Service designers identify and order goals in service systems. Service systems are a unit of analysis for an exchange of skills and capabilities which leads to the production of value in use (Vargo et al., 2008). Service systems are developed though the creation of value, where reinvention can transform the relationships of use and practice. Service systems are characteristically intangible, heterogeneous, simultaneous in production and consumption, non-perishable, and grounded in times and places that maintain their meaning and value (Kimbell, in prep).
One of the ways that designers understand service systems is by using a variety of approaches and concepts that isolate or concentrate focus on the relevant aspects of a system so they can drive experimentation and change. An example of this is a touchpoint, which means the aspects of the service are visible and come in contact with the users of that service (but see this discussion of its origins). You may have suspected that in a relationship of co-creation, touchpoints multiply quickly when production and consumption are linked since users are creators and vice versa. Another example that designers use is the line of visibility. This is similar to the touchpoint, and it describes what users see and experience in their relationships with a service system. It helps in rendering a system so that its processes and organizational structure are visible.
A draft diagram of a business process showing the line of visibility between the user and the organization dedicated to providing a service.
Because touchpoints and lines of visibility exist not only as tools but in practice, service experiences are tightly bound to tied to the production of narrative. Suspense in particular is a common experience for users when parts of a process, system, or set of relationships are hidden from view. Just imagine a time when you were the creator or recipient of a service. Much of your uncertainty or satisfaction was probably driven by what you knew or could expect about the outcome as well as the communication process that was taking place while the service was being delivered.
Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.”
So when working in service design we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.
Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.
Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.
In order to try to make the differences between pure suspense and impure suspense more tractable, I imagined what users in a service system might say if they were experience one or the other. The result is in the chart below, and it adapts these distinctions and starts to resolve how one might go about implementing different narrative objectives for a service system.
Pure suspense
Impure suspense
Locations
I move unrestricted between vantage points and locations.
I stay highly local and subjective.
Points of view
My perspective is omniscient and wide-ranging.
I tell everyone what is happening everywhere.
I get different sources of information through the eyes of the others.
I keep some people informed and others in the dark.
Time
My day is prolonged by tension and arbitrary delay.
Deadlines are set early in the day and acceleration commonly heightens my emotional state.
Emotional states
I have anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as a deadline looms.
I am alertly attentive, experiencing empathy for others.
Knowledge Production
The person in charge chooses and focuses attention on the priorities.
I cooperate with the information provided to learn what to do next.
Expectations
I can explicitly identify a threat.
I am frequently surprised.
I sense an outcome before others.
I fill in blanks with sources of meaning that haven’t been provided.
Moral outcome?
I favor the best outcome – like what happens in popular media.
The best outcome is less certain and often unrealized.
References:
Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145-152. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2008.04.003
Disaggregation among natural and social scientific communities can lead to misunderstandings about the different components of disaster management and socio-ecological systems. Terms like resilient, adaptive, robust are often used to describe systems and their processes and come up in the literature, policy, and the media very frequently. They have catch my attention because they have different use patterns in the field I know a little about: biology.
Adaptation, coping, resilience, and robustness have similar definitions, but they sometimes have different technical definitions across disciplines. Their different meanings contribute to their value, and they highlight the differences in perspectives that each scientific community contributes. However, the details matter for distinguishing important components of systems and what aspects might be suggestive for new insights or that might be responsive to intervention or assessment. It’s also important to establish common ground meanings when communities get together and work towards common goals.
The following represents some of my notes and thinking as I try to sort out the definitions on my own. For me, it means asking how different perspectives contribute to the ways in which we interact in socio-ecological systems.
Adaptation
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th Assessment Report defines adaptation as:
Initiatives and measures to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects. Various types of adaptation exist, e.g. anticipatory and reactive, private and public, and autonomous and planned. Examples are raising river or coastal dikes, the substitution of more temperature-shock resistant plants for sensitive ones, etc.
This definition takes its function from the ability of humans to manipulate their environment, making it better suited to human-identified goals and interests, even if acting on behalf of other organisms. Some synonyms include alteration, modification, redesign, remodeling, revamping, reworking, reconstruction, conversion, adjustment, acclimatization, acclimation, accommodations, habituation, acculturation, assimilation, and integration.
