Welcome to the Haphazard Technology Generator (HTG)!!

All it takes is a click here on this link to help you manage risks and create new ones! Hit the refresh button on your browser to spin out even newer, more haphazard technologies.

Keep in mind that for maximum portability that you should reduce your three-word technology to a more simple three-letter acronym.

But how does it work?

The Haphazard Technology Generator recombines three simple elements to make new technologies:

1. a place, location, time, or temporal boundary
2. form, an object, or a capability
3. a social action, or service

That’s it! Have fun! But please don’t crash the planet.

The Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) 2010 Map of the Decade is part of their annual Ten-Year Forecast which uses foresight and scenario planning to help organizations navigate change. Entitled “The Future is a High-Resolution Game”, the research materials demonstrate the re-emergence of games as a systematic process for positive change.

Map of the Future

One key in making these translations is the ability to connect macro level processes to micro level behaviors – and everything in between. IFTF took a different tactic towards games as a tool for their 2010 map of the decade, and I think it helps move us in that direction of positive change.

IFTF has been at the forefront of what some call gamification – the systematic use of game mechanics for the development of positive psychology, practice, action, and cooperative dynamics. As IFTF’s Director of Game Development describes, games are put together with a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation. So it’s pretty easy to see how game mechanics can connect with operational challenges such as problem solving, productivity, and personal growth within organizations.

Critics argue that in most organizations and real-world situations things are pretty fuzzy, conflicted, and confusing. Agreeing on goals, rules, feedback systems, and participation can be difficult obstacles to begin with. But I think that is why games are tools that help us move in positive directions. We don’t often want to spend too much of our time arguing over goals; we’d rather just get on with it, play/work hard, and feel good about what we accomplish.

Th polling organization Gallup conducts surveys among employees every year across thousands of organizations worldwide asking hundreds of questions. THREE of those questions where employees responded positively turn out to be the largest human factors for organizations that are successful.

1. I have a commitment to quality.
2. I know what my job and/or role is, and
3. I trust my leadership.

Organizations are set up to accomplish a wide array of highly-complex tasks. No one person can keep track of everything. So in order to get things done, people have to simplify their overall cognitive load. They have to eliminate many conflicts and sources of confusion to deal with what they know and how it relates to new challenges. Game mechanics (goals, rules, feedback, participation) can be vectors for the above three factors, and more importantly they systematize them within organizational processes – something good human resource departments struggle to do everyday.

Think about it. I trust my leadership so I don’t always need to reevaluate the goals. Check. I know what my role is so the rules are clear. Check. I have a commitment to quality which means that I show up to participate and when I get feedback I self-correct to improve what I’m doing. Check.

I think the differences there have a lot to do with focus – of setting priorities and knowing what to spend one’s time on – especially when things go awry. We often get distracted, but even when we don’t human, social, and technological systems are always out of sync. Sometimes they connect and we may even experience periods of intense connectivity, creativity, and productivity. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls these bursts. So I suppose one of the benefits of the scenario platform IFTF uses is its ability to concentrate social interactions to achieve these bursts. We always need some latent time to process, connect, and search further. Maybe that’s why IFTF does the Map just once a year

One element of IFTF’s Map of the Decade is “The Happiness Kit”. It’s a platform for helping people ruminate on the kinds of transitions that could lead to more happiness in the world. There are a few standard tools of the foresight practice included like writing headlines from the future to identifying events that might shape or be shaped by the trends. There are also points where participants can identify new services, communities, and practices.

In science and technology sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Reassembling the Social, he looks specifically at groups, actions, objects, and facts as sources of uncertainty in the emergence of new technologies or innovation paradigms. These highly social elements tend to reveal themselves when controversies emerge. They help shape our future when, for example, a nuclear plant melts down and new groups, objects or facts insert themselves into society. Most recently at the Fukushima nuclear plant, it was formerly an established fact that the leaked radiation was 10% of Chernobyl disaster. Now as a society we are learning much more about nuclear radiation leakage models and their diversity when it is revealed that two different groups used two different models. The fact has been revised to 20%. We also know much more now about the safety mechanisms at nuclear facilities, especially the roles of strange monsters like emergency generators, vents, and containment vessels. Groups we never really paid attention to, methods of establishing facts, and objects with strange names all the sudden appear as important factors for how we think about the future. Kits like the IFTF Happiness Kit help us by working through some of them before they emerge from other events.

The kit also works to identify the actors involved in these transitions – as well as the distribution of those that are happy and those that are not. Understanding the distribution and abundance of elements in a system is important when we consider that rare things may become more prevalent and ubiquitous things sometimes disappear. William Gibson is famously quoted, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As we consider technological diffusion, development, and knowledge-networking, one of the questions we have to ask is how the future can be more evenly distributed. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I think that getting more explicit about the social-technological-ecological networks that individuals live in can help. This graph of system elements in a rural farmer’s immediate grasp might be one step towards understanding, for example, the diffusion of organic farming methods and how they interlink with new sources of income and time for alternative activities.

Overall the thing I like the best about the map of the decade is its ability to use foresight methods while leaving open space for individual interpretations. Some scenario techniques can lead to overarching narratives which create sources of bias. In IFTF’s platform, it appears that participants are encouraged to apply the trends to their immediate organizations and processes (although I cannot be sure since I’m reading the product and not the use-context). My sense is that it’s more of a constructionist approach than the methods used by Royal Dutch Shell or the Global Business Network (for a critique see: Wright 2004; pdf) which define opposing axes and use those for story generation. The way IFTF does it is to throw out a variety of results, new ideas, patterns, and processes – allowing users to pick and choose where to apply them. It’s a more humble approach (if I may say so) that stems from the simple proposition that we can’t really predict what is going to happen and neither can we take everything into account. The point is attenuate our mental models towards things that we think will matter – so that when they become relevant – we notice them.

Still I think there are opportunities to bring greater resolution and hence greater relevance to the process. While the Map of the Future helps deal with actors and events, I think it gets less explicit in areas that matter a lot. More important than who or what is why. The goals that actors have lays out different sets of procedures for attaining those goals. So it’s important to demonstrate how goals and the ways that actors achieve those goals converge on other elements. For example, resources and boundaries are areas that can undergo rapid restructuring or remain relatively stable over time. Helping people make explicit predictions about the direction and magnitude of these changes is helpful for understand the complex dynamics of interacting systems.

Similarly, rules, conflicts, and the outcomes of conflicts are specific pivot points for change. What helps us navigate change well is being able to understand the implications on all side of those transformations. Whiles rules, conflicts, and outcomes are somewhat embedded in the IFTF process, how can we support thinking about how they would change and what changes they would bring in turn to the procedures or boundaries shared by different actors?

