June 5, 2009 at 11:03 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’ve been taking a bit of a break from this blog and posting somewhat more frequently over at Rising Wisely, the official blog of the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP). I’ve been posting about my attendance at the Games for Change Festival in NYC as well as other issues related to the social embedding of science and technology in India and elsewhere. Soon, I’ll be sharing a series of articles on Design Ecology as a more formal description is starting to resolve. cheers!
April 19, 2009 at 6:35 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, design ecology, interdisciplinary, metaphors
This is one of the best popular articles I have read on the psychological factors affecting individual and group decision making in complex, high-stakes uncertainty. The focus of this article is on climate change, but the implication can be translated to other problems just as easily. This is simply because of the scale and the way that problem itself is generated. The scale is large and usually prohibits people from seeing the impacts of decisions, while it is also caused by many individuals making choices that contribute to the problem.
It amazes me that in all of the discussion documented in the article, there is never a mention of designers, artists, or any other such expertise that actually spends the majority of its effort on communication, messaging, experience design, and the use of sensory mechanisms to motivate behavior. It makes me sad that there is the recognition that, when it comes to communication, it’s always about the researchers doing the communication. This can be improved, yes, and there are also many design-thinking guidelines one can pull out of the article. How many can you spot?
The Green Issue - Why Isn’t the Brain Green? - NYTimes.com.
April 6, 2009 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
At the end of 2008 the travel networking site Dopplr sent a well-done report summarizing the year’s travels. Good design and some nice information bits, including my favorite–a duck-like comparison.
personalvelocity
I’ve started using Dopplr to track my travel and to communicate where I’ll be. I like coincidences so it’s nice to find I’ll be in the same city as someone else I know. I don’t have enough contacts that travel to Bangalore..nor do I travel all that much to make it super effective…but whatever, I’m a duck.
March 31, 2009 at 3:48 pm · Filed under ecoregionalism, india, making it public, visualization, watercasting
wattersupplybangalore8801
This graph represents the difference between demand and supply in Bangalore from the years 1988-2001. Blue circles are per capita supply of water in Liters per day.
December 10, 2008 at 8:55 pm · Filed under cognitive justice, ecoregionalism, heterarchy, proposals, watercasting
We agree that the global water crisis presents a communications design challenge of urgent immensity. From where we sit, paani (water), ghats (steps), vidhushak (trixter), matkas (containers), ulat bansi (upside-down story), and melas (fairs) are the mediums of our message.
However,
Current public understanding about the use and management of water is broadly defined by embodied practice, everyday experiences, and faith. The perspective that developing regions have outmoded experiences and assumptions ignores the reality of daily practice and serves to create a hierarchy of meaning that places certain forms of water use and practice above others despite the apparent and real effectiveness of available options.
Rather than “powerful, fact-based narratives”, we believe in narratives that change and respond to their audiences and allow for multiple interpretations. Sarcasm, word play, exaggeration, juxtaposition, false-belief, humor, optimism and rebellion are tactics needed to engage and inform diverse, international audiences of varying demographics and geographies. Facts may be starting points, but because we cannot control interpretation, they are not ends in themselves.
We believe that the water crisis is a social problem that cannot only be solved by scientific or technological means or other rational approaches. Irrational responses are therefore positive, justified, and appropriate.
The water crisis is not in need of novelty or innovation. It needs relevant visual identities, mantras, mythologies and stories carried by relevant mediums that entertain, inform, and inspire audiences that are socially, politically, and economically isolated.
Because policy makers lack political will and personal motivation to implement existing, effective, small, scalable solutions, we will always lack the full scope of raw field data and the presentation tools needed to make water crisis understandable and actionable for policy makers.
We value varied groups, not select groups. We value practice beyond thought. Leaders in our opinion are those that use personal invention and creativity to affect everyday practice and demonstrate how political, social, and economic barriers to water availability can be overcome.