Adaptation is also used to describe genetically-accumulated evolutionary change over time in organisms as a response to natural selection. This is different from the case where manipulating the environment substitutes in the short-term replaces the pressure of genetic adaptation over the long term.
So I suppose this is why it calls to mind a version of evolution based on characters acquired in its lifetime (commonly known as Lamarckian inheritance)–if only for the appropriation of the term adaptation to refer to intra (within) generational processes and not inter (between) generational processes.
Adaptation for evolutionary biologists typically means processes through which a population becomes better suited to its environment over the course of many generations, often through natural selection. A great deal of debate and research has been directed at how we recognize adaptation in hindsight. This is because it can be difficult to state the causes for the evolution of a trait when we do not have direct observation and only historical signatures to learn from. Most notably this was discussed in “The Spandrels of San Marco”, a paper by Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin (1979) that uses an analogy from architecture for the evolution of organismal form and function.
I agree that changing the environment in the ways mentioned in the IPCC definition will likely limit vulnerabilities for humans and other populations. However, there is an implicit assumption here that the goal should be for humans NOT to have to adapt over a course of generations–despite the inevitability of genetic change over time. It presupposes an assumption of stasis – and a very western one when compared to eastern notions of change and mutability. Richard Nisbett catalogues how some of these assumptions about change and stasis in his book The Geography of Thought. For me, it depends on what time scale one is looking to understand if stasis or change is more relevant. Still, I think its difficult to argue anymore that stasis is more relevant than change.
The necessary question should not be IF we should adapt (genetically or by manipulating the environment). Instead we should ask, “What are we adapting to and how are we getting there?” Will humans and other populations be adapting to artificially-supported ‘vulnerability balloons’ as we are almost surely doing now through our uses of technology and fossil fuels?
This question of adaptive goal is important because the IPCC definitions include definitions of costs and benefits with its description of adaptation. To what goal are these costs and benefits applied? Within the frame of a generation or an organism’s lifetime, explicating goals may make sense, but ascribing goals to a ecosystem – much less whole populations – gets very very slippery. You start to need some way to implicate who or what is writing that mission statement.
Similarly the IPCC includes adaptive capacity in its glossary as the ability, institutions, and resources that can be used to implement adaptation measures.
I think this is all a bit confusing, and I feel it makes more sense to reserve the definition of adaptation for genetic, phenotypic, and behavioral attenuation of organisms or systems to their environment across generations. To describe the processes that organisms and systems use during their lifetimes I think we need a term that encompasses more variability, one that is less blatantly anthropocentric and functionalist in its approach to socio-ecological coevolution. We also need a long view on systems not ones that are limited to single generations only – something that the biological definition of adaptation retains but that the socio-technical one does not.
Borrowing from the literature of evolutionary biology, behavior, and developmental biology, plasticity seems far better suited to the processes of environmental manipulation being described by the IPCC. This is because it references a material (plastic) that maintains its basic molecular structure while having variable capacity to take on any number of manipulations or forms.
Coping and Plasticity
The terms coping and adaptation are sometimes used interchangeably leading to confusion. Here I think there is some opportunity to disentangle the two. A compilation of brainstorming sessions by groups of development practitioners in Ghana, Niger and Nepal described some differences which were then documented in the Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook. The results of the group’s sessions were pointing to what I think was a difference between 1) consistent and conscious actions to reduce vulnerability (adaptation) versus 2) ad hoc solutions (coping).
It’s worthwhile to differentiate coping and adaptation as within and between generation processes, respectively. Biologists use plasticity to describe the ability of an organism or group to adjust within its lifetime via behavioral or developmental responses to the environment. This may indeed include manipulation of the environment to decrease vulnerability. Phenotypic plasticity is a description that could easily encompass artifacts, behaviors, institutions, and aggregations of resources as extensions of an organism’s phenotype. It invokes important concepts from evolutionary biology including the role of cooperation in building and maintaining extended phenotypes (such as aggregations of useful materials like insurance, band-aids, and water) or how phenotypic reaction norms can change in response to different environments–shedding light on why a strategy in one environment may not be as successful in another. There is further correspondence here with plasticity and the concept of developmental canalization (that organismal systems can get locked in to specific trajectories) and with the concept of path dependence in the development of economic and institutional systems.