I think these additional elements can be added to these types of foresight exercises with little additional cost. And they yield a huge benefit of allowing the results and products of foresight exercises – namely the knowledge generated – to be transferred to the engineers that develop computational simulations. Actors, Goals, Procedures, Boundaries, Rules, Resources, Conflicts and Outcomes are all the basics of putting together agent-based simulation models that allow us to look at the interactions and assumptions of our exercises and turn it into sustained practice.

After all, wouldn’t it be really cool if the Future WAS a High Resolution Game?

You can find the Institute for the Future’s Research Materials in their online library. Plus it has really good graphic design — yea!

Towards the last quarter of 2010, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) held an open contest to design its new logo. They constraints they articulated included dimensions and the need for it to show the work “evolution” or “SSE”.

Mock-up journal cover

I’ve been a member of SSE in the past, and I’ve also been interested in the dynamic between values, visual communication, and scientific advancement. SSE’s mission is to promote the scientific understanding of organic evolution, and that role has always occupied it with controversies around evolution as science and cultural currency.

For these reasons I was very excited to give it a shot. I was also very anxious to see how some of my current and former peers would respond to this sort of public engagement around something so central to communication of values – a logo. Designers and organizations that actively seek to build relationships with their customers and stakeholders know that branding and identity creation and co-creation is extremely important for a holistic engagement strategy. I count many of the stakeholders involved as friends, so I took on this project with a very deep sense of urgency and meaning. However, because it was a contest, all of the design work would be speculative. Still, I was excited to see how the SSE community and its stakeholders would react to the range of designs.

As a result of the contest, the competition generated more than 40 logos from more than 30 designers. However in the end, the kind of community discussion and open engagement never materialized. A letter about the results had this to say:

A slide show of the logos was sent to a panel consisting of the SSE council as well as a graphic artist and a publisher’s representative. Everyone was asked to explain what they liked about their favorite designs, and we took a poll. Originally, we had intended to send a selection of designs to our membership for a vote, but the council was unable to achieve consensus on which designs these could be. Neither was the council ready to adopt any particular submission as our logo. We did award the $1000 prize for the design that was most highly favored by the panel, but we will continue to work with to devise a logo that suits our needs.

As I read this I thought it was hugely interesting. A handful of things stand out:

1. Non-experts (except perhaps for the graphic artist) are being asked to make strategic decisions about branding, identity, and service design (somewhat ironic in my opinion).
2. Along with #1 is a tacit assumption that such expertise exists.
3. A formalized plan was scuttled because a non-expert group didn’t have a system for making clear choices.
4. It wasn’t made clear at the outset how the designs would be evaluated or how the visual characteristics and metaphors should map to the organization’s goals and mission.
5. It was stated in the end that there are needs, but these remain hidden or unarticulated.
6. A small number of people were involved in the selection process and were not ready to adopt any of the submissions.

As you can probably guess, it was likely a pretty lively discussion among the group. They acknowledged that the the diverse range of styles and content were useful for them to see. They also indicated that they would be more effective in working with a graphical artist to design a logo that expresses the identity of the society. That’s great for them, but has the community at large gained anything from the process, and will it embrace future designs any better than it has in the past?

Working with designers can be tough, but working with the right ones can be refreshing, especially when they are actively involved early in the process. It’s pretty clear from the context that the society was working under the archaic model of design, where logos are pretty things that don’t do much other than identify the organization – and also that everyone’s opinion is both valid and meaningful. Designers know their stuff, and they can make informed judgements about seemingly minor differences.

I do think that through the process the society gained a better understanding of how the quest for identity formation reveals unspoken values and commitments in some interesting ways. That’s one of the better things that design does: it makes things visible. Values becomes lines on paper. Assumptions get turned into letterforms. Goals become shades of color. What is really cool is how the design process can activate those discussions. Indeed it can lead to co-creation.

The value of design is to create a substrate for the vocalization of values that people are unable or unwilling to share. This is participatory design, and there are a variety of techniques for making this a more robust process. The first iteration in design is always just a starting point, with many examples to continue the process with. The design process is a continuous one with multiple rounds of iteration and feedback. Values (usually derived from mission statements) are what SSE is effectively selling to its members and society at large. With values, there is never an end point or product. A logo is simply an indicator of those values; it can be honest or something different altogether.

Given the public controversy that can sometimes follow a group like this, engaging in a forthright community discussion about the values it intends and how they are perceived can itself be valuable for opening up the process of doing science to the lay public. I agree that it can be dangerous, but then again, physics has been very good at doing this, perhaps because its outcomes are used by so many people in everyday life and because its concepts can also be so abstract.

In general, designers are discouraged from doing speculative work – i.e. work that contributed as a reasonably finished product in anticipation of future compensation. Contests are basically speculative work, but they usually trade off the probability of a financial award with other benefits – usually in the form of some public exposure. Most designers will agree that speculative work and competitions usually devalues the profession (see AIGA’s policy on spec work). Non-profits often exploit this kind of work, though I doubt other consulting services would receive similar treatment (imagine a contest for accounting services for example). So one part of a publicly engaging discussion is just that – publicizing the results, however satisfactory, so that it opens up additional communication that may not serve the direct interests of the SSE.

I do feel it was unfortunate that the committee wasn’t able send the preliminary designs to the wider SSE community. They indicated that they didn’t have an effective mechanism in place for responding to such input. If I had been able, I would have told them about this thing called Web 2.0 and gone on to demonstrate the variety of tools for collaboration (e.g. OpenIDEO, Kluster, or some of GOOD’s contests). I think it would have served as a fun and compelling way to engage in a discussion about science and society.

P.S. The visual identity system you see here is up for grabs;)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a Viennese philosopher intent on language, its meaning, and its interactions with the physical environment– or more precisely, the public space of use. His writings have influenced education, mathematics, art, and others for their critical approach to language, meaning, metaphor, and our representation of a shared environment. His work Philosophical Investigations (2nd Ed., Trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe) takes a decidedly non-linear approach, where his analysis of language straddles a landscape in which games are played, rules made, and mental images resonate with the spoken and written word.

Interspersed within Philosophical Investigations are a handful of passages that describe some general properties of games. In the book, they connect to other passages that explore language-games, rules, imagery and so on, but I’ve chosen these for their generality. In the work, the discussions proceed from an unwrapping of language and games into and understanding of the rules for play – i.e. grammar. Here we are only interested in the meaning of a game.

I’ve extracted these passages, to separate them (for the moment) from language. You’ll see lots of errors in the text because used OCR (optical character recognition). I was tempted to tidy it up, but given the general theme of the work, I think it’s fitting. Enjoy!

3. Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication;
only not everything that we call1anguage is this system. And one
has to say this in many cases where the question arises “Is this an
appropriate description or not?” The answer is: “Yes, it is appropriate,
but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of
what you were claiming to describe.”

It is as if someone were to say: “A game consists in moving objects
about on a surface according to certain rules …”-and we replied:
You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others. You
can make your definition correct by expressly restricting it to those
games.

3I. When one shews someone the king in chess and says: “This is
the king”, this does not tell him the use of this piece-unless he already
knows the rules of the game up to this last point: the shape of the king.
You could imagine his having learnt the rules of the game without ever
having been shewn an actual piece. The shape of the chessman corresponds
here to the sound or shape of a word.

One can also imagine someone’s having learnt the game without
ever learning or formulating rules. He might have learnt quite simple
board-games first, by watching, and have progressed to more and
more complicated ones. He too might be given the explanation “This
is the king”,-if, for instance, he were being shewn chessmen ofa shape
he was not used to. This explanation again only tells him the use
of the piece because, as we might say, the place for it was already
prepared. Or even: we shall only say that it tells him the use, if
the place is already prepared. And in this case it is so, not because the
person to whom we give the explanation already knows rules, but
because in another sense he is already master of a game.

Consider this further case: I am explaining chess to someone; and I
begin by pointing to a chessman and saying: “This is the king; it
can move like this, …. and so on.”-In this case we shall say: the
words “This is the king” (or “This is called the ‘king’ “) are a definition
only if the learner already ‘knows what a piece in a game is’. That is,
if he has already played other games, or has watched other people
playing ‘and understood’-andsimilarthings. Further, only under these
conditions will he be able to ask relevantly in the course of learning the
game: “What do you call this?”-that is, this piece in a game.

We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something
with it can significantly ask a name.

And we can imagine the person who is asked replying: “Settle the
name yourself”-and now the one who asked would have to manage
everything for himself.

54· Let us recall the kinds of case where we say that a game is
played according to a definite rule.

Th~ rule may.be .an aid in teaching the game. The learner is told it
~d gtven pract1c~ in applying it..-Or.it is an instrument of the game
~tself.-Or .a :ule IS employed neither in the teaching nor in the game
ttself; .nor IS rt set down in a list of rules. One learns the game by
watching how others play. But we say that it is played according to
such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from
the practice of the game-like. a.na~ral.law governing the play.-B~
t how does the observer distinguish in this case between players’
mistak~s and ~orrect p~ay?-There are .characteristic signs of it in the
pla~ers behaviour, Think of the behaviour characteristic of correcting
a slip o.f the tongue”. It would be possible to recognize that someone
was doing so even WIthout knowing his language.

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”.
I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and
so on. What is common to them all?-Don’t say: “There must be
something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but
look andsee whether there is anything common to all.-For if you look
at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To
repeat: don’t think, but look I-Look for example at board-games,
with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here
you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common
features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames,
much that is common is retained, but much is lost.-Are they
all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there
always. winning and losing, or competition between players? Think
of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a
c~ild throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has
~sappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the
difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of
games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement,
but how many other characteristic features have disappeared 1 And
we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same
way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network
of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall
similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

68. “All right: the concept of number is defined for you as the
logical sum of these individual interrelated concepts: cardinal numbers,
rational numbers, real numbers, etc.; and in the same way the concept
of a game as the logical sum of a corresponding set of sub-concepts.”-
It need not be so. For I can give the concept ‘number’ rigid limits
in this way, that is, use the word “number” for a rigidly limited concept,
but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not
closed by.a frontier. And this is how we do use the word “game”.
For how IS the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a
game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No.
You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never
troubled you before when you used the word “game”.)

.”B~t ~en the use of”the wor? is unregulated, the. ‘game’ we play
WIth It IS unregulated. –It IS not everywhere CIrcumscribed by
rules} but n? more are there any rules for how high one throws the
ball In tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has
rules too.

69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine
that we should describe games to him, and we might add: “This and
similar things are called ‘games”’. And do we know any more about
it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what
a game is?-But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries
because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundaryfor
a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable?
Not at alll (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took
the definition: I pace = 75 em, to make the measure of length ‘one
pace’ usable. And if you want to say “But still, before that it wasn’t
an exact measure”, then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one.Though
you still owe me a definition of exactness.

70. “But if the concept ‘game’ is uncircumscribed like that, you
don’t really know what you mean by a ‘game’.”–When I give the
description: “The ground was quite covered with plants”-do you
want to say I don’t know what I am talking about until I can give a
definition of a plant?

My meaning would be explained by, say, a drawing and the words
“The ground looked roughly like this”. Perhaps I even say “it looked
exact!J like this.” – Then were just this grass and these leaves there,
arranged just like this? No, that is not what it means. And I should
not accept any picture as exact in this sense.

Someone says to me: “Shew the children a game.” I teach them
gaming with dice, and the other says “I didn’t mean that sort of
game.” Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before
his mind when he gave me the order?

75. What does it mean to know what a game is? What does it
mean, to know it and not be able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow
equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were
formulated I should be able to recognize it as the expression of my
knowledge? Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely
expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing
examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other
games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should
scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.

100. “But still, it isn’t a game, if there is some vagueness in the
~ules”.-But does this prevent its being a game?-”Perhaps you’ll call
it a game, but at any rate it certainly isn’t a perfect game.” This means:
it has impurities, and what I am interested in at present is the pure
article.-But I want to say: we misunderstand the role of the ideal
in our language. That is to say: we too should call it a game, only we
are dazzled by the ideal and therefore fail to see the actual use of the
word “game” clearly.

200. It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a
tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go
through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate
mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they
were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated
according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not
ordinarily associate with a game-say into yells and stamping of feet.
And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing
the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way
that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of
chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game?
What right would one have to say so?

563. Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game.Now
let it be decided by lot which of the players gets white before
any game of chess begins. To this end one player holds a king in each
closed fist while the other chooses one of the two hands at random.
Will it be counted as part of the role of the king in chess that it is used
to draw lots in this way?

564. So I am inclined to distinguish between the essential and the
inessential in a game too. The game, one would like to say, has not
only rules but also a point.

567. But, after ali, the game is supposed to be defined by the rules I
So, if a rule of the game prescribes that the kings are to be used for
drawing lots before a game of chess, then that is an essential part of
the game. What objection might one make to this? That one does not
see the point of this prescription. Perhaps as one wouldn’t see the point
either of a rule by which each piece had to be turned round three times
before one moved it. If we found this rule in a board-game we should
be surprised and should speculate about the purpose of the rule.
(“Was this prescription meant to prevent one from moving without
due consideration?”)

