Thanks to one of my students,  I read this recent NY Time article reviewing a book by Andrew Lih, The Wikipedian Revolution and compares Wikepedia to a city (referring also to the History in the City by Lewis Mumford):

“[…] Like a city, Wikipedia is greater than the sum of its parts; for example, the random encounters there are often more compelling than the articles themselves. The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting. Ultimately the journey ends and you are not sure how you got there.Wikipedia articles can send you down unlikely alleyways in two ways. First, there are links that direct you to the same article in another language, a trippy experience that sheds light on a culture. Spend time in German Wikipedia, and you find jazz musicians likeThelonious Monk with articles far longer than those written in their own language; you may also come upon odd areas of deep interest, like “pecherei,” the extraction of resin from trees — no English equivalent provided — and 15 different tools needed for the job.Second, at the bottom of most articles, there are the categories — impromptu neighborhoods, or perhaps civic organizations, that bind together the virtual encyclopedia. […] 

Mumford elaborates: “Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”The marvel of Wikipedia — and cities — is that all the intercourse and spiritual stimulus don’t make living there impossible. Rather, they are exactly what makes living there possible.  […]”

Of course I found the comparison between the virtual space of Wikipedia and the physical space of a city a compelling comparison. I also found interesting the comments on the role of social practices (trust, behavior, etc.) which once again highlights the discussion we had about the intertwining between social and physical spaces. Last, I could not be insensitive to the description of the journey through Wikipedia similar to a journey through a maze!

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Cassim  Shepard wrote about maps on the Urban Omnibus yesterday: 

” The map provides one of the principal governing metaphors for how we organize and navigate information. According to New York Times technology reporter John Markoff,

With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. New in one sense, that is. It is also as ancient as humanity itself. That metaphor is the map… As this metaphor takes over, it will change the way we behave, the way we think and the way we find our way around new neighborhoods.

Understanding where we are in the world usually involves a singular conception of location. Phrases like “from point A to point B” reflect the common view: you are either here or there. And if you are in between, you are at a single point in between. Mapping fields of action is far more complex – activity is zonal, concentrations are unequal – and the two together often lead to muddy and busy if not downright confusing results. “

I could not help thinking of the discussions on this blog and how one might be involved in several conversations online (through email, chat, facebook, posting on a blog etc.) and thus involved in many different “spaces” while sitting at “point A” - whether it’s your home, a coffee shop, your office or an airport. This notion of space and geography is indeed challenged by the current development of the technology…

As noted by Cassim “One of the many gaps in the existing literature that STEW-MAP seeks to redress is that notion that no two bodies occupy the same space. Common sense tells us otherwise, yet the most popular and accessible forms of geographic information (note the google map on your right) still make it easier to drop a pin than to draw a polygon. ”

Questions discussed with Yasmine Abbas   on physical, digital and mental mobility: e.g. one can be physically in a place but longing for another place, or Turkle’s work on people who feel that they are more present to the MUDs they are involved in than to the physical space in which they sit while playing, are relevant to these issues.

There is also a second of issues highlighted by Cassim linked to our definition of the geography of the city (cf. Latour’s book on Paris Invisible): there is the level of the streets but there are many other layers, spatial but also of practices involved in the making of the city that we are often not aware of.

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…)

In the spirit of Paris Invisible (see February 6), here is another attempt to provide a “thick description” of interactions in public spaces.

A while ago, Yasmine posted about an interesting project “Touching the city”  by her friend Alexandra Ginsberg is showing her work done in collaboration with Oliver Froome-Lewis (see June 19, 2007):

Touching the City is a design research unit that explores the ways in which we interact with the city. Observing the private life of small public spaces, we consider and exchange views on their potential and make proposals for their transformation.

While reading Yasmine’s post on the situationists and the “psychogeographical” maps (February 2nd), it reminded me of a book by Latour, Paris, Invisible City.

In this book which mixes photos and texts, Latour takes on a journey beyond “Paris, the City of Light”, reminding us how beneath the surface, there are always much more going on and highlighting the complex networks of people, artifacts and socio-material practices that “make” a city. This is a great exercise of “thick description” (Geertz, 1973).  It reminds me also of Becker’s description of art worlds (1982): Artistic work, like all human activities, depends on the joint activity of a number of people. Producing an artwork requires more than just an artist; it requires an idea, a manufacturing/distributing network, time, money, “support” apparatus, an audience, critics, training, and civil order (Becker, 1982).

In some ways, Aileen and I are also aiming to develop a “thick description”, a good understanding of  the relationships between physical spaces, virtual spaces and interactions. (more…)

……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

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…)

On December 1, Lucy posted an interesting post on her blog http://www.designleadership.blogspot.com/
very relevant to our discussion about socio-material practices:

“Designers wary of social theories - imagining that intuition, or something like it, will produce good design - would benefit from being attentive to the work of sociologist Steve Woolgar. In his recent lecture on the occasion of winning the J. D. Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), Steve produced a thoughtful demonstration of how it’s hard to talk about “the social” without talking about objects and how they are involved in constituting it. Many designers, of course, have the opposite problem - they find it hard to talk about anything but objects and aren’t interested in what “the social” might be.

Outside of social science, Steve is perhaps less well known than his close collaborator Bruno Latour, but he is an important figure. Their Laboratory Life (1979), is one of the most influential books in social studies of science published in the past 30 years. Steve enjoys telling people that his job title when hired at Saïd was professor of marketing. More recently - having along the way run whole events on the perplexing question of what Science and Technology Studies (STS) is doing in a business school - he has worked with Dan Neyland (now at Lancaster) on studying what they call mundane governance: looking in ethnographic detail at the now day-to-day, possibly boring objects that are involved in governance and accountability. Their examples include things like speed cameras, recycling boxes, and bottles of water. The latter, for example, are turned into weapons of terror once you pass from one zone into another in an airport. Key questions for Woolgar are who, which and what, is accountable to what, which and whom? Once governance is not just about the governance of people, but also about the governance of things, then the categories (and practices) that constitute mundane, ordinary life, should be considered.”

Lucy was mentioning in her post on rat art / art rat (December 23) that she took “a practice from psychology labs, where such activities are routine, and combined it with an acknowledgement of the human participation to make an art event”.

Aileen commented on this point: “Your description of what took place in the gallery really highlighted the practices and procedures of the laboratory. It raised the question for me too of the ‘performative’ aspect of behaviour in different social spaces.”

This makes me wonder what defines a practice as “scientific” or “artistic”: from the comment above, maybe not the activities, the procedures, but the social context - a laboratory and experimenters who are “performing” an experiment or artists who are “performing” an artistic event. The example here is art and science, but it could be art and social science, art and design, or science and design.

(more…)

As I was skipping through Alexander’s book today, I found this quote which is very relevant to the idea that material and social are always intertwined, “mutually entangled” (Orlikowski, 2007): 

“No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical space (defined by columns, walls and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups)” (Alexander, 1977, p. 941).