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

building_space_with_words is featured on Caught in the Act: Art in Brooklyn, on
Brooklyn Independent Television (Time Warner 56 and Cablevision 69). It was premiered on October 28 at 10 pm.

For the next month, it will repeat every Monday & Wednesday at 2pm & 10pm.

It’s also on their website:

http://www.bricartsmedia.org/community-media/brooklyn-independent-television/caught-in-the-act

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.””

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…

I’ve just read about this installation which was exploring the relationship between the physical and the virtual space:

Constellations is a network music installation by Atau Tanaka connecting the physical space of a gallery to the imaginary space of the internet through sound and image. Visitors in the gallery navigate an onscreen universe of planets, invoking audio to stream into the gallery. The planetary system is the interface to a library of soundfiles existing on servers throughout the internet. Each planet represents a contribution from a different composer. The sounds coming from the network space resonate in the acoustical space of the gallery, connecting these two universes.

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

I arrived nearly 2 weeks in London and was planning to get a phone fast but realized one needed a bank account to have one, and this takes some time.

I could have taken a pay-on-the-go phone, but thought, “better just to wait, I can survive a few days without a cell phone”. I can, this is confirmed but along the way I also realized how my perception of the city changed. When I go and meet people, I always have this worry that I might be late, or they might and they won’t be able to call me. I could go to a public phone but it is as if the phone booths don’t seem efficient anymore.

I went to this meeting in Hampstead and I got lost and was late. There were no public phones around. I had a few seconds of frustration and then I thought, “I’ll get there when I get there”… I was 20 minutes late and apologized. It was OK but I don’t think the person I was meeting could really picture someone without a cell phone.

What does all this tell us? How connected, technology dependent we are. I guess so. It also shows the materiality of these connections - cell phone, public phones, etc. More deeply I realized that I had this mix feeling of being alone, not being able to talk or text anyone, and a sense of freedom. Text messages are often these tags we send to each other, sharing our perceptions, waving at the other. They create a second layer of space. Yet, once this habit is put on hold, there’s a sense of freedom, even maybe adventure to walk in the city “on your own”. From being “disconnected” I became “unconnected”.

al

I heard, read and wrote  about The listening post by Hansen and Rubin but I never experienced it.

Today I went to the Science Museum with my kids as we were wandering in London… and I noticed on the museum map: 1st floor, Listening Post. Could it be? There can’t be many Listening Posts, can it? After doing all the interactive spots on the 3rd floor, I dragged my kids to the 1st floor and after a little bit of search found a sign “science art projects”. At the end of a corridor, there it was!

I really liked the piece although I wish it was not stuck behind a glass fence and that one could stand in front, walk around. People sat at there were seats in the middle of the room. I thought it took away some of the experience. People did not walk around. They just sat and “watched and listened”. I also realized that many people were puzzled. The audience was not right in a sense. People did not come to see art installations and they were not expected it, and they did not know how to interpret it, experience it.

Yet I was still very happy to see this work which in many ways is very close to the themes we explored with Aileen:words,online interactions, sounds. In a way Hansen and Rubin’s work highlights more the cacophony and the random aspect of the web, while we looked at the construction of connections, of relationships.

It was just a nice surprise and it made my day!

al

John Weeks just sent me a link to a great platform designed by The Economist:  http://thinkingspace.economist.com/#/explore

I like the design - the general space, but also the pictures with the red dots that point to the evocative objects of the person thinking space. It reminds us the materiality of thinking.  It is also interesting to see whether people really have spaces (locations), or if their thinking spaces consist mostly of objects (mobile, that they take with them in different places). I also like the collaborative aspect of it: people can build their own thinking space.

Thanks John!

My friend Nicole was in Paris for the first time and sent me this clip (mostly audio though) that she recorded in a taxi.

She wrote “It was on a late Monday night and the streets of Paris were very quiet.” and she tried to capture “the sounds from that night in the cab, including the taxi headlights blinking, an ambulance, 2 really great French songs which I heard for the first time” and a conversation between the taxi driver and her friend.

I thought it was interesting how her perception of the city was linked to her experience of the taxi, her emotions while listening this song… It was even more meaningful to me as the first song, “Ma ligne de chance” is a song I love in one of my favorite movies - Pierrot Le Fou from Godard. It was interesting that she sent me the link which is recording of her “perceptions” to which she added a comment to give us some content and describe the emotions associated with the perceptions (in fact perceptions are in some ways never neutral, aren’t they?) and to me it became an evocative object because I knew the song, the sound of the Paris ambulances (so different than the NY or London ones). I’m just wondering how she would have shared it with us if she had had only words — It’s also interesting that she “needed” the title “Sounds of the city” and the commentary to make this clip meaningful… to me, maybe to her.