The Institute for the Future’s (IFTF) 2010 Map of the Decade is part of their annual Ten-Year Forecast which uses foresight and scenario planning to help organizations navigate change. Entitled “The Future is a High-Resolution Game”, the research materials demonstrate the re-emergence of games as a systematic process for positive change.
Map of the Future
IFTF uses a variety of strategies to help groups understand and interpret macro-level trends across several functional areas including carbon, water, power, cities, and identity. The long term goal is to use these sensemaking activities to meet diverse economic, technological, social, political, and ecological challenges. For organizations it is often the case that the interpretation and implementation can be difficult to connect. As foresight and sensemaking tactics become better honed to organizations of different sizes, structures, and cultures, so will the tools that help dedicated individuals in organizations recognize emerging landscapes AND translate those insights into priorities.
One key in making these translations is the ability to connect macro level processes to micro level behaviors – and everything in between. IFTF took a different tactic towards games as a tool for their 2010 map of the decade, and I think it helps move us in that direction of positive change.
IFTF has been at the forefront of what some call gamification – the systematic use of game mechanics for the development of positive psychology, practice, action, and cooperative dynamics. As IFTF’s Director of Game Development describes, games are put together with a goal, rules, a feedback system and voluntary participation. So it’s pretty easy to see how game mechanics can connect with operational challenges such as problem solving, productivity, and personal growth within organizations.
Critics argue that in most organizations and real-world situations things are pretty fuzzy, conflicted, and confusing. Agreeing on goals, rules, feedback systems, and participation can be difficult obstacles to begin with. But I think that is why games are tools that help us move in positive directions. We don’t often want to spend too much of our time arguing over goals; we’d rather just get on with it, play/work hard, and feel good about what we accomplish.
Th polling organization Gallup conducts surveys among employees every year across thousands of organizations worldwide asking hundreds of questions. THREE of those questions where employees responded positively turn out to be the largest human factors for organizations that are successful.
I have a commitment to quality.
I know what my job and/or role is, and
I trust my leadership.
Organizations are set up to accomplish a wide array of highly-complex tasks. No one person can keep track of everything. So in order to get things done, people have to simplify their overall cognitive load. They have to eliminate many conflicts and sources of confusion to deal with what they know and how it relates to new challenges. Game mechanics (goals, rules, feedback, participation) can be vectors for the above three factors, and more importantly they systematize them within organizational processes – something good human resource departments struggle to do everyday.
Think about it. I trust my leadership so I don’t always need to reevaluate the goals. Check. I know what my role is so the rules are clear. Check. I have a commitment to quality which means that I show up to participate and when I get feedback I self-correct to improve what I’m doing. Check.
I think the differences there have a lot to do with focus – of setting priorities and knowing what to spend one’s time on – especially when things go awry. We often get distracted, but even when we don’t human, social, and technological systems are always out of sync. Sometimes they connect and we may even experience periods of intense connectivity, creativity, and productivity. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls these bursts. So I suppose one of the benefits of the scenario platform IFTF uses is its ability to concentrate social interactions to achieve these bursts. We always need some latent time to process, connect, and search further. Maybe that’s why IFTF does the Map just once a year
One element of IFTF’s Map of the Decade is “The Happiness Kit”. It’s a platform for helping people ruminate on the kinds of transitions that could lead to more happiness in the world. There are a few standard tools of the foresight practice included like writing headlines from the future to identifying events that might shape or be shaped by the trends. There are also points where participants can identify new services, communities, and practices.
In science and technology sociologist Bruno Latour’s book Reassembling the Social, he looks specifically at groups, actions, objects, and facts as sources of uncertainty in the emergence of new technologies or innovation paradigms. These highly social elements tend to reveal themselves when controversies emerge. They help shape our future when, for example, a nuclear plant melts down and new groups, objects or facts insert themselves into society. Most recently at the Fukushima nuclear plant, it was formerly an established fact that the leaked radiation was 10% of Chernobyl disaster. Now as a society we are learning much more about nuclear radiation leakage models and their diversity when it is revealed that two different groups used two different models. The fact has been revised to 20%. We also know much more now about the safety mechanisms at nuclear facilities, especially the roles of strange monsters like emergency generators, vents, and containment vessels. Groups we never really paid attention to, methods of establishing facts, and objects with strange names all the sudden appear as important factors for how we think about the future. Kits like the IFTF Happiness Kit help us by working through some of them before they emerge from other events.
