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.

The graph below is composed of four of these types where the axes show the proportion of the population as a function of trait values through time. The shaded areas represent the part of those populations that is being selected for. The color simply differentiates between types. Correlational selection is not shown because it consists of the interaction of multiple traits in response to selection, and we would need a 3-dimensional graph to show just two of those traits changing.

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.

Cognitive Biases – A Visual Study Guide

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

Anyhow, here is most of it—-minus some names to protect the innocent—–except one: this logo was created by Zack Denfeld, and we’ve used it on a variety of projects.  For more, you should visit his launchpad.

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.

It’s worth noting that the authors admit that the results are not drawn from a representative sample of the world’s population.  Most of the work described comes only from studies done in North America, Europe, and Australia.  Even the researchers who put the report together were from only the United States, Canada, Australia, and one member with dual citizenship in the United States and Germany.  So while the report doesn’t represent a diversity of perspectives, it does emphasize the fact that there are significant gaps in our knowledge about environmental psychology and what intercultural similarities and differences exist in how we perceive and respond to problems like climate change.

Given that much of the work in the report describes what we could call cognitive or psychological biases, there are probably vary important differences in the processes people will use to adapt to climate variability. Indeed, one finding was that perceptions & reactions to climate risks are mediated by cultural values and beliefs.

Examples of design levers (observation followed by lever):

Small probability events tend to be underestimated when based on personal experience. Thus, designer should gather multiple personal experiences (embodiment? experiential learning?)

Recently occurred small probability events tend to be overestimated. Thus designer should show longer time frames (the historical context?)

Emotions influence perceptions of risk with respect to climate change.  Thus, people tend to be conflicted and muted because it is seen as being beyond personal control.

The report also details how psychology looks at the relationship between consumption and behavior, where individual ability + motivation, context, and external motivators shape practice.

There was also a specific focus on the psychosocial impacts of climate change as driven by health an by relationships with common goods.

Adaptation in this context has multiple conduits:

• sense making
• causal and responsibility attributions for adverse instances
• appraisals of impacts
• resources
• possible coping responses
• affective responses
• motivational processes (stability, security, coherence, etc)

Which can be affected by media representations as both formal and informal social discourse that moderates the social construction, representation, amplification, and attenuation of risk and impacts.

In summary, the report identified psychological barriers to climate change action:

• unaware
• unsure
• lack of trust or believeability
• “not in my backyard”
• fixed behavior
• other people’s problem
• belief that actions are unimportant or make no difference
• engaged in token or objectively unhelpful actions
• not under human control
• other competing goals, time, resource, or effort draws

Much of the discussion and research seemed to point to a question of the cognitive architecture of risk.  That is, how are categories learned, does information become relevant, risk construed, and behavior adopted?  And what does that mean for vulnerability and adaptation?

Detection of climate change means distinguishing between climate and weather, making relevant the need for planning and decision making, and addressing expectations based on categories (e.g. latitude or place) since these beliefs bias the direction of our errors in perception.  It also means understanding how information acquisition takes place which leads to differences in perception and action even when it comes from the same source.

associative + affective processes + repeated personal experience = fast and automatic

Good for low probability events

statistics = slow + cognitive effort

Good for recent, high impact events

Ok, that’s all for now. Here’s the reference:

Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges
A Report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change

I found one particular passage to be quite helpful for a project I am working on at the moment. It deals with relevance drawing from Sperber and Wilson’s book on communication and cognition. Relevance is a pretty subjective measure of how much something matters to someone.  The articulation of relevance in these pages shows ghosts of Bateson’s difference that makes a difference, but here there is an efforts to start to describe exactly what aspects of cognition make something relevant–that is, how does the environment and one’s interactions in it affect meaning?  pay attention teachers…this is where it gets relevant to learning.

Here’s some notes:

Relevance: if processing an input at a certain time yields cognitive effects.

Cognitive Effects =

1. revision of previous beliefs
2. derivation of contextual conclusions following from input taken together with previously available information

So:

greater cognitive effect = greater relevance

While:

greater effort = lower relevance

Thus:

Salient information has greater relevance given the lower effort it requires.  Atran and Medin make this point be describing their research with different groups’ interpretations (interpretations = mappings from objects, situations, problems, and events to words. In an interpretation, one word can mean many objects) of ecological relationships and taxonomy.  They also studied school children who had a more nuanced view of ecology and compared them to urban children to try to help understand why they had different experiences in the classroom.  The conclusions supported the idea that textbooks and instruction was not relevant enough to support the expansion of learning among those with more nuanced perspectives (perspectives = mappings from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word).

Learning, then, is guided by what is already known. What is learned first often becomes a category ideal.  It’s like when your idea of what tastes good, what a certain kind of flower is, or how to do a task is based on what you first learn. It’s also affects things like what we think of when we think of a bear. My image of a bear may be based on North American species like the black bear or grizzly. In India, an image of a bear may be based on their Himalayan relatives.

This seems to resonate somewhat with patterns of cognitive bias studied across different organisms in evolutionary biology in an attempt to get a better understanding of sexual selection.  Cognitive or sensory bias, as studied in evolutionary biology, refers to an organism’s set of preferences.  It’s similar to judgment biases studied by psychologists and micro economists (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman). However, in biological terms, sensory bias often has a genetic/sensory basis and can significantly affect mating and reproduction. Some well-studied examples include how Tungara frogs (Ryan lab at UTexas) or even crickets (Zuk lab at UC Riverside) influence mate choice with different call structures or signals (e.g. deep, red, loud, frequent, etc).

So in an experimental, teaching, or design setting, good examples of categories are ones that are familiar, have a high word frequency (use = familiarity + context), or that represent ideals.  So as we design interfaces, software, interactions, and signs for access, it makes sense to consider categories that are culturally relevant and that have legacies of use in context.  Additional learning uses these categories as supports (scaffolds?) to build on.

This is why representation of goals and categories is so important.  The implicit organization of knowledge around goals creates category ideals, subsequently driving category based inference–that is, the creation of new knowledge from what already exists.

So in terms of deriving an experimental practice from these ideas, a student at CEMA, Aliya, has been trying to look at how naming objects as concepts (decategorization?) rather than the names they have been given.  Thus a “chair” becomes a “people holder” or a “step ladder” depending on new contexts of use.  It leads to the question, “How do we take objects from everyday life & create a stimulus that provides an opportunity for reflection & engagement on the use, interaction, and consumption that the object supports—all while waiting for whatever that object does?”

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).

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.

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.

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.