semeiotica recombining contemporary art, design strategy and life science
Archive for community interaction design
September 29, 2008 at 8:28 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, watercasting
The first day was organized to enumerate problems and the criteria by which to evaluate responses to those problems. The second day focused on our responses as ‘designers’ and the methods that we could use to find tactical responses to the difficult problems posed by water (and the lack thereof).
We began by discussing what it is that designers do. I asked students what is is that artists and designers do? I asked the students to describe what they felt was their strongest characteristic as an artist/ designer. Surprisingly, almost all of them described characteristics that were domain-free and overwhelmingly social. I showed them Burt’s (2002) concept from sociology of a network entrepreneur, and we used his assessment tool to see how individual personalities and the class as a whole tended towards network entrepreneurship.
We continued by discussing Bowker and Star’s (1999) article about classifications an boundary objects. I expanded the initial discussion by showing them examples according to Star and Griesemer’s four types of boundary objects. We came to realize that boundary objects do and could play an important role in mediating different groups, particularly those that might have conflicting goals.
We concluded the morning session by sharing candidate solutions to the difficult problems posed by water. A couple of these dealt with making groundwater (and its hidden concerns) visible ‘above the ground’. This would be a metaphor to build on later that day.
In the afternoon, I showed them Paris: Invisible City and navigated through the multimedia map- a demonstration of all that helps to construct Paris as a city. With this in hand, we questioned how we come to describe the components of a city and how existing ways of seeing are, perhaps, constrained by existing representations. We discussed sex differences in navigation as one example relating to how maps are rendered and what it means for cognitive justice. We started to see that all of the components of a city- its water systems, street systems, entertainment systems- are constructed in numerous places and not just at the sites of consumption. 
As the afternoon waned, we adjourned to the water cooler in the corner of the room where we were able to have a refreshing drink and a new perspective on the networks that supported our taking that sip. We reflected and surmised deeply all of the actions and passing of signs, documents, and behaviors that are needed to make sure that the water cooler is there when we need it, that it tells a particular story, and what we miss when we take is existence for granted. WE connected it to the electricity plant, to the staff that keep it clean and full of water, to a history associating the color blue with water, to the friendliness of ‘eco friendly’ technology, to the construction people who built the building, to the architects and the central planning board whose permits probably had something to do with the fact that it was in the southwest corner and very near the bathrooms whose water systems run all alongside the building there.
We all shared what technical skills we had after that…from illustration, film shooting and editing, writing, 3-D rendering, and so on. We decided that we would make boundary objects as our designs and solutions for creating awareness and solving problems associated with water’s future. We decided we would make films to share our scenarios because they carry stories and build empathy. We decided that we would be like the tide, starting from shore and moving out to sea, returning to shore with our collections and documentation, moving back out again during the interim, and then back again…to sea what we can see.
September 29, 2008 at 6:49 pm · Filed under boundary objects, cognitive justice, community interaction design, design ecology, interaction, interdisciplinary, making it public, network entrepreneurship, teaching and learning, watercasting
We started by looking at the neologism ‘watercasting’, coined for the purposing of re-imagining what it is that we would be doing in the class. Casting for the purpose of making a mold, a cast that one would find in theatre or film, to broadcast, and even futurecasting were brought up by some of the participants.
We discussed difficult and wicked problems by comparing them to tame ones such as one would find in science and engineering. We formed groups based on complementary zodiac signs (in part to introduce forms of classification and grouping). Students were asked to develop symbols or logos for each of the characteristics of difficult problems as described in Horst and Rittel (1973). This required them not only to have read but to work toward synthesizing that information in the form of a visual response.
We ended the morning session by brainstorming and expanding a list of difficult problems associated with water. Pairs of students articulated the problems and then as a class we grouped them according to the themes they seemed to be suggesting.
After lunch I introduced the students to twitter and kluster, software platforms for 1) assembling a symphony of interactions around water in the case of twitter, and 2) choosing among proposed solutions in the case of kluster.
I asked students to come to the class with examples of good and bad design from around Srishti. They described many instances, and for a minute it seemed as if it would be a ‘crib’ session about the things the students didn’t like. Instead, we found out that things we might perceive as being ‘designed’ were often vestigial or happenstance. We also used examples of so-called bad design to recognize was it is that we value that seemed to be missing. In this way we turned these examples into opportunities as we transitioned into finding a list of criteria that we could use to evaluate or responses to difficult problems over the course of the semester.
We ended the afternoon session by compiling a list of these criteria as a first step towards understanding what kinds of traits our designs should have if they were going to be progressive responses.
August 14, 2008 at 10:39 am · Filed under Uncategorized, boundary objects, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, proposals, teaching and learning
So here is something neat: I was recently appointed a Senior Researcher at the UCLA Art |Sci Center. I’m currently working on a community website for the Leonardo Education Forum, and organization focused on promoting the intersections of art, science and technology– particularly in educational contexts.
Here is a brief for the project:
How do individual perspectives and group identities impact the development of diverse collaborative networks such as those exemplified by the Leonardo Education Forum? The Leonardo Education Forum is composed of educators, artists, scientists, designers, historians and students from many regions of the world and of diverse ages, backgrounds and perspectives. The main objective of the research is to create an online portal for individuals and groups to find common ground through which they can develop interactions and perspectives that will allow them to establish long-term and robust collaborative and interdisciplinary relationships. Diversity refers not only to the disciplinary affiliations that characterize, for example, artists, scientists, historians, sociologists and designers, but also to different age distributions, regional, and language-based perspectives in addition to the opportunities afforded by differences in socio-technical networks.