The kit also works to identify the actors involved in these transitions – as well as the distribution of those that are happy and those that are not. Understanding the distribution and abundance of elements in a system is important when we consider that rare things may become more prevalent and ubiquitous things sometimes disappear. William Gibson is famously quoted, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” As we consider technological diffusion, development, and knowledge-networking, one of the questions we have to ask is how the future can be more evenly distributed. I’m not sure I know the answer, but I think that getting more explicit about the social-technological-ecological networks that individuals live in can help. This graph of system elements in a rural farmer’s immediate grasp might be one step towards understanding, for example, the diffusion of organic farming methods and how they interlink with new sources of income and time for alternative activities.
Overall the thing I like the best about the map of the decade is its ability to use foresight methods while leaving open space for individual interpretations. Some scenario techniques can lead to overarching narratives which create sources of bias. In IFTF’s platform, it appears that participants are encouraged to apply the trends to their immediate organizations and processes (although I cannot be sure since I’m reading the product and not the use-context). My sense is that it’s more of a constructionist approach than the methods used by Royal Dutch Shell or the Global Business Network (for a critique see: Wright 2004; pdf) which define opposing axes and use those for story generation. The way IFTF does it is to throw out a variety of results, new ideas, patterns, and processes – allowing users to pick and choose where to apply them. It’s a more humble approach (if I may say so) that stems from the simple proposition that we can’t really predict what is going to happen and neither can we take everything into account. The point is attenuate our mental models towards things that we think will matter – so that when they become relevant – we notice them.
Still I think there are opportunities to bring greater resolution and hence greater relevance to the process. While the Map of the Future helps deal with actors and events, I think it gets less explicit in areas that matter a lot. More important than who or what is why. The goals that actors have lays out different sets of procedures for attaining those goals. So it’s important to demonstrate how goals and the ways that actors achieve those goals converge on other elements. For example, resources and boundaries are areas that can undergo rapid restructuring or remain relatively stable over time. Helping people make explicit predictions about the direction and magnitude of these changes is helpful for understand the complex dynamics of interacting systems.
Similarly, rules, conflicts, and the outcomes of conflicts are specific pivot points for change. What helps us navigate change well is being able to understand the implications on all side of those transformations. Whiles rules, conflicts, and outcomes are somewhat embedded in the IFTF process, how can we support thinking about how they would change and what changes they would bring in turn to the procedures or boundaries shared by different actors?
I think these additional elements can be added to these types of foresight exercises with little additional cost. And they yield a huge benefit of allowing the results and products of foresight exercises – namely the knowledge generated – to be transferred to the engineers that develop computational simulations. Actors, Goals, Procedures, Boundaries, Rules, Resources, Conflicts and Outcomes are all the basics of putting together agent-based simulation models that allow us to look at the interactions and assumptions of our exercises and turn it into sustained practice.
After all, wouldn’t it be really cool if the Future WAS a High Resolution Game?
Design is a sticky practice. It is looped with contradictions, uncertainties, and material constraints. Bringing something new into the world, be it an artifact or service raises challenges that few individuals can surmount – if at all. Despite the dominant view that geniuses, visionaries, and otherwise crafty individuals are solely responsible for designed creations, organizations play a far greater and often unattributed role. Perhaps it is because of the aesthetic flair worked into the surface of the object or experience, or maybe it’s the personality of the driving individual that points us in the direction of these myths. And they are myths, because even the most brilliant designer owes their success at the end of the day to at least one group – their participants, their users. More likely is “rock-star” designers owe the production of a product or service to many more who inhabit a long chain in the process of design, implementation, and distribution.
Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry, South Wall"
Somewhere along the chain of causation between creative individuals and their users there exists a group of people, places, ideas, and things that operate synchronistically and synergistically to develop ideas into concepts, concepts into prototypes, prototypes into experiences, experiences into practices, and practices into lessons. These sets of translations encompass different skill sets and relationships, few of which are possible without deep and varied interactions across different environments.