568. If I understand the character of the game aright-I might
say-then this isn’t an essential part of it.
«Meaning is a physiognomy.))

This post consists of some notes that looking at the analogy of natural & artificial selection to design and its consequences. A worthwhile paper on a related but different topic is Christina Cogdell’s Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology (2003) Design Issues, 19(1), 36-53. doi:10.1162/074793603762667683

Types of Selection
The purpose of this page is to describe how natural selection can be used as a framing tool for recognizing how artifacts, services, and interventions can affect individuals and natural populations of humans and other species. The point is not to draw a direct analogy, but to try to link the effects of the things we make to the behaviors, growth, and flourishing of living things. These are not so much set rues as they are a set of guides that can help us reconsider the expected effects of changing our environment in order to evaluate the risk and alternative future possibilities involved in the production of technology from the most precursory to the most complex.

I was intrigued after a reading group discussion we had about anthropometrics. Wikipedia defines anthropometrics as the measurement of human to gather statistical data about the distribution of body dimensions in the population are used to optimize products. I would alter this definition slightly to say design products rather than optimize. Humans change and so do products.

We were a little unsettled by the focus only on human needs and the intent that anthropometry be entirely in support of comfort and ease of use. Taking a more critical approach, we started to brainstorm all of the different ways that design structures human and non-human behavior. We started to keep an eye open for ways that design and evolution can begin to interact. We hit some dead ends so I reached out.

I asked a group of colleagues if they knew of any comprehensive taxonomy of selection, and here is what one of them (Joel) contributed:

There are so many different ways to split selection up that it can be mind-boggling. To make it worse, those who study molecular evolution use different terms (positive, balancing) than those of us who study phenotypic selection. I don’t think there’s a way to taxonomize the terms satisfactorily, at least in a tree. It would probably look more like a convoluted Venn diagram.

That said, Joel laid out four areas that can be used to focus our attention. I’ve modified them from his interpretation, but they are basically agents, episodes, modes, and scales.

Here is how he originally wrote about it in his response to me:

In the phenotypic selection realm, I tend to split selection up in four different ways, based on agents, levels, fitness components, and mode.

The agent of selection, that is, the factor that causes fitness differences to arise, can be either ecological (phyisical or heterospecific) or conspecific. I would call the former ecological selection and the latter social selection (sensu West-Eberhard). The latter would tend to subsume sexual selection, which tends to be caused by male-male or male-female interactions. Includes frequency-dependent and density-dependent or other x-dependent.

The level of selection describes the units that exhibit fitness differences (which, annoyingly, Gould call “agents” of selection). This can be individual selection, and at higher levels, family selection, group selection, kin selection, social selection (sensu Wolf, Moore, and Brodie), etc. Hard and soft selection can fall under this category as well–Wade and Goodnight have good papers discussing this.

Third, selection can be split into different “episodes” by splitting total fitness into multiple components. This is usually done because it is empirically convenient, or to examine evolutionary trade-offs. This gives rise to terms like survival selection, fecundity selection, and sexual selection.

Finally, you can describe selection based on the shape of the fitness surface, i.e. the “mode.” This includes directional (linear), stabilizing, disruptive, and correlational (all three quadratic). Of course, the shape of the fitness surface is often complex, and you can have elements of all of these going on at once when you’re considering multiple traits.

Reframing Selection
We might think about what Joel said differently and transform it as the grammatical structure of a sentence. Where:

AGENT = SUBJECT

SELECTION =VERB

EPISODE = DIRECT OBJECT

MODE might be akin to diagramming the entire sentence. while SCALE is more like the context that the sentence takes place within (e.g. the paragraph or passage).

Agents
Agent refer to the most causal explanation for the response to selection. Agents provide the mechanistic explanation and frequently are the antagonists to the entity/entities experiencing the effects of selection.

From a designer’s perspective, these agents should be the artifacts or services we create either with the intent to exert some selective force or ameliorate it.

We can understand these as ecological agents that affect anything from the climate of our surroundings, our food supply, the structure or our living and working spaces, interactions with outer species (as in pets, disease, or domesticated laborers), and even perhaps to our conventional definitions of time that enable further articulations of the environment.

Similarly social agents work along the lines of our own perception, learned, and innate behaviors to enumerate male-male, male-female, family, and cooperative interactions. Sensation and display are extremely important because they distinguish among individuals to allow decisions about how to interact. Social agents range from clothing, jewelery and other status symbols to weapons, traditions, and business plans as agents of cooperation or competition.

There is a nice hybrid space too where ecological and social meet in the production of artifacts favoring or disfavoring reproduction–in vitro fertilization on one hand…and condoms on the other, for example.

Often, agent-based selection is described as selecting for trait ‘x’ and can even be more complicated when traits x, y, and z covary as a result of this selection. As a consequence we find that selection can be multi-facited and not reducible to a single interaction. Hence, we need to reconsider the cumulative effects of each agent’s contribution.

Episodic
Moving along the causal chain (if we can indeed identify it), we would then want to understand the factors or physical attributes that are on the receiving end of the agents’ work. From an empirical perspective, this is often where conflict begins and fluctuates in an ever-present set of trade-offs. We can split the effects into many different components looking at reproduction, lifespan, health, outlook, social status, niche, range, communicativeness, and, perhaps most importantly, agency (as the ability of an individual to act as its own agent).

This is the main point of interest in design–i.e. what, where, when do the effects of the design work manifest in nature?

Mode and Variance
In order to understand what patterns are present, evolutionary biologists look at variation and the response of a particular trait or episode to selection from agents. Here attention is focused on the values of the entire population in contrast to just the trait itself. We can certainly use these visualizations and modes to describe the distributions of episodic traits, but here there is explicit quantitative emphasis on the response to selection over one or more generations.

We can think about it in different ways: populational and interactional or hard and soft.

Populational
Populational patterns include the ideal types of directional (linear), stabilizing, disruptive, and correlational (all three quadratic), and null (no selection). The shape of the fitness surface is often complex, and you can have elements of all of these going on at once when you’re considering multiple traits.

This graph depicts four abstract types of natural selection. The colors are used only to differentiate between types. The axes show the proportion of individuals in the population as a function of their trait values through time.

From the graph you can see the response of a population to null selection. Because mutation-based variation is not selected out of the population, the shape of the distribution randomly changes and will not fit a “standard” distribution.

The blue, directionally-selected distributions move (you guessed it) directionally because of pressure against one end of the distribution.

Likewise, stabilizing selection in green is like directional, but instead of one end the pressures are exerted to stabilize the mean.

For diversifying (aka disruptive) selection in red, the mean is selected against–leaving greater proportions near the previous tails of the distribution.