We endeavor to create a space that shares events and opportunities for individuals to identify and take part in–i.e. to model behavior across time and space. There is a social networking aspect that seeks to make visible that spaces and regions in which these people, events and opportunities are available so as to extend an existing global network of interactions and perspectives on the relationships of art and science. In particular, we are interested in making best-practices in projects and pedagogy visible and available for students and educators that seek to establish methodology for cross-fertilization among disciplines. Of particular concern are areas of technology whose relationship with individuals is complex and where solutions tend to be controversial (e.g. nanotechnology, climate change, genetic engineering, analysis of human behavior, etc). These tend to be spaces where the interactions among diverse domains are both most necessary and less clearly articulated. They are also areas in which the Leonardo Education Forum can provide creative models for these interactions.
July 25, 2008 at 8:04 pm · Filed under cognitive justice, community interaction design, critical theory, evolution, metaphors, semantics
I’m picky when it comes to using metaphors. They reveal so much about the biases and commitments that underscore our thinking and, more importantly, how that thinking gets translated into physical manifestations and action.
Cathy Davidson at HASTAC has written a sharp brief on the use of the word ’selection’ as it pertains to evolution and natural selection. She writes,
Having spent a day pulling book after book after book off my shelf, and looking at the proforma and obligatory evolutionary argument that almost inevitably comes in the final chapter of an otherwise careful description and discussion of brain functionality, I am convinced that the word “selection” has a lot to answer for.
The point she makes in the article is that the use of the word selection is directly linked to ideology. I think she is right here, and it should have been incumbent on the evolutionary biology community to recognize this and have proffered a solution early in its history. My fear is that, to do so, would be seen as a mocking retort to creationists that so recently cloaked their arguments in the guise of intelligent design. Well, maybe that a good thing.
Expanding on the relationship of the selection metaphor and its connection to ideology, Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolution, 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.
Maybe we ought to have namethis.com come up with a new term.
June 25, 2008 at 9:51 pm · Filed under community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, relational aesthetics, teaching and learning
Ok, the pic isn’t great but you get the idea. This is “The Cube” at the MIT Media Lab. I visited the Lifelong Kindergarten group there and saw how their close proximity to tools, shared workspaces, and each other facilitated their work in progress. I really liked how the space was large with high ceilings, that it was a mess of projects, and that there was a table where lab members would work individually with a tacit sociality.
June 25, 2008 at 9:18 pm · Filed under community interaction design, interdisciplinary, relational aesthetics, teaching and learning
Most of what I liked about the GROCS lab at the University of Michigan Media Union was how the activities of various groups, classes and projects were in an open, shared space. Mix that with some movable furniture and a close proximity to other resources in the Media Union and it made for a good space to come up with ideas, share them and work them out with each other.
June 20, 2008 at 4:21 am · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, design ecology, ecoregionalism, science
The Owl Project is a community space for interacting with owls in their natural habitat. I stumbled across it while visiting the MIT Media Lab. It is part of the Ecology Media group that “explores the potential of computational media as access point to natural systems and global ecology”.
Try exploring the aviary to hear some owl sounds!
The Owl Project
June 16, 2008 at 9:31 am · Filed under boundary objects, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, science, teaching and learning, technology, visual culture, visualization
This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.
Sounds fun.
Addendum: you can also view an explanatory video about Mapping Controversies, narrated by Bruno Latour
June 7, 2008 at 7:19 pm · Filed under bioinformatics, community interaction design, complex systems, cybernetics, heterarchy, making it public, technology
A letter to this week’s Nature describes a study that reveals an interesting model of human movement patterns. The study is the first of its kind for the simple reason that the researchers were able to objectively track people in the natural environment by using mobile phone locations as proxies for their movement.
location tracking phone
Biologists have been performing similar studies on animals for years, using radio tracking devices and similar forms of locations awareness. However, because people tend to be difficult to keep track of, subject to influence from experimental methods, and resistant to monitoring by others, it has been previously difficult to get this kind of accurate data about humans.
Without recapping the study itself (you can read the original abstract and related news stories from the links below), there are many reasons why these data are interesting and useful. The least of which concern us with how people behave and how their behavior translates into public health practice, urban planning, education and communication. For me, the most interesting questions come when we understand what kinds of heterogeneity exist in populations. Understanding what motivates people to behave and respond differently is curious, especially when it relates to their cognitive capacities, their environment, and their learned behaviors. Thus we can begin to ask questions about how systems like architecture or policy, at very different scales, affect systems at other scales–like human reproductive choices for instance.
This study demonstrated that people aren’t really all that interesting in the movements, which is to simply say that we are predictable. We generally stay close to home or work and move in small bursts around these areas most of the time. Occasionally we make wider forays across the landscape.
There are privacy concerns to be negotiated. Many have been critical of the use of this information for the study. To my mind I don’t find the use of the data in the current study problematic for two reasons: 1) there is no identifying information available in the data, and 2) the mobile phones companies have been collecting this data, often out of legal obligation for billing precision, and using it for proprietary purposes with contractual consent from subscribers. I think it is important that some public good be made of the information, even if it means simply bringing to light the fact that these kinds of data are ubiquitously collected under the terms of cell phone contracts. Furthermore, a sample of people in the study explicitly consented to having their movements tracked as part of a value-added service, associated with navigation or weather for example.
Still, the study raises questions and begs for further social questioning and negotiating. I think where it starts to become problematic is when these studies begin to impede personal autonomy. Then again, the negotiations are where all the fun is…
BARABÁSI LAB
For a rundown on how the press is selling the story-via Google
Cellphone Tracking Study Shows We’re Creatures of Habit-NYTimes
Cell phone users secretly tracked in study-CNN
How Will Disease Spread?-ABC News
Mobile phones expose human habits-BBC
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