Taking stock of an emerging design practice is something we do often these days. I think it springs from places that have recognized and internalized failures for what they are – opportunities – and from people who embrace reflection as positive forces for learning and adaptive change.
Our environments are changing. And they will continue to do so. Even if we find pathways to design static landscapes that include fixed social interactions, the resources and habitat available to us and other species will remain in flux. Consider that in 2008, we reached the threshold where 50% of the world’s human population resides in urban dwellings (and possibly also 50% of the world’s population of cockroaches, starlings, street dogs, and sewer rats).
It’s also true that the biosphere can no longer be considered ‘natural’ in the same terms that 18th century Romantics did, as something pure, something to be conserved, something separate. The landscapes of our contemporary experience are human enmeshed – neither dominated nor resistant to our desires to interact, to use, and to understand. They show our preferences for stable communities supported by agriculture that reinforce a growing feedback loop between population growth and energy consumption. The Anthropocene, as this epoch is now commonly referred to, places a point on some linear timeline where people demonstrated their best applications of the idea of progress. Perhaps it is only our external concept of the sublime that are disappearing from the human range of experience.
There is much greater landscape diversity than has ever existed, but certainly it is less inhabitable by the majority of the world biological diversity. Landscape diversity is created not only by people and their continued interpretations of “safe” and “prosperous”, but also by animals and plants that push and get pushed into their own new and divergent niches. Patches of materials are being collected and redistributed to form wild hybrids and pure spaces– bacteria-resistant surfaces, show rose gardens, crude oil-slicked sandy beaches, tourist-friendly rainforest, wildlife mobility solutions, skyscraper concrete pillars, semiconductors, and extra-terrestrial orbiting robots – to name just a few.
Each time new patches are created, they exemplify the desires and possibilities available for their inhabitants. They provide food, space for living, courses for exercise, obstacles for navigation, challenges and threats between groups that aim to occupy more patches, places to hide, and places to trade. Evolutionary history has demonstrated that cooperation confers a significant strategic advantage to those who choose to communicate, share, and build together. In human terms, one need only look at the migratory patterns of individuals from rural to urban settlements to understand that there is a direct and perceived economic advantage from sharing land, resources, infrastructure, and culture on people’s livelihoods – not to mention social mobility.
Detail from wall illustration at the Golden Temple, Namdroling Monastery, India
Design practices are widening. They are gaining breadth proportional to their influence on economic productivity, their ability to expand social engagement and political empowerment, and perhaps because of the impact that social studies of science and technology has provided to our appreciation of artifacts as catalysts for knowledge. Scientists and technologists are viewed as inventors, individual carries of the modern ideal of progress. We now recognize that images, laboratory spaces, institutions, public media, and mechanical parts play as significant a role in chance events, innovation, and the acquisition of scientific and technological dogma by civil society.
One of the implications of an expanded design practice is the gradual inclusion of organizations as ‘objects’ for design. Organizations were once the purview of managers, business executives, policy makers, and human resources consultants, but they can now be confidently lumped together with paint, plaster, and photo emulsion.
I’m sure this is raising red flags for some who read this, and it should. It’s a scary proposition for some to think that individual behaviors can and should be designed and organized. But it is a fact that individual and group behaviors are already structured by the designed and so-called natural environment along with normalized social interactions and perceptions of social agency. The only thing we gain by ignoring the structures that are already in place (albeit unconsciously) is the freedom from self-awareness, individual and collective agency to solve more challenging and complex problems. The more we ignore these unconscious behaviors (eating habits for example) that already exist, the more they leads us into deep patterns and habits that can be difficult to get out of for reasons of fear, inexperience, ability, or just a lack of awareness.
This is not to say it is all negative. If we had to pay attention to everything we did, we would fall apart from exhaustion while trying to make complicated decisions. Many of our biases may have developed because they habituate us into safe spaces for interaction. Unfortunately, as our societies and environments change, those safe spaces may be retreating, and it’s worth reflecting on our biases and how our individual and group dynamics promote infrastructures for flourishing.