Interactional
The second way is what I call interactional, meaning it depends on the interactions among agents, often in space. Here, ecological agents and social agents exert their effects. The goal of this description is to capture the meaning behind the mechanism (thus, interaction) rather than the change over time. When coupled with population visualization techniques, one begins to get a dynamic picture of evolutionary change.

We may be able to consider correlational selection as a special case of interactional (and not populational) because the internal constraints within a population’s gene pool and genomic regulation are effectively a suite of internal genetic interactors at a different scale.

Normally however, we can think of interactional patterns in terms of frequency-dependence, density-dependence, or some other x-dependent factor related to ecological or social agents. So frequency-dependence, for example, is just a way of describing the total effect of agents…or of saying that the trait in question responds in a way that is frequency-dependent.

The main difference is that interactional describes the mechanism of selection itself (within a generation), while populational describes the response to selection (change between generations).

Putting the two together means we could graph dynamic change.

Hard
Both hard selection and soft selection are relative to the population as a whole. Hard selection is like a bat chasing an insect. The insect has some maximum speed that it can flee and the bat has some speed that it can chase. Assuming it is only the bat and the insect, then there is hard selection for the speed at which the insect can flee.

Soft
Of course insects are probably not alone since they tend to aggregate in large populations. Soft selection takes this into account and considers the effect of more than one insect fleeing. Here the insect needs not be faster than the bat, just faster than the other insects that the bat is following!

The major difference is one of absolute value or of percentage. Hard selection works on the absolute value of a trait while soft selection works on a percentage of the distribution of trait values.

Scale
The scope of impact of a particular service of artifact is also important, especially when we ask the question, “for whom?” Is it working on a emergent trait or even creating one? Examples might include political systems or policies that increase or decrease emmigration, the locating of a hazard that increases mutation rates, or one child policy.

Whereas before we were only considering a single ideal population, what happens when we include multiple populations? Does the work of the designer or design team affect traits that span across individuals and include qualities that can only be formed from collective-action?

Some levels of scale might include: individual, family, kin, group, social, community, or ecological.

Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world. Via RSA

It’s not often that unfunded proposals make their way into disinfecting daylight. Sometimes you try again, and sometimes you just let them waste away among the dusty electrons of your hard drive.

I don’t know which category this one falls into, but I do feel it’s worth sharing and making public. Perhaps someone will even comment with improvements. I can only hope.

In any case, this proposal was dependent on a constellation of partnerships (and funding) to make the project move forward–at least from my perspective. Sometime a little cash can help develop needed projects and spur collaboration. This was a submission to the Knight News Challenge which is supposed to announce its winners sometime in mid-June. Since I know I’m already out of the running, there isn’t really a compelling reason not to share—but please tell me if there is!!!

envirocasting logo

Describe your project:
Envirocasting adapts global weather information to the cultural and operational needs of local [international disaster preparedness organization] branch offices and communities, supporting their risk assessment and preparedness needs. A wealth of information exists to support disaster preparedness, but a gap exists between the design of information services and their local use-contexts, limiting widespread use and effectiveness. The benefits of these information services are clear to local decision makers, and they are anxious to put the tools and news sources into practice.

However, exposure to digital news platforms is low, and the capacity to use them in decision making contexts is minimal as a result of this disconnect between design and use.

Envirocasting takes a design anthropology approach to inform the design, distribution, and acquisition of digital weather information services to local decision makers. Design anthropology seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human. Using this approach, local patterns of information consumption and culture related to futures, information design, and technological metaphors can be identified, allowing for the design of appropriate services. Design principles as well as specific, local use-applications will aid in the distribution and assessment of weather forecast efficacy. Thus, weather news for risk assessment can flow more precipitously to decision makers, allowing them to coordinate the disaster preparedness efforts more quickly and strategically.

Simulation games for local communities will support learning and the application of information services in context. This provides use-case memories of the future and practice in managing uncertainty with minimal risk.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?

Envirocasting aims to localize climate information by making it simple, non-technical, clear, easy to use, and as meaningful as possible. Maps are relevant when their colors, numbers, icons, and scales are relevant and supported by culture and context. Information that connects with specific actions can be used confidently in planning and decision making. Specific use-cases communicated by local communities will drive the development process and will help weave the digital media fabric with aesthetics, narratives, and metaphors. Games support critical thinking and social play to help decision makers and communities explore the dynamics of news and information-based decisions for climate-related disaster preparedness.

How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)

Envirocasting innovates by translating connections between design and use. When local conditions refract the design and dissemination of information from distant or multiple sources, innovation is an inherent byproduct. Envirocasting is designed with the mind in mind, understanding cultural legacies that influence the recognition of uncertainty and metaphors. It bridges experience, play, and interactions, creating memories of the future. The project identifies appropriate implementations of open-source digital information services and defines a set of prescriptive resources for innovating across disaster risk contexts and cultural processes based on abstractions and lessons from six local communities in three countries.

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

A fact-finding mission conducted surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops over two-month periods in 2008 and 2009.

Explicit unmet needs include:

1. An Increase in the Accessibility and User-Friendliness of Climate Information Products
2. New Products to Fill Information Gaps for Needs–Starting with Improved Flood Forecasting Tools
3. Training in the Use of Climate Tools and How Climate Information Could Trigger Action Such as:
   • Learning to access and interpret climate information tools.
   • Learning how to monitor seasonal forecasts in conjunction with medium and short-term forecasts.
   • Understanding how to take gradated actions.
   • Channels of communication and decision-making to receive and take action based on time-sensitive climate information.

And don’t take my word for it:

What will you have changed by the end of your project?

More-Measurable outcomes:

• Prototypes that adapt weather information services to local use-contexts.
• Documents that communicate design processes for cross-cultural communication.
• Heuristics or ‘rules-of-thumb’ for the design of climate information services for risk assessment.
• Country and local use-context reports that document specific patterns of information acquisition and behavior.
• Relevance of climate information for local decision-makers.
• Ability to align information with decision and action.
• A folktaxonomy of climate information and categories for creating a cultural consensus model (CCM) to realize translations in cognition and practice among cultural contexts.
• An index of context-specific actions and the values associated with them.

Less-measurable outcomes:

• Perception of the design process and innovation pathways for news and information about climate-driven risks.
• The relationship between information providers, researchers, designers, policy makers, and implementing offices providing the opportunity for continued support, training and dialogue necessary to realize the potential benefits of using climate information.
• Channels of communication between information providers and decision makers and between decision makers and community constituents (incl. digital information services).
• The scope of the implementing organizations to conduct cross-cultural research and information adaptation projects.

