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.
After writing yesterday’s post on psychology and climate change, I stumbled upon this article from the journal Ecological Economics entitled, “The art of the cognitive war to save the planet”.
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:
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
This find (thanks Dharmang) describes a history and accounting of the Transactional Arts–which is art, where a transaction is explicitly part of the work.
Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:
“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”
It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives. For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals. It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.
For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators. The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.
Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.
Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.
A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message. It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator. Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work. Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.
The coefficient of art is a compelling concept. It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context. Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.
Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.
Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.
But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?
ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.
Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.
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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.
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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.
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.
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…
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
I was up this morning thinking about the kinds of spaces, communities and interactions I would like to see. Somewhere between physical computing, synthetic biology, evolutionary ecology, and design is a space where species can speak and be recognized by each other, where urban infrastructure becomes adaptive in the space of days and not decades, where the threshold of difference is lowered to such a degree that new networks between otherwise unrelated groups and individuals can find common ground.
Perhaps for the first time, I am beginning to see how things can be connected for the purpose of builing empathy. Whereas previously, I think the difficult work of etting to know a species was largely out of many peoples’ desires and time banks, perhaps there are now ways of making the opportunities both immediate and resource-efficient.
Rather than always seeking to decouple tightly-linked host-parasite relationships, can we find ways to make new ones…perhaps ones that can grow into mutualisms and symbioses? Is hardwiring a step in the process? What are the costs, benefits, sources and sinks? Can we create or link networks of co-dependence? What models of covariation should we adopt: linear, dominance, epistatic, topological?
Here is a new visualization of the cell cycle using a combination of Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), Flash, and database-driven graphics. This new version from Chris Landau and Jamie Cope’s nformation design demonstrates the yeast cell cycle in 3D cycle stages along with educational information about the process.
Try zooming in and see changes in the nucleus as the cycle progresses.
This project started as a collaboration at the University of Michigan with Anuj Kumar’s lab in the Life Sciences Institute and first led to the OrganelleView project.
It took me a long time to warm up to facebook. Eventually it was everyone else’s adoption of the site and its practices that convinced me to once again reaffirm my membership and make connections again. It’s been a good decision in the short-term, if only for the current knowledge of long-lost friends and colleagues.
Another peculiar benefit was seeing my former labmate’s profile and down there at the bottom, her dog’s profile. I had my first introduction to dogbook.
Dogbook it seems is the canine equivalent to facebook. Well, it’s not exactly an equivalent mind you. Rather it allows people to add pictures of their dogs to their profiles, for their dogs to join social networks, and for their friends to send ‘pets’ and other gifts. Here’s their description:
Dogbook allows you to create a profile for your dog, tag your dog in photos, find dogs in your area, and much more!
After doing some searches, it seems that dogbook isn’t the only facebook-hosted social networking site for animals out there. Besides dogbook there’s catbook, horsebook, rodentbook, fishbook and, of course, petbook.
My favorites are the ‘Obese Ann Arbor Squirrel Supporters‘ and the ever vigilant ‘Chihuahuas of NYC – UNITE!‘
More may be on the way as facebook users seem to be requesting ratbook, cowbook, and ferretbook as well.
For me this means that social networking is quick to adopt our companions of other species, or at least to use them as indicators of our own social compatibility. That friends can send gifts such as virtual pets and chew toys ups the ante. The benefit isn’t really for the pets themselves, but it much more for the user own self satisfaction I’m guessing. Of course the ads at the top of dogbook speak volumes. Maybe it’ not for the dogs at all, but rather the people contributing to the billion$+ dog economy…
I asked a friend of mine why she added the application, and here’s what she had to say:
I added dogbook because I love the idea of my dog having friends (and, yes, he does actually visit with and play with the dogs on facebook). I added it since I have so many other friends on facebook with dogs, but so far they are all slackers (or think it is a stupid idea) and so Smudge only has one friend : ( I guess it’s lucky for him he has no clue what it’s all about.
I checked her dogs profile, and it seems he likes, “eating, running, cuddling, gathering all my toys into one pile, barking at chipmunks and pesky cats.” His favorite treats are, “Anything and everything (even carrots and grapes).”
True social physical networking among species is what interests me. How might species engage in ecosystems of care by themselves (with a little intervention from us of course)? What happens when species from different parts of the world are linked by virtual communities of care and neglect? Does it take a village or is a biosphere more appropriate these days? What are the technological links that can make these connections feasible and meaningful for us and our interspecific companions?
I’m reading a book entitled, When Species Meet, by Donna Haraway. She’s one of my favorite authors, not only because of her subject matter, the relationships between ourselves and other organisms, science, and the stories we use to create meaning for how we act in the world, but because her literary style mixes the meanings of words and maintains her constantly questioning presence in the text.
In the third chapter of the book, she handles suffering, particularly of organisms in highly-constructed laboratory settings, with great care. By pointing out that we are always linked to killing in one form or another, the questions she raises is not if we do it at all, but rather how we approach, encounter, and leave those organisms that we are inextricably bound to.
My favorite passage from that third chapter is the one in which she asks some of her colleagues in the biological sciences how they demonstrate concern for the organisms in the lab as part of their practice. This is a question very close to home for me because it describes so much about my own motivations for doing science in the lab, how ‘reliable’ data are produced, and what kinds of practices can result.
I’m reminded of that famous quote from Barbara McClintock, also the title of Evelyn Fox Keller’s book, that emphasizes how “Getting a Feeling for the Organism” inserts itself so profoundly into daily scientific practice. This is empathy, yes, but the question Haraway asks is how we learn to recognize and therefore intervene in existing situations to show concern and enact strategies for care.
I think back to my own experiences in the lab, or rather, a temperature-controlled cool room. Others had brought snails back from a mountainous lake region in the southern hemisphere, and I was responsible for their care. These snails happened to be an invasive species in the U.S., requiring an extra level of containment to keep them, their offspring, and the parasites out of the regional ecosystem. My relationship with them meant creating the best possible environment for their growth and reproduction. They were, in effect, prisoners (although escape did have a potentially huge payoff). My role in their care meant feeding, finding and installing balanced spectrum lighting to mimic the ambient wavelengths, bringing in local plants to help filter the water in a huge freshwater ecosystem, making sure the water kept moving, installing irrigation systems to distribute a constant flow across many individual containers, adding sterilized rocks to the containers to allow for micronutrients, bacteria and other microorganisms, and even keeping fish and crayfish in the main tank to help condition and scavenge the water. For me, all of these technologies were about care. For one thing we couldn’t maintain the relationship these snails had with their parasites in the lab because we thought they just weren’t being taken care of well enough. There was this very important relationship, then, between how we cared for these snails and how and what kind of data we could collect about their own tight relationship with the parasites they came with.
For design, I’m thinking of how we script care. How can it be made obligatory as part of the function of a service, object, or process? How is it that we find connections and feel compelled to spend our time and energies attempting to make an environment or artifact more comfortable for another? How are we able to recognize what matters in this equation, especially when there are so many possibilities to misinterpret or just plain get it wrong. I suppose we look for signs of health, reproduction, and activity as indicators that we are on the right track. In doing so we create synergies between ourselves and others. By designing for their comfort, we link our vigor and theirs.