The crisis is a complex mix of global and local implications for matter and meaning. It therefore requires responses that connect many locations from the most broad panoramic view to the most minute, localized interaction.
Four main issues characterize the water crisis:
1. The problem is not scarcity. We have an abundance of water. The problem is access limited by changing ecological conditions, costs of technology, and social, economic and political disparities.
2. The water crisis is fundamentally complicated by outmoded ideas of rights and ownership. These concepts seek to create additional divisions and further amplify problems of access.
3. Inequitable distribution and out-of-equilibrium use cycles make available water unpotable and unsafe for living.
4. Standards do not currently represent or account for contemporary water use. These standards create incompatibilities in both meaning and matter when policy is made and when technology is developed to respond to the crisis. The existence of current standards, their role in international trade, and their high cost of acquisition and participation means that so-called developing regions are placed at a disadvantage.
September 29, 2008 at 8:28 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, watercasting
The first day was organized to enumerate problems and the criteria by which to evaluate responses to those problems. The second day focused on our responses as ‘designers’ and the methods that we could use to find tactical responses to the difficult problems posed by water (and the lack thereof).
We began by discussing what it is that designers do. I asked students what is is that artists and designers do? I asked the students to describe what they felt was their strongest characteristic as an artist/ designer. Surprisingly, almost all of them described characteristics that were domain-free and overwhelmingly social. I showed them Burt’s (2002) concept from sociology of a network entrepreneur, and we used his assessment tool to see how individual personalities and the class as a whole tended towards network entrepreneurship.
We continued by discussing Bowker and Star’s (1999) article about classifications an boundary objects. I expanded the initial discussion by showing them examples according to Star and Griesemer’s four types of boundary objects. We came to realize that boundary objects do and could play an important role in mediating different groups, particularly those that might have conflicting goals.
We concluded the morning session by sharing candidate solutions to the difficult problems posed by water. A couple of these dealt with making groundwater (and its hidden concerns) visible ‘above the ground’. This would be a metaphor to build on later that day.
In the afternoon, I showed them Paris: Invisible City and navigated through the multimedia map- a demonstration of all that helps to construct Paris as a city. With this in hand, we questioned how we come to describe the components of a city and how existing ways of seeing are, perhaps, constrained by existing representations. We discussed sex differences in navigation as one example relating to how maps are rendered and what it means for cognitive justice. We started to see that all of the components of a city- its water systems, street systems, entertainment systems- are constructed in numerous places and not just at the sites of consumption. 
As the afternoon waned, we adjourned to the water cooler in the corner of the room where we were able to have a refreshing drink and a new perspective on the networks that supported our taking that sip. We reflected and surmised deeply all of the actions and passing of signs, documents, and behaviors that are needed to make sure that the water cooler is there when we need it, that it tells a particular story, and what we miss when we take is existence for granted. WE connected it to the electricity plant, to the staff that keep it clean and full of water, to a history associating the color blue with water, to the friendliness of ‘eco friendly’ technology, to the construction people who built the building, to the architects and the central planning board whose permits probably had something to do with the fact that it was in the southwest corner and very near the bathrooms whose water systems run all alongside the building there.
We all shared what technical skills we had after that…from illustration, film shooting and editing, writing, 3-D rendering, and so on. We decided that we would make boundary objects as our designs and solutions for creating awareness and solving problems associated with water’s future. We decided we would make films to share our scenarios because they carry stories and build empathy. We decided that we would be like the tide, starting from shore and moving out to sea, returning to shore with our collections and documentation, moving back out again during the interim, and then back again…to sea what we can see.
September 29, 2008 at 6:49 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, watercasting
We started by looking at the neologism ‘watercasting’, coined for the purposing of re-imagining what it is that we would be doing in the class. Casting for the purpose of making a mold, a cast that one would find in theatre or film, to broadcast, and even futurecasting were brought up by some of the participants.