So a better definition of plasticity might re-appropriate the IPCC’s definition of adaptation and rework it as:
An adjustment in natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli or their effects, which moderates harm or exploits beneficial opportunities. Plasticity operates through cognitive (sensing), social (interactional), physiological, and other mechanisms that can adjust to a wide range of variability. Plasticity is the ability to respond to variability and a range of realized and possible futures continuously and in a sustained approach. Plasticity or coping strategies attenuate the use of resources to local needs and involve planning that hybridizes old and new knowledge and strategies in an exploratory process.
Here I think this definition makes it much easier to bridge what may be happening at a physiological level (cellular temperature variation, sweating) with responses at an artifact level (clothing, ventilation) and an institutional (e.g. policies towards what it means to be cool).
This is because the term plasticity explicitly invokes a connotation of variability, while adaptation feels more like a description of how well two things (in this case organism or population and environment) fit together. Clearly, if the environment is highly variable we need variability in our systems, not assumptions and values of how well we already fit and work within it.
Coping, on the other hand, seems pretty straightforward. Survive. It makes sense to leave a lot of variability open for this one, because when it comes time for coping strategies, any and all tactics may be appropriate. But then again, there can be ways to cope that are more responsive than others. But I think this starts to dig into a definition of resilience or robustness, where the system properties begin to matter more than than how they manifest themselves in practice. What I mean by this is that as people, organisms, and ecosystems attempt to cope with change, their ability to draw on networks or strategies for coping is itself embedded in the system. Some systems, as a function of their structure, cope better than others. Consequently the adapt better than other too.
Resilience
The Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook adapts its definition from UNISDR (2009) defining resilience as “the ability of a system to resist, absorb, and recover from the effects of hazards in a timely and efficient manner, preserving or restoring its essential basic structures, functions, and identity.”
The IPCC defines resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organisation, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.”
While Walker et al (2004) define resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks.”
In these cases resilience emphasizes a system’s ability to maintain or return to specific structural or functional features–i.e. to maintain its identity, its durability, its persistence. But as noted by Erica Jen in her article “Stable or Robust? What’s the Difference?” (2005), the choices of features or structural elements that we attend to are important for assessing both the capacity and quality of that responsiveness to change.
So what is the function, what is functional, and for whom? Definitions matter.
One way to think about resilience is to imagine a couple of different water balloons. One balloon is filled halfway full. Another is filled so that the latex rubber that composes its surface and membrane is stretched tightly to hold the water in. Now you can throw both balloons back and forth between each other, and neither may pop. But what do you think will happen when the balloons are stretched, twisted, or allowed to drop on the ground where a twig might be a hazard to the already tense surface of the overfilled balloon? It will probably pop and spill the water out.
A system’s resilience is a lot like a water balloon, and the degree of resilience is determined by how much water is forced into the balloon, the size of the balloon, and how much it is pushed to its limits. We might think of the balloons shape, its ‘throwability’ or the thickness of its membrane as examples of functional or structural elements. In most cases, we are looking at how well the balloon is able to maintain it shape and its continuity despite being stressed – i.e. it is functionally a ‘water balloon’, it has a round shape, and responds to the exterior and interior pressures of air and water.
Rarely do we think that a water balloon might reconfigure itself, rearranging the organization of its functions, structural elements, or features to be able to accomplish the same task differently. What would happen if the water and the balloon separated or if the water balloon system was able to draw on other systems (e.g. refrigeration) to change the relationships between its functional elements? What if we no longer simply considered only the water inside of the balloon as the system responding to the task of throwing? What if the throwing and catching movements were also included? Would we still think of a resilient system, or would we start to walk a path of robustness–of being able to adjust the definitions and constraints of the systems themselves in pursuit of coevolutionary relationships between them?
Robustness
Robustness is a different beast altogether – literally. While resilience is focused on maintaining a system, we can describe robustness as the ability of a system to change and in doing so to respond to environment and to develop entirely new functions as a result.
Some argue that robustness describes the ability of a system to withstand mutations and maintain its phenotype or “shape” as a result (Wagner, 2005). Instead I think there is a greater correspondence of robustness with transformation as used by Walker et al (2004). Transformability is “the capacity to create a fundamentally new system when ecological, economic, or social (including political) conditions make the existing system untenable.” I’m less sure about the “untenable” part of Walker et al’s definition.
