A group of researchers made up of advanced students from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) and the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DAIICT) set out to learn about ethnographic practice and to experience the places and people that may have something to add to our understanding of how the technology fits (or doesn’t fit) with their everyday life. Their goal was to identify how user context could affect the landscape of educational technology…or at least that’s how they started out.
Playpower is a initiative to support affordable, effective, and fun learning games. The project is starting with an existing $10 TV-computer as a platform for learning games in the developing world.
The video below introduces the Playpower Foundation’s mission.
Working on a set of social research practices means getting to know or getting NOT to know (depending on how you look at it) the places and practices of the people who can potentially create something valuable from changes to the exiting technology and it uses.
We held a summary and feedback session at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy after their first week of training and observation. They shared their process of ethnographic research gathered feedback to develop it further and begin to implement more observations on a wider scale.
The research team gave a great introduction of their process with some initial results. What followed was a fantastic discussion among approximately 15-20 staff and researchers at CSTEP as well as visitors and the Playpower team.
Many themes began to emerge, and it became clear that the exciting thing about the Playpower project was more than its concept of low cost computing. Instead, I think it raises as many questions as it answers and engages its audience with problems about the role of technology in education and everyday life.
We explored multiple themes in more or less detail, but overall the session was a fantastic success and good model for how to bring about discussions that relate social science, technology, economics, and education in exciting ways.
Questions and themes for further follow-up:
1. What is the role of ethnographic researchers in relationship to the design process and the Playpower project more generally? That is, how do perspectives gained “on-the-ground” compete with held assumptions about the project and its implementation?
2. How do we move from perspectives of technology as a solution questions about peoples’ goals and aspirations? That is, are we working on the Playpower technology as a panacea for educational constraints rather than understanding how family and individual wants and needs articulate their own technology (or otherwise) solutions?
3. Understanding context means that we may need to do some questionnaire redesign – to understand more than just the landscape afforded by people’s lifestyles and incomes towards an understanding of how practice and purpose shape socio-technical interactions.
4. How can the conclusions and assumptions held by programmers and designers be refined? Put another way, do designers or researchers feel free, comfortable, or motivated to redress cultural biases and modes? Also, how is the distinction between game design and development articulated?
5. Does ethnographic research inform through techniques beyond the interview-questionaire-film? What are additional techniques for research?
6. What are the values that Playpower is proposing, advocating, or nominating? For example, are fantasizing, empathy, or transitions in behavior and practice something the project aims to make durable in its presentation and game design? What about the game or software content? How do these values translate into design – e.g. process or pattern knowledge as bird’s eye views and 2nd order perspectives.
7. Can film and cinema provide media and narrative precedents for games and instruction?
8. Did they buy (the original keyboard/game sets) because they are educational? Or for other purposes?
9. Are there game paradigms to move beyond the screen and into interaction and engagement with the real world.
There is a fantastic series of podcasts produced by the CBC a few years back. The podcasts interviews many noted historians, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists to help distill what science is, how it’s claims to knowledge and facts are produced, and what many of the critical themes and questions are that science has to wrestle with including objectivity, fallacies of “historicity-turned-relativism”, and others.
Many influential authors contribute including: Richard Lewontin, Peter Gallison, Lorraine Daston, Steven Shapin, Bruno Latour, and James Lovelock..among many others.
Yesterday I made a point of visiting the exhibition “Design in the Age of Darwin” at the Block Museum of Art on Northwestern University’s campus in Evanston, IL. The title of the exhibition caught my attention when I was flipping through a Chicago guide while visiting with some family there. The terms “design” and “Darwin” are usually brought up in a controversial opposition. However, this exhibition promised to take a deeper look at the relationships present in the fundamental orderings of Darwin’s work on natural selection and decorative design.
The exhibition takes a sort of auteur-like approach, focusing on a few men prominent in the decorative arts at th turn of the century and just before the birth of so-called modernism. The title includes the notables William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright as well as C.F.A. Voysey, Louis Sullivan, and Christopher Dresser, an English botanist turned industrial designer.
I wrote in the comment book that the exhibition was well-presented, but that it lacked an engagement with the discipline of evolution as well as any other social and cultural field beyond traditional notions of design.
The missed opportunity lies in the ability to untangle well-tread debates of form versus function from ideas about natural and sexual selection, the role of mutation as a creative force, and the cultural and social appropriation of “selection” in the burgeoning onslaught of mass production and “upward mobility”.