We discussed difficult and wicked problems by comparing them to tame ones such as one would find in science and engineering. We formed groups based on complementary zodiac signs (in part to introduce forms of classification and grouping). Students were asked to develop symbols or logos for each of the characteristics of difficult problems as described in Horst and Rittel (1973). This required them not only to have read but to work toward synthesizing that information in the form of a visual response.
We ended the morning session by brainstorming and expanding a list of difficult problems associated with water. Pairs of students articulated the problems and then as a class we grouped them according to the themes they seemed to be suggesting.
After lunch I introduced the students to twitter and kluster, software platforms for 1) assembling a symphony of interactions around water in the case of twitter, and 2) choosing among proposed solutions in the case of kluster.
I asked students to come to the class with examples of good and bad design from around Srishti. They described many instances, and for a minute it seemed as if it would be a ‘crib’ session about the things the students didn’t like. Instead, we found out that things we might perceive as being ‘designed’ were often vestigial or happenstance. We also used examples of so-called bad design to recognize was it is that we value that seemed to be missing. In this way we turned these examples into opportunities as we transitioned into finding a list of criteria that we could use to evaluate or responses to difficult problems over the course of the semester.
We ended the afternoon session by compiling a list of these criteria as a first step towards understanding what kinds of traits our designs should have if they were going to be progressive responses.
August 21, 2008 at 4:26 pm · Filed under biotechnology, complex systems, events, heterarchy, host-parasite, relational aesthetics
scanner ants
The CEMA homepage is showing an image of scanner that has opportunistically been colonized by ants (anyone know which species?). I was present at the offending attack, and I have this to say. I didn’t see it so much as an attack as it was (more perversely) an underanticipated observation that ants had quietly moved into an (apparently) unused and undisturbed piece of late 20th century technology- that of the document scanner.
While this may have been felt by some as an attack on our morals of human-hood and right-living (ants and scanners shouldn’t mix, right…er…right?), to me this was much more the most delicate and profound expression not of nature but of the social world in which we live. The most amazing thing to me is that a colony of ants could have arrived and decided that a scanner would make a good home. Perhaps there were some legacy muffins adding allure to the crystal glass and step-motor, but maybe the ants were looking for something held up in the ambient waves of electrical heat left over from un-nourished scans of students’ faces, buttocks, book chapters, and collages.
No..I think this is exactly where we want to be…where mixes and happenstances converge out of nothing more than the desire to find place, continence in the “other”, and the cheap thrill of being where you aren’t supposed to.
On checking up on their status, they are gone from the scanner…pupae and all. I’m not sure if they left on their own accord or if they were kicked out. Where did they go? The water cooler perhaps? As for next time, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that discovery doesn’t correlate with disentanglement. I’d like to keep my scanner ants…who knows…they may have figured out something that we haven’t.
August 15, 2008 at 6:33 pm · Filed under complex systems, ecoregionalism, interdisciplinary, making it public
This intelligence assessment on climate change came out a couple of months ago and had a bit of coverage in the press, NPR especially.
National Intelligence Assessment on Climate Change (PDF)
The compelling section of the report was its recognition of its own limitations, and the kinds of tactics that the intelligence community needs to better understand complexity and difficult social, economic, and environmental issues.
Our analysis could be greatly improved if we had a much better understanding and explanation of past and current human behavior. Continued research to model social human dynamics at the individual and society level would support this improved understanding. This would necessitate the ability to integrate social, economic (infrastructure, agriculture, and manufacturing), military, and political models. Continued research in these efforts—while a significant challenge—could have high analytical payoff. In the interim, assessing the future of a society’s evolution will by necessity be a scenario-driven exercise and an imprecise science. The continued use of outside experts is critical to our success.
It’s somewhat comforting to know that at least the intelligence community is starting to learn that it takes diverse groups of people and disciplinary perspectives to solve difficult problems. Who knows, maybe they will even be willing to seek out non-traditional perspectives from the arts and/or oppositional discourses in their futurecasting.
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