Organizational management has become a major discipline of the 20th century with the adoption of increasingly complicated tasks and industrial processes. It stands to become more integrated into our systems and psyche, but will management theories dominate – or will design envelop management in favor more distributed processes of self-organization consistent with cybernetics and decision theory?
Groups change, and so do their goals. It is a part of life and society, and it always will be. The questions that we ought to be asking is how, where, through whom, and when do they change?
There is ample evidence that organizational behavior is at the root of innovation and robustness across enterprises. The shape and tenor of a group of people, each with different tasks, and working towards a common goal varies widely – not to mention the tasks, people and goals – and that’s assuming those goals are shared among the group members! Without going into the theory and practice of organizational behavior for which there is a massive literature, I simply want to raise the point that organizational design may be a more recent practice and one that plays a role in or strategies for adaptation, sustainability, and inclusive growth.
In part II, I’ll look at some examples where designers are tackling organizational design as project and process.
On Tuesday evening I had the pleasure of meeting up with some fellow UM alums during an information session for the Ross Business School. I didn’t graduate with an MBA; I did my MFA in the School of Art & Design. Nonetheless, I was welcomed and had the opportunity to share my perspectives on what makes Michigan different from other universities and experiences. Actually, I think it is becoming increasingly relevant that students in art and design connect with business students and vice versa.
The highlight of the evening was a lecture by Venkat Ramaswamy, Hallman Fellow of Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. During his visit to India he was launching his new book, “The Power of Co-Creation”, and he gave a very nice explanation of co-creation to the audience of prospective MBAs and Alums.
For me, the lecture was especially timely. I have been diving deep into the theory and practice of service design for the last eight months. My goal is to use knowledge of complex systems and dematerialized practices as options for thinking, teaching, and solving problems that can benefit from the engagement of multiple stakeholders. Some of these problems range from the provision of water resources, delivery of health services, discovery of patterns in public health, the maintenance and design of infrastructure, or even how learning is measured and fed back into teaching and course content.
Prof. Ramaswamy’s talk focused on examples that demonstrated co-creation as a paradigm for value creation. He provided a sample of instances where the design of platforms focuses on interactions between enterprise providers (supply chain, enterprise planning, customer relationship) on one hand – and stakeholders on the other. The key part of the value creation lies in the assembly of a platform through which the process of engagement and co-creation can take place. In this way, engagement happens first, enterprise second.
Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.
Seoul OASIS co-creation & planning includes the use of images to illustrate the suggestions.
Venkat’s first example came from civic planning in Seoul, South Korea. OASIS is a platform for engagement with public services. It facilitates citizen engagement with the city council using a combination of online, video, and face-to-face platforms. To make it an effective platform, complaints are not allowed – only suggestions. The facilitators also ask/keep the suggestions limited to the goals that have already been determined. So the question civic participants have to ask themselves is, “How do we achieve our goals?”
Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS
Civic Participation in Seoul OASIS
The participation process begin with (1) suggestions which get tagged by the participants. The tags allow people to start structured (2) discussions of the ideas. About 12% then get taken for (3) off-line examinations. Eventually there are (4) Seoul OASIS meetings which are filmed live and where stakeholders and civic service providers get to interact. Finally, a handful of suggestions make it to (5) implementation where the project gets documented along with benchmarks and other accountability checks.
Delhi-Traffic-Police-get-social
Another great example for India is how the Delhi Traffic Police have been using Facebook as a platform for accountability and peer pressure on Delhi’s citizens to follow the rules. In some cases, the platform has even allowed citizens to establish some accountability on the part of the police as well.
Caja Navarra (Spain) is pioneering civic banking using engagement platforms to make an impact in the social sector. It shows customers how much it makes from their savings and provides them with the ability to choose from an array of eight or so recipients of their social contributions. The recipient organizations are further pushed to present how they use the money as a result of the participation. The benefits also feed back to the bank’s ability to attract new customers. By providing “gift cards” with preset amounts, new participants can log on and get involved with their donations. Meanwhile, the bank is then able to show potential customers how their money would be used by Caja Navarra as opposed to the customer’s current bank.