I would have liked to see, for instance, a more overt discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spandrel and the famous (at least within evolutionary biology) paper “The Spandrels of San Marcos”. In it Gould and Lewontin take on the adaptationist perspective which basically says that form must have function and needs a explanation. The adaptationists neglected the role of happenstance (technically, genetic drift) and frequently created “just so” stories to explain the unexplained. Gould and Lewontin’s view was that evolution is a side-effect of a true adaptation, where some traits arise from correlations between a networked body (i.e. gene networks), rather than arising from natural selection. Admittedly, I haven’t read the catalog for the exhibition, but here was a golden opportunity to flesh out the role that complex dynamism plays in evolution. As it stands, the exhibition just furthers the paradigm of intention and selection in the interplay of form and function.
I would agree with the curator’s thesis that Darwin’s ideas contributed to the design sensibility of the age, but it was probably only the case insofar as both Darwin and these designers relied on the metaphor of selection.
Another missed opportunity was the role that social Darwinism played in the development of modernism. For an excellent paper on the subject, see Christina Cogdell’s “Products and Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology.”
What was there were some fantastic examples of Arts and Crafts and Prairie-style decorative and architectural renderings from Chicagoland area collections. It seems almost like the curator was constrained in the availability of ideas and objects to articulate the thesis, and while the show is a unified presentation, there isn’t anything novel to suggest that accounts of art history haven’t yet “speciated”. For the discipline’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t go extinct.
Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 205(1161), 581-598. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/77447
Cogdell, C. (2003). Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology. Design Issues, 19(1), 36-53. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/074793603762667683
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.
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.
Here at the Center for Experimental Media Arts we have been delving into a biology-themed semester. Here is a list of readings that we are more or less using to structure lab meetings and interactions with other groups at Srishti.
Bergson, H. (2005). Creative Evolution. Cosimo Classics.
Endler, J. A., & Basolo, A. L. (1998). Sensory ecology, receiver biases and sexual selection. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 13(10), 415-420.
Ensemble, C. A. (1994). Electronic Civil Disobedience. Critical Art Ensemble.
Ensemble, C. A. (2001). Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media. Autonomedia.
Haraway, D. J. (2007). When Species Meet. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Hawken, P., Lovins, A., & Lovins, L. H. (2000). Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. Back Bay Books.
Jack Ingram, Elizabeth Shove, & Matthew Watson. (2007). Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice1. Retrieved February 14, 2008, from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/desi.2007.23.2.3?journalCode=desi
Jasanoff, S. (2007). Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States. Princeton University Press.
Manzini, Ezio. DOORS OF PERCEPTION. Products, Services and Relations for a Sustainable Society. Retrieved February 13, 2008, from http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors3/transcripts/Manzini.html
McCullough, M. (2004). Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing. MIT Press Cambridge, MA, USA.
McDonough, W., & Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. North Point Press.
Meadows, D. (1999). Leverage points: places to intervene in a system [Electronic version]. Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute. Retrieved February, 15, 2005.
Morville, P. (2005). Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
O’Rourke, D., Connelly, L., & Koshland, C. P. (1996). Industrial ecology: a critical review. International Journal of Environment and Pollution, 6(2/3), 89-112.
Real, L. A. (1993). Toward a cognitive ecology. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 8(11), 413-417.
Shettleworth, S. J. (2000). Cognitive ecology: field or label? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 15(4), 161-161.
Shiva, E. B. V. (2007). Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed. SOUTH END PR.
Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology. Zed Books.
Shiva, V. (1997). Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. South End Press.
Shiva, V. (2000). Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. South End Press.
Spiekermann, E., & Ginger, E. (2002). Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works. Adobe Press.
Sterling, B. (2005). Shaping Things. The MIT Press.
Thackara, J. (2005). In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. The MIT Press.
Tidwell, J. (2005). Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design. O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Evidence from language, history and form suggest an analogy between the cinema and the genome. The author describes some of the relationships between cinema and the genome and points to opportunities for discovering unmarked categories within the genome and new methods of representation. This is accomplished by evaluating existing metaphors presented for the understanding of genetics and revealing how current scientific understanding and social concerns suggest a cinematic alternative. The formal principles of function, difference and development mediate discussion and serve as heuristics for investigating creative opportunities.
What are the historical precedents for design and strategy? Why does innovation not matter or why should it? What is empathy? For whom does it matter?Design Strategist Papers is a an effort to look deeply into the history and social studies of design.