How will you measure progress and ultimately success?
The uses of weather and hazard preparedness information can be measured using surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops and compared to current estimates of use and use cases, but those data are useful differently for different people including the decision-makers, their constituents, their supporting agencies, and funders of this project. Thus, we intend to cast progress in varied terms for the different stakeholders and partners.

Some of these guiding questions include:

• What are the iterations, changes, and improvements to existing systems?
• What does the trajectory of individual decision-maker’s tasks or questioning look like?
• How do other elements of the media ecology change and what stakeholders are invoked or leveraged in the process?

Success, on the other hand, is more elusive. Disasters are sporadic and may not always afford a direct link between information effectiveness and risk reduction. However, existing case studies show that these types of information, when combined with specific actions, can lead to significant reductions in both the vulnerability and negative effects of a disaster such as flooding. The key to assessment it to engage in a continual processes where we value choices and transitions in practice. The design of this project take into account the high-stakes involved in the decision-making and information uses by providing opportunities for both high stakes (post-hazard) and low stakes (simulation-games) assessment.

Do you see any risk in the development of your project?

The biggest risk at present is that the organizations listed do not have a history of working together (this is indicated by the generic names rather than their proper ones), but this is also where the opportunity exists. The leadership (particularly of the larger orgs) is wary of their participation in the project without first-hand knowledge of all partners and/or certain funding. This conversation is ongoing at the time of this application and continues to develop. If the proposal moves through to the next round, we should at that point be able to name each of the partners in more specific terms.

Supply-side risks (design-mediated)

• Inability to generate meaning either through lack of empathy or translation of needs to designers
• Research products are not absorbed and implemented during the design processes because they are non-normative, unclear for direct application, left uncommunicated, or other
• Partner coalition denatures from lack of shared goals or mental models
• Emphasis on technological development or information diversification over use-context and user needs
• Existing insights, stakeholders, and methods are unknown or unengaged
• Irrelevance, inability, or non-linkage of digital mediums and meaningful information services
• Cultural heterogenetiy too great for scaling of appropriate information services
• Ability and capacity of project managers to recognize and adapt to other sources of risk
• Expertise of project partners is missing or unleveraged
• Translation of local use-contexts into primary research is distorted or biased

Demand-side risks (user-mediated)

• Low frequency acquisition of technology platforms, information services, and/or symbolic systems
• Scripting of use and application to local decision making is unclear
• Appropriation for local use-cases is nonexistent
• Assembly does not fit into the local context of everyday life
• Cannot be integrated into normal practices, culture, and concerns
• Practice with information and platform is sparse

What is your marketing plan? How will people learn about what you are doing?

The conduits for marketing are, in many respects, already in place. The organizational structure and extent of [intl. disaster preparedness agency] branch offices will facilitate branding and distribution using existing networks of community organization, tactical planning, and response offices. Though the value of the services should be self-evident in the design and cognitive acquisition of the services, the goal is to help users to practice using and applying these information services. We also recognize that aesthetic values can elevate the recognition of value and the maintenance of that value through everyday use. Thus, arriving at these values will be a principle objective for all participants.

In order to increase domain knowledge, the outcomes can be shared among the participants, their centers, and via professional and interest networks including the design research community which actively engages with similar project goals. Because some of the project partners include university centers, schools and research organizations, the outcomes will be shared with emerging professionals including graduate students and visiting fellows.

Tactically, the marketing plan for simulation game-based training is slightly more difficult because it requires additional preparation, training, and presentation. Nonetheless, with a bit of effort, these games will reinforce the marketing strategy for the primary goal of adapting weather information using the same local community branch office network structure. We also expect to develop videos that demonstrate our process as well as the use and value of the informations service under construction. But ultimately, the best marketing will be the effectiveness of the adaptation process.

Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant? If it is to be self-sustainable, what’s the plan for making that happen?

Envirocasting is the application of a process to translate meaning across cultural contexts with relevance for local concerns. We do not view it as an experimental process so much and an underutilized one. Luckily, there are many resources, case studies, and additional expertise to draw from in the process. Our goal is to assemble them and to draw the pieces together into relevant platforms and prototypes for weather information services.

The project will accomplish this goal as a one-time research project that will publicly document its methods and outcomes as guides so that they can be applied in new use-contexts and for wider information arrays. We fully expect that the different project partners will continue to apply the work and experience in varied ways after the initial project, although they may carry it out to their own ends.

Our method for fostering rhizomatic-like dissemination of the results (and thus, sustainability) is to link with additional strategic partners whose networks span varied social groups, languages, use-contexts, and concerns. Furthermore, the acquisition and integration of the research (as well as the information services it supports) can be broadly advocated from a policy perspective because successes arise from its application and benefit in specific, local communities. The overall plan for sustainability is to demonstrate that these information service platforms reduce risk by enabling decisive action before pending hazards become disasters. If this is demonstrated, sustainability will ensue, even if not in the form described in this proposal.

This find (thanks Dharmang) describes a history and accounting of the Transactional Arts–which is art, where a transaction is explicitly part of the work.

Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:

“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”

It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives.  For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals.  It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.

For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators.  The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.

Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.

Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.

A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message.  It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator.  Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work.  Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.

The coefficient of art is a compelling concept.  It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context.  Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.

Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.

Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.

But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?

ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.

Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.

This was a post that I initially wrote for the ‘Telling Stories’ discussion group that is made up of recipients of the Wellcome Trust’s International Engagement Award.  The group practices public engagement with public health and science from a variety of different perspectives and goals.  In this post, I was exploring the role of narration and also looking at the idea of suspense as created by communication (or the lack of) between researchers and members of the public.

Part 1.
I can start by locating the visual arts as a source or medium for engagement. The answer is: myriad. In the last ten years or so (and even before) the arts domain has taken on science and technology in bushels. Some of the response of the arts has been driven out of curiosity and the desire to take on the mantle of science for aesthetic reasons. For others it has been a source of tactical engagement with the very substance of knowledge production in the sciences, defense and military establishments, and the diffusion of technology in everyday life.

There are way too many example to adequately cover here, except to say that the Wellcome Trust is a major stakeholder in this area and has been for at least a decade as far as I know. I remember a festival in South Kensington that I happened upon almost ten years ago called Sparks which featured may artists working specifically with the life sciences in some form or another. Exhibitions were held at the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum, among others (http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/festival_of_science/91…). It was largely a cultural series of events, continuing a dialogue which I have witnessed firsthand in many forms and places afterwards. It seems to me that the role of the arts in these debates has largely been restricted to Europe, but I have seen some signs in the US and now in Asia that the visual arts are playing a more tactical and more integral role in the development of engagement vectors with the public, practitioners, and policy makers.