The Gameful Leaderboard
The Gameful Leaderboard
All of this reminded me of some other platforms that tie emerging enterprises with potential stakeholders. Kickstarter is a new platform for ideas that need capital to get their projects off the ground. Anyone can contribute, and it only depends on the project’s ability to pitch their idea – and maybe some well-placed social capital (here’s some tips on managing a kickstarter project). One hugely successful project pitch that was launched is Gameful (exceeding their funding goal by over 3000%). It’s an online Secret HQ for gamers and game developers who want to help change the world and make our real lives better. The project’s developers did a really nice thing in pitching the project. They set of levels of giving, that mimicked some game tropes like secret entry points and awards.
Co-creation and service design are largely about the engagement that happens in the development of product and service offerings. Later as we ate dinner, I asked Prof. Ramaswamy what it might mean to go beyond products and services. What would happen, for example, if co-creation impacted the evolution of the core business model and plan? Eric Beinhocker explores some of the conditions for how this might happen in his book, The Origin of Wealth. One of the central themes of the book revolves around how businesses themselves are a form of design. The design of businesses encompasses how to understand the market and connected institutions, product and service offerings, operations, marketing and sales, strategy, and the organization itself. If, as Beinhocker argues, business designs evolve over time through differentiation, selection, and amplification, then it stands to reason that co-creative platforms for engagement can distribute that work as well as just the product and service offerings. The only question is where will it happen?
This post from frog design reminded me of a short presentation I attended a couple of year’s back on Maslow’s Hierarchy. I have to admit that I forgot what the main point was that was being made, but I think it had something to do with design and how attention to this classification could help designers with the “important” things. There is something about Maslow’s pyramid that fits quite nicely with Indian social philosophy. Perhaps it is the hierarchy part – or maybe the path to enlightenment.
All I really remember is that I was a little frustrated by the talk, and I made some sketches to explain my unease (recreated here).
In India (where I live), I often see some obvious trade-offs between one person’s self-actualization and another’s basic needs. This is true most everywhere, but luckily in India, many more of these trade-offs are visible and not isolated or placed elsewhere – although that is changing.
The basic maneuver of my sketch inverts Maslow’s pyramid and adds another. I think it’s somewhat useless to consider an individual in isolation – which is why Maslow’s hierarchy has a certain irony in India – very little exists in isolation. In a social setting, this inversion starts to get you somewhere near the interactions one experiences if everyday life. One person’s need for security means that another person has to sit and guard the front of a building all day – with little in the way of engaging, goal-oriented work. Likewise, the more “enlightened” one becomes, the less they feel pressured to advocate for material wealth for themselves or others.
So my comment would be that I now see Maslow’s hierarchy more as an interaction diagram. Drawing it out this way makes me also think that perhaps that brown middle band – being part of the group – is where the pyramids pivot and heterarchies begin. But that’s just me reasoning from sketches….
UPDATE: I’ve been looking at food pyramids lately, and found this inverted food pyramid to show a comparison between diet choices and environmental cost. thx GOOD
The image above was the first draft. This is the second. Thanks to Aliya for good, perceptive comments.
attachmentModel_v2
Premises:
Culture as the processes that allow the uptake of processes, procedures, information, beliefs, values and social norms.
Cultural affiliations are attachments.
Attachments and reattachments are limited (quantity) and constrained (quality) by pressures.
Aspiration is a cultural step in creating capability.
Based in part on: Appadurai, A., 2004, ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, in Rao, V. and Walton, M., (eds.) Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California, pp 59-84.
This is short presentation I gave to the Melton Foundation’s Symposium on Innovation which was held in Bangalore in August, 2009. I spoke on Innovation in Education, coming from the perspective of someone with the aim of bridging disciplines and interpretations.
The article details the proposition that our adaptive capacity–to respond to environmental feedback–to learn–is structured by the double bind, a concept coined by Gregory Bateson. A double bind is when an individual receives conflicting messages (intransitivity of preferences?) that disallows action on their part because responding to either message means being in conflict with the other. Wikipedia has a more detailed description here, but Bateson’s articulation of the concept can be found in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000, University of Chicago Press).
