheers, milena.

Yesterday, I read an article in the NY Times on sense of touch http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/science/09angi.html?partner=rss&emc=rss. The article argued that although often forgotten our sense of touch is more powerful than vision and hearing (we can detect with our finger a bump of just one micron high while we can see anything smaller than 100 microns) and biologically primary (even extremely simple-cells organisms react to tactile inputs). Touch is primary in a deeper sense:

“Touch is so central to what we are, to the feeling of being ourselves, that we almost cannot imagine ourselves without it. It’s not like vision, where you close your eyes and you don’t see anything. You can’t do that with touch. It’s always there.” (Chris Dijkerman, a neuropsychologist at the Helmoltz Institute of Utretch University).  

Yesterday when I read it, I just thought it was an interesting article, but today in the train, sitting nearby someone, brushing someone as I was getting off, I thought of how this connected with the BSWW project.

In public spaces, in physical spaces, our sense of touch is always called upon. We are in space embodied and surrounded by shapes, walls, objects, people. Our haptic sense is less obviously involved in our online interactions. That might be one of the underlying reason why people say that online we miss the “human moment” - part of this human moment being the interpersonal, emotional relations, but part of it being also the non-verbal communication which involves haptics.

In one way it is because we are always embodied and situated - but it does not influence our online interactions the same way.The haptic sense is still called upon: because we are sitting somewhere, because we type and the keyboard is at our fingertips. Yet, it’s not directly involved in our interactions with people: I don’t push you because I’m trying to avoid another person, I am not stepping on your toes by mistake while we are having a coffee, I am not talking with you squeezed among a crowd of people in the train at 6:30 PM.

In that sense, the affordances of a physical space seem to be radically different than those of a virtual space and I am not sure how haptic affordances can be re-enacted, recreated. (This, by the way, is not a problem. My point is not to argue that virtual space should perfectly mimic physical space).

What is interesting is that the changes in the practices in fact brings back the sense of touch in our online interactions. Indeed, as noted in a previous post, and as shown for example by Laura Forlano’s work, increasingly people interact online but in a public context. They go and work in a co-shared space, in a coffee shop, in a park… and their haptic sense is re-engaged.  

Note that our interpretations of space are social and cultural: how close can we be? how far apart should we be? see Edward T. Hall work on proxemics and personal spaces. 

Cheers, 

al   

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

www.haque.co.uk/index.phpTheir work is described thus-’The domain of architecture has been transformed by developments in interaction research, wearable computing, mobile connectivity, people-centered design, contextual awareness, RFID systems and ubiquitous computing. These technologies alter our understanding of space and change the way we relate to each other. We no longer think of architecture as static and immutable; instead we see it as dynamic, responsive and conversant.’

Yesterday I went to Madison Square Park to “see” the installation Pulse Park I mentioned on October 27. I had understood from the article that people walking through the park were registering their heartbeat and that each light represented one person. I assumed that the point was to make the space “alive” and to represent through the light beams each of the visitors.  Another person with whom I went thought there were sensors and therefore as soon as you entered the park, your heartbeat was measured and “represented” by one of the light beams.

In fact, “Pulse Park” is more “individualist” as the light beams represent the pulse of one individual.When you arrive, in front of the entrance there is a machine with two handles that you have to hold. It registers your pulse and the lights start going up and down. People in the park experience your heartbeat and you can see your pulse represented, “choreographed in lights”. My kids run like crazy before registering their heartbeat, as they wanted to see how fast the lights will go. They also try each holding one of the bars, and then separately. Between each individual, the park goes dark and then it starts lighting, vibrating again with a new individual.

As I was standing there in the middle of the lights, with other people walking around, kids running, I remembered that in the NY Times article Lozano-Hemmer explained that his inspiration came from listening to the hearts of his twins in his wife’s womb and he wanted to “expand that into something that could be appreciated visually”. Indeed, being in the middle of Park, you could feel in someone’s body… experiencing her or his heart bit. Despite the public nature of the experience - in a park, with other people - it could also become something quite private.

Re-reading Lozano-Hemmer’s quote, I could not prevent myself of thinking of a topic which came up in several of my posts and comments recently: this attempt to make “visible” something audible… to make it more public in a sense… to share it with a public. We were talking about this point last Thursday with Aileen. I was wondering if art - more specifically interactive type of art - was not about making visible, audible, uncovering in some ways perceptions, interactions and embodying them in a different modality or medium to make the public aware of them. She was not completely convinced… I am not sure I am right either, but I keep thinking of this attempt to “make perceptible” as I read about, watch, listen to, and experience these different installations.Yet, in the case of “Pulse Park”, the aim is not to make the interactions visible; it is not to put in light the bodies, the heart beats of the different people in Madison Square Park, but it’s about making visible one’s heart beat - both for the individual and for the public. The body, the heartbeat becomes part of the instrument and the lights in the park the music… 

Last, it’s interesting that the picture in the NY Times is taken from above: it’s very beautiful, but it’s not at all what you experience as you come in the park… You are in it, not above it… Here are a few pictures taken yesterday… from the ground level… :-) al 

A link to Camille Utterback’s interactive installation ‘Abundance.’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkOrX9WC-N0