Some examples:
Last year we conducted a workshop for artists at NCBS (http://cema.srishti.ac.in/content/bioart) which focused on introducing cell and molecular biology methods to artists so they could use them as media for performance, communication, and engagement. It was conducted in collaboration with Oron Catts, a well-know bioartist from Australia (http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/) with extensive experience in using the trappings and discourse of the lab to open up critical thinking about future scenarios and paths of social and technological development.

A group of our students is taking part this week (and won an award) in the international genetically engineered machines (iGEM) competition held at MIT in Boston, USA. This is a group of art students working at NCBS (our host in Bangalore) to develop synthetic organisms, in part to provide a forum for engagement and critical dialogue at these meetings that is not just motivated by the accumulation of capital wealth or basic functional research via biotech (http://hackteria.org/). The result was a highly influential discussion about the role of amateurs in creating public knowledge using science and technology.

Project Vision (htt p://symphysis.wordpress.com/designing-for-converging-cultures-a-diplo…) is an ongoing project here in Bangalore that uses new media (i.e. web 2.0, sensors, physical computing, interactive story-building software, locative media like mobiles and GPS) to develop forms of intimate science where urban, poor, school-aged students run their own experiments and communicate first-hand experiences with nature and their environment.

Moon Vehicle is a community project maintained by Joanna Griffin (http://www.aconnectiontoaremoteplace.net) that bridges storytelling, artifacts, and arts-based methodologies to create peer communities between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), astronomy buffs, schoolchildren, and others in order to reconstitute new narratives of science and technology as they apply to satellites, space exploration and the once and future missions to the moon.

Another timely example comes from Denmark. The Rethink exhibition (http://www.rethinkclimate.org/) combines contemporary art into political debates surrounding climate change responses in anticipation of Copenhagen.

In the US, The Center for Post-Natural History (http://postnatural.org/) takes on biotech and the conversion of biological organisms to intellectual property.

There are many, many others. But I think it’s safe to say that they have had varying impact and effect. Unfortunately (in my view) we haven’t yet developed a coefficient of art to assess its effect on other domains. Some of the examples I have cited have a distinctly critical edge. Others are more about raising awareness or, more to the point, about connecting different social communities and groups (e.g. science practitioners and schoolchildren).

One of the most important things I have learned in the last few years about public engagement with science comes from the field of science and technology studies. Sociologists, philosophers, and historians have started to demonstrate the value of media (especially visual) in the production of science and technology and the resolution of debates about scientific truth and public acceptance. The production of artifacts, objects, and “things we can wrap our heads around” is very important it turns out.

I think the lessons from history and sociology leads to some clarifying questions such as “What is the material basis for engagement?” and “What is engagement made of and where does it live?”

Part 2.

My perspectives
Many of my perspectives on public engagement are shaped by my experiences as both a practicing scientist studying evolution, ecology and behavior in lab and field settings, as an artist and designer working to develop communication and engagement tools, and now working to assess options for better decision making in public health, energy, and infrastructure.

As a biologist, my perspective is further shaped by host-parasite dynamics and their implications for disease in populations. I am also influenced by network science and complex systems. As such, the interaction is the focal point of engagement. How the interaction is created and maintained is significant for me.

As a designer, so-called design thinking influences my approach to engagement. This often means thinking critically about how the engagement process can transpire as part of everyday life–that is, part of the daily routine that people struggle with and recreate everyday.

I think the questions raised in previous posts about the motivation behind “science’s” engagement with the “public” and who makes up the “public” are critical because they help to identify the costs and benefits of engagement and the location of engagement as it pertains to the public. Still I think we need to constantly open up our assumptions further to scrutiny.

Of Scientists and Risk
I know scientists to be a very heterogeneous community involved with many others in the production of knowledge. In general, the people are exceedingly nice, driven by their own curiosity and desire to create understanding that will make a difference, however far downstream. Science, however, is also composed of lots of others, including the organisms and the tools used to develop new hypotheses and results. By far the most practical defining feature might be its place–where it is done and how that place structures the kind of interactions that in turn lead to what we call new knowledge.

Let’s be clear. In the West, science and by extension public health is hardly the product of scientists alone. Many individuals are involved from students, to researchers, financial managers, glassware technicians, viruses, lab rats, secretaries, publishers, reviewers of literature, politicians, middle-school teachers, clergy, university boards, ethics review panels, biotech company shareholders, news media and so on. All of these individuals are possibly working to do one thing–identify sources of risk and manage the uncertainty that arises out of the everyday interactions of people and their environment. If they can scrape out a living in the meantime, all the better for them. So yes, in a sense I would also say that because risk and uncertainty are trying to be minimized, science and technology have a lot to do with securing and locating ways to create wealth. And yes, all of this scales greatly with the complexity of the science (think: CERN or the HapMap project).

I prefaced this as part of the Western tradition 1) because it is of direct lineage from Christian emphasis on divine intervention and design, and 2) because I have found that (in Asia at least) very different traditions underlie the identification of risk and the communication of uncertainty. My sense is that in Asia these are intrinsically related to variation in the ordering of time, and I’m anxious to discuss this with others that know more than I do.

“The Public”, User Needs, and Witnessing
On the public side, I would prefer to say civil society–that is those who are engaged in social contracts relating to economics, technology, common goods, governmentality and so on. And I agree that it is correct to say that it is an even more heterogeneous group.

One way to think about civil society is much like designers think of their users. There is a simple axiom that underscores the work of many successful designers: user needs drive the acquisition of a product or service. Public heath knowledge and science can be that product. Yes, this is a very functionalist way of looking at it, but this principle of participatory design involves end users in the design process to help ensure that it meets user needs and is usable. It has been a successful strategy for architecture, software, and business (the customer is always right, right?). Why should science and its cognitive technologies be an exception?

By adopting user perspectives the scientific community can recognize that its practices may or may not resonate with user needs: socially, by ensuring equal access for disenfranchised groups, economically: by creating new opportunities for capital development and financial transactions, and politically: by improving the quality, speed, and sensitivity of social technologies to the needs of local users. It’s not that science doesn’t already do these things. It just isn’t always evident to the average user. In the realm of health, sometimes it’s just a matter of making the benefits clear so that they justify whatever costs there are in the user’s mind.

One of my favorite case studies come from evolution and its approximately 50% public acceptance in the United States. Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolutionary theory and biology, acquire evolutionist and creationist beliefs. Evans describes how Western religious and philosophical traditions emphasize essentialism, teleology, and intention, and in the process limit the cognitive appeal of natural explanations for the origins of species. She argues that because these ideas tend to show up repeatedly in public representations, they constrain the inferential reasoning capacities of the developing mind. It’s an observation that suggests science’s own predilection for categorization is at the root of evolutionary biology’s social friction.