The author’s argument is that sustainability, or human-environment interactions that respond dynamically to each other, is constrained because beliefs about oneself and the community are increasingly biased towards individual level sustainability for two reasons. First, individual safety is increasingly linked to individual performance. Second, alienation from environmental feedback loops means that an amplification of uncertainty is taking place resulting many more belief ‘nodes’ about systems level relationships. This amplification results in greater propensity for conflict to develop between an individual’s assessment of the environment/system and their own well-being.
The task they outline is manifold–having many forms and elements. It means developing a shared cognitive base from which to develop mental models for collective action. The goal of a shared cognitive base is to help connect system level safety ideals to individual level belief nodes They argue that to do this requires “simple messages with the potential to shape individual belief systems”. Excessive information is to be avoided, while everyone should have access to the building blocks of conceptual blends that synthesize complex information.
The authors, Antal and Hukkinen, argue that more direct and influential injunctions should be exchanged to help reframe the context towards systems-individual linkages–not just individual. Thus an injunction, “Become a vegetarian” becomes the positive injunctive norm, “Become a vegetarian to maintain the status quo” and then makes more sense in terms of promoting sustainable behavior when coupled with a positive injunctive future norm, “Become a vegetarian so our civilization can survive.” This tactic seems similar to one described in the book Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, Penguin Books, 2009) where they describe some forms of social nudges based on experiments in judgment and decision making.
Thaler and Sunstein describe how some forms of social nudges unfold. These include:
Increasing compliance when one is informed that others are complying–i.e. drawing public attention to what others are doing.
Emphasize the positive injunctive norm encourages behavior that helps maintain the commons. (e.g. “Please don’t do this in order to keep it this way.”)
Show what the norm actually is, as opposed the the perceived norm.
Small encouragements or discouragements can maintain or induce new norms.
The example of the positive injunctive norm seems to be what Antal and Hukkinen are advocating, but with a touch more bite.
Their case lies in creating cognitively accessible links between systems status and individual experience. An example of this might be an electricity brownout linked to CO2 accumulation or perhaps a full blackout each time species diversity is degraded.
Their conclusion that ICT services are needed to help these links form is predictable. Systems like smart grids, early warning systems, and other membership and signaling tools are appropriate, but the burning question is how to implement them in society where the tools themselves do not reflect the normative values.
One scenario I had after reading this is a case where an electrical power generation company that is responsible for supplying the city creates more direct informational links with its consumers. Neighborhoods in the city already experience frequent and irregular cuts in supply. Engineers, particularly in energy, tend to focus on maintaining supply based on certain assumptions. Sometimes we don’t always know what those assumptions are. Smart grids have been identified as a solution bridging consumption and supply (albeit from a supply perspective), but what if there was a more jugaad solution?
I am hereby coining the term Ener-geets™ to describe a form of information transfer between energy consumers and energy suppliers. Let’s say consumption is pretty high. It’s hot. Everyone has fans running, AND the big cricket match is on. Power suppliers have decisions to make in order to maintain a consistent supply, but what if they could provide realtime feedback to their customers that threshold levels were being reached and if their behavior didn’t change, they might loose the ability to follow the cricket match to its conclusion.
Cut the normal means of feedback out for the time being (an energy bill or brownout) and allow the power operator to send a message, perhaps in the form a tweet (from Twitter), to everyone following those tweets. Potential overshoots to the grid capacity could be avoided. But then, this would go against established channels of information flow and place a great deal of responsibility in the power operator’s hands–er..mobile phone.
To connect the feedback loop, individual consumers could also be sending messages, informing of power cuts, potential spikes in use (a festival perhaps), or other changes or observations about consumption at the individual level.
You start to get the picture. Now, how do w do it?
Ref: Miklos Antal, Janne I. Hukkinen, The art of the cognitive war to save the planet, Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 February 2010, ISSN 0921-8009, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.01.002.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDY-4Y9HP0Y-2/2/8effb7b70d90787bc2250323ffeef134)
Keywords: Human-environment interaction; Belief systems; Environmental strategy; Climate change communication; Cognitive studies
Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:
“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”
It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives. For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals. It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.