Robustness is the ability of a system to evolve system functions, not simply maintain those that already exist. In this way, an analogy can be drawn between adaptation/robustness and plasticity/resilience. Similarly, I think robustness has a quality of being parametric. Parametric architecture has the quality of being built from common construction principles, but by varying the parameter values of those rules of construction, endless forms become possible.
References
Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5
UNISDR, 2009. Terminology: Basic terms of disaster risk reduction and IISD et al, 2007. Community-based Risk Screening – Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL) User’s Manual, Version 3.0.
Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis Handbook
IPCC, 2007: Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Annex I., M.L. Parry, O.F. Canziani, J.P. Palutikof, P.J. van der Linden and C.E. Hanson, Eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 976pp.
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme” Proc. Roy. Soc. London B 205 (1979) pp. 581-598
Wagner, Andreas. 2005. Robustness and Evolvability in Living Systems (Princeton Studies in Complexity). Princeton University Press.
Nisbett, R. E. (2004). The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why. Simon and Schuster.
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.
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.
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.
A comparison of interaction records in two group of hens. This figure illustrates the comparison feature of the music notation program showing the interaction records in two groups of hens interleaved in two-hour blocks.
Ivan Chase demonstrates a compelling use of musical notation for visualizing social interactions and (conceivably) networks using musical notation. Chase suggests that:
music notation graphs can be of particular help in a variety of fields interested in social interaction in humans, animals, and machines such as behavioural ecology, behavioural economics, social organization in animals, development of social networks in humans, human conversational analysis, and the coordination of actions in social robots.
Jay Silver is a researcher in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first met Jay when I arrived in Bangalore about ten months ago. While he was there, he made all kinds of cool things that allowed us to interact in interesting and fun ways with our environment! His recent work has been looking at how to make touch, sensation, and interaction with the world around us astonishing, especially for kids! I made this video while discussing his work with him in the Media Lab.
This semester I have the pleasure of being able to lead and help two teams of students create engaging, socially-embedded, interactive design projects. The experience was a success both for me and the students. I learned a lot about my students and what they needed to do excellent work. I think we also found some new ways of working here at Srishti that may prove valuable in the long-term.
The teams also took part in a competition in which the winning team is invited to present their work at the Microsoft Research Design Expo, part of the Faculty Summit held in Redmond, WA in late July. We’re all looking forward to attending because we are very proud of the students’ accomplishments.
The ‘Moon Vehicle’ project consisted of a system to create interactive storytelling experiences around themes of the moon, space exploration and colonization, and India’s forthcoming launch of the Chandrayaan-I moon satellite.
Screen captures from the \'Moon Vehicle\' project design.
The Moon Vehicle team’s design developed in part from the Bangalore Space and Culture Initiative, an interdisciplinary endeavor of artists, scientists, designers, and technologists that began in late September, 2007 and coordinated by Srishti, NIAS, and ISRO.
The Play Revolution project changed many times, but it was always focused on the idea of building a socio-econo-technical system for improving the knowledge-networking opportunities of children living in slums in and around Bangalore.
The lab itself and the social interactions were influenced in part by the GROCS lab at the University of Michigan. Thanks go to Linda Kendall-Knox for her willingness to share aspects of their process.
The course started as a relatively straightforward user interface design series of topics, but this plan was quickly abandoned for a more socially-embedded model that would adapt to the different concerns and questions we were going to encounter. The primary article guiding this process was entitled “Products and Practices: Selected Concepts from Science and Technology Studies and from Social Theories of Consumption and Practice” (Ingram et al. 2007). The article stressed six stages of technological adoption: acquisition, scripting, appropriation, assembly, normalization, and practice.
We used these stages to guide our design process.
The students were given a design brief that consisted of two challenges: one consisting of Srishti’s existing commitments to cultural, educational, artistic,and design-based engagements with society, and another consisting of a more general challenge to design a user interface and/or interactive experience around the theme of learning and education. They were asked to develop a project that synthesized these challenges into one unique approach that incorporated the concerns, commitments, and constraints that were implicitly and explicitly embedded in the issues raised.
The theme of this year’s competition was “Learning and Education”, and students were challenged to design a user interface and/or interactive experience around the theme of learning and education that improves the daily life of a wide variety of users through learning and education, promotes creativity and curiosity in new topics, demonstrates novel ways of providing instruction, and rethinks education systems and tools.
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.
Potamopyrgus antipodarum under the dissecting scope
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.
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.