I think these cognitive biases come into play often, for good and bad. I’ll want to describe some others, but I need to take a detour first.

Engagement, Stories, Suspense, Scenarios, and Fallacies
I personally feel that if scientists, policy-makers, and funding bodies are willing to involve cultural workers like artists and designers in the process of science and its associated applications, there is good news for broader participation because they cultural workers tend to excel at reconfiguring essentialist categories, and they often like to do it in public. There is some indication that this may be a general rule because visualization involves so much codification, creation of meaning, and translation of concepts and ideas into tangible, material artifacts for cognition and discourse. In effect, the sensory object is a vector for witnessing.

Witnessing
In their book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, authors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe three types of public witnessing of science: the direct performance of experiments in social spaces (imagine if the laboratory were a chapel or temple), reporting experimental methods in a manner that enables someone to replicate the experiments themselves (like primary journal articles that recount the plot), and virtual witnessing by producing in a reader’s mind an image of an experimental scene that displaces the need for direct witness or replication (this, I argue, is much like a story in someone’s mind constructed from the plot). We need more of this public witnessing if science is going to connect with society in a dynamical way.

Suspense and Narration
The idea of witnessing in science is intimately tied to the production of suspense in narrative. Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiousity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.” So when thinking about public engagement we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

The difference between surprise and suspense is also relevant. This passage from a conversation between Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut helps to make the difference clear.

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the audience knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.”

Suspenseful Science?
My reason for taking this detour is to try to show some of the different narrative techniques that can be used in the construction of public health engagement and of science in the collective mind of civil society. Curiosity, surprise, and suspense (pure/impure) are all narratives tactics for engagement.

Curiosity is important for people attending to and learning on their own, but I don’t think it necessarily develops in people unless the benefits are of satisfying it are known to them.

Surprise is also relevant and critical to sensations of astonishment–and of being placed in a new reality that will cause dissonance and therefore growth.

Suspense, while composed and related to surprise and curiosity, has a more pedagogical function. It builds up knowledge of scenes and constraints using what I think Shapin and Schaffer described as virtual witnessing. The audience/spectators build the story themselves, creating it from the narration and plot to fit their own needs, and to adapt it to their own context and location-based experience. I think this is especially true for impure suspense because pure suspense rings of master narratives and the hindsight needed to create contrasts among moral outcomes. Life is not so much like that. Impure suspense allows us to decide the moral outcome during the process. We are never sure if we have chosen the right one, and we may not know even after the “movie” has ended.

So how can public engagement efforts use suspense to build better acclimation and participation among its audiences?

Scenarios and Fallacies
One possibility lies in the construction of scenarios about the future. Scenarios are descriptions of alternative future states where narration helps to articulate the shape and distribution of actors, procedures, and resources. Scenarios can be general or highly detailed, and they can be shown or represented in a variety of ways from verbal description, acting or role playing, visualization and imagery.

I’ve recently delved into the techniques of scenario development. They serve a number of important functions for individuals and organizations. The most important is perhaps building out aspirations and ideas of what the future could hold–even if the present lacks those characteristics. In this way preferred futures can be imagined, but even when the future is imagined to contain destructive relationships, it aids the processes of critical thinking and adaptation. For individuals, recognizing opportunity and constraint is the first step to capitalizing on it or avoiding its pitfalls. Arjun Appadurai has been highly influential in defining aspirations, or the capacity to aspire to a better future, as an important feature of cultural capacity. Scenarios, as extensions of aspirations, are a way to work forward, to rearrange the systems and see what new hybrids emerge and how they might affect well-being.

For organizations, scenarios can help create common ground. The dredge up assumptions and interactions to create a big picture where knowledge can be exchanged. When scenarios are combined with games and simulations, they provide an opportunity to work through challenging situations, to create memories of the future, and out of these take the confidence to undertake critical adaptive change without incurring any of the risks that real experiences entail.

One of the discussion themes asked what happens when artists and others ‘misinterpret’ the science or present it in a biased or misleading way. Rather than seeing this as something necessarily counterproductive, creative interpretations provide circumstantial detail that may be critical for the social fluency of science. A creative depiction of evolutionary technologies, such as Chris Landau’s The Flocking Party (http://theflockingparty.com/), should therefore be seen as a ‘minority report’, suggesting possible avenues for experimentation or areas of conflict between science and society.

On the contrary, critics of scenarios have argued that they aren’t effective in the development of policy precisely because of the detail they incorporate into their ‘worlds’. Morgan and Granger (2007) have argued that scenarios come with an implicit expectation of liklihood–that any particular scenario is more likely to occur in the future. As I already stated, predicting the future is not a goal for scenarios, but critical responsiveness to uncertainty is. Morgan and Keith based their argument on a common fallacy (and I will include another) that I think are important for us to consider as we take on public engagement through narrative.

In adding detail to a scenario or, let’s say, a compelling tale of science, we create compounding descriptions that run the risk of invoking the conjunction fallacy. A frequent example was developed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They gave respondents the statement:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

and asked: Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Logic and probability tell us that #1 is more probable since it is increasingly unlikely that she is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

The issue here is that we want to include more detail and visualization in our stories, but in doing so we possibly risk compounding peoples’ expectation of what is and is not likely to happen.

Vividness is another concern. According to wikipedia, “The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Although misleading vividness does little to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.”

The availability heuristic says that we often place events we have just seen or experienced in our memory more prominently, even if we know them to be less frequent occurrences. I can’t tell you how many times my Mom called me late in the evening when I was in college to warn me abut something she might have just seen on the evening news as a possible risk. The detail that many forms of media and engagement provide can also bias judgments that we would otherwise weigh more carefully.

I think somewhere there is a sweet-spot. I like this account of The Critical Art Ensemble as a group that routinely replicates scientific experiments in public spaces such as malls and parks in an effort to publicly verify political claims ranging from the presence of GMOs in the food chain to the terror threat of biological warfare. One of CAE’s projects with co-collaborator Beatriz de Costa is described by Regine Debatty from the blog we-make-money-not-art this way:

GenTerra is essentially a participatory “theater”…Scientists and artists are talking the public through the process and implications (whether they are purely profit-driven or feature some utopian qualities) of transgenics. Materials are then provided to allow people to get a hands-on experience by creating their own transgenic organism…After that they become actively involved in risk assessment by deciding whether or not to release bacteria from one of petri dishes of the release machine.

Even if the feedback generated doesn’t make it back to the lab or policy office, it’s a form of participatory design that seeks out users of science.

Another example was developed in Europe and has now spread. Some of you may have read about Science Shops as one possible form of engagement that pits user needs in direct contact with professional researchers. Here is a blog post about this that I wrote awhile back (http://blog.cstep.in/?p=319).