For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators. The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.
Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.
Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.
A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message. It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator. Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work. Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.
The coefficient of art is a compelling concept. It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context. Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.
Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.
Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.
But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?
ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.
Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.
We agree that the global water crisis presents a communications design challenge of urgent immensity. From where we sit, paani (water), ghats (steps), vidhushak (trixter), matkas (containers), ulat bansi (upside-down story), and melas (fairs) are the mediums of our message.
However,
Current public understanding about the use and management of water is broadly defined by embodied practice, everyday experiences, and faith. The perspective that developing regions have outmoded experiences and assumptions ignores the reality of daily practice and serves to create a hierarchy of meaning that places certain forms of water use and practice above others despite the apparent and real effectiveness of available options.
Rather than “powerful, fact-based narratives”, we believe in narratives that change and respond to their audiences and allow for multiple interpretations. Sarcasm, word play, exaggeration, juxtaposition, false-belief, humor, optimism and rebellion are tactics needed to engage and inform diverse, international audiences of varying demographics and geographies. Facts may be starting points, but because we cannot control interpretation, they are not ends in themselves.
We believe that the water crisis is a social problem that cannot only be solved by scientific or technological means or other rational approaches. Irrational responses are therefore positive, justified, and appropriate.
The water crisis is not in need of novelty or innovation. It needs relevant visual identities, mantras, mythologies and stories carried by relevant mediums that entertain, inform, and inspire audiences that are socially, politically, and economically isolated.
Because policy makers lack political will and personal motivation to implement existing, effective, small, scalable solutions, we will always lack the full scope of raw field data and the presentation tools needed to make water crisis understandable and actionable for policy makers.
We value varied groups, not select groups. We value practice beyond thought. Leaders in our opinion are those that use personal invention and creativity to affect everyday practice and demonstrate how political, social, and economic barriers to water availability can be overcome.
The crisis is a complex mix of global and local implications for matter and meaning. It therefore requires responses that connect many locations from the most broad panoramic view to the most minute, localized interaction.
Four main issues characterize the water crisis:
1. The problem is not scarcity. We have an abundance of water. The problem is access limited by changing ecological conditions, costs of technology, and social, economic and political disparities.
2. The water crisis is fundamentally complicated by outmoded ideas of rights and ownership. These concepts seek to create additional divisions and further amplify problems of access.
3. Inequitable distribution and out-of-equilibrium use cycles make available water unpotable and unsafe for living.
4. Standards do not currently represent or account for contemporary water use. These standards create incompatibilities in both meaning and matter when policy is made and when technology is developed to respond to the crisis. The existence of current standards, their role in international trade, and their high cost of acquisition and participation means that so-called developing regions are placed at a disadvantage.
The CEMA homepage is showing an image of scanner that has opportunistically been colonized by ants (anyone know which species?). I was present at the offending attack, and I have this to say. I didn’t see it so much as an attack as it was (more perversely) an underanticipated observation that ants had quietly moved into an (apparently) unused and undisturbed piece of late 20th century technology- that of the document scanner.
While this may have been felt by some as an attack on our morals of human-hood and right-living (ants and scanners shouldn’t mix, right…er…right?), to me this was much more the most delicate and profound expression not of nature but of the social world in which we live. The most amazing thing to me is that a colony of ants could have arrived and decided that a scanner would make a good home. Perhaps there were some legacy muffins adding allure to the crystal glass and step-motor, but maybe the ants were looking for something held up in the ambient waves of electrical heat left over from un-nourished scans of students’ faces, buttocks, book chapters, and collages.
No..I think this is exactly where we want to be…where mixes and happenstances converge out of nothing more than the desire to find place, continence in the “other”, and the cheap thrill of being where you aren’t supposed to.
On checking up on their status, they are gone from the scanner…pupae and all. I’m not sure if they left on their own accord or if they were kicked out. Where did they go? The water cooler perhaps? As for next time, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that discovery doesn’t correlate with disentanglement. I’d like to keep my scanner ants…who knows…they may have figured out something that we haven’t.
