Even before Darwin authored “On the Origin of Species” he used variants of the term ‘selection’ to describe the (now well-known) theory of evolution by natural selection. In the 19th century England, ‘selection’ was in common use among animal and plant breeders who isolated desirable variants and bred them for future generations. Darwin appropriated the term as an analogy and an appeal to experiences grounded in everyday life. Darwin’s ‘natural means of selection’ was a tactic to deal with the cultural inertia of teleology – supernatural design explanations for the emergence of species. The term stuck, and it continues to resonate – in part because ‘natural selection’ is an extension of human desires and not those of other species.

Following publication of “On the Origin of Species”, Darwin went on to reconsider his use of ‘natural selection’ to describe the evolutionary process. In letters to Asa Gray and Charles Lyell on the 26th and 28th September, 1860, respectively, Darwin suggested that ‘natural preservation’ would be less confusing for some readers. He also hoped it might discourage related uses he found objectionable and inconsistent with the meaning he sought.

In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace wrote to Darwin describing the difficulties that ‘natural selection’ posed to acceptance of the theory. Wallace argued that ‘natural selection’ was “indirect and incorrect”; Wallace thought ‘extermination’ rather than ‘selection’ was more appropriate to the evidence. It is evident that Wallace preferred personification as a rhetorical tactic, but he also recognized that people often took the metaphors too literally. He cited use of ‘Nature’ as a personification and begs for caution in Darwin’s rhetoric.

When Wallace wrote to Darwin about his use of ‘natural selection’, he pointed out how other contexts (e.g. watching, choosing, preferring, seeking, thought, direction) led to some of these anthropomorphic and voluntarist biases. Darwin’s pervasive anthropomorphic, voluntarist description of natural selection is described in depth by Young (1985) who elucidates Darwin’s contemporary milieu. Darwin appropriated ‘selection’ to reach across disciplines. He was seeking clarity in the processes he was trying to explain. In drawing on breeding culture, he found a ready example from everyday life to equate his theory with. Breeding, being a subset of natural selection, would provoke visual comparisons in people’s minds. Young points out another benefit of using ‘selection’ was that, in breeder’s terms, it simply differentiated their understanding of variation into known and unknown causes (Young p95). Darwin was just trying to imply that he had expanded what was known about the causes of variation in nature.

In his 1866 letter, Wallace’s ultimate goal was to convince Darwin to replace his ‘natural selection’ with Herbert Spencer’s term ‘survival of the fittest’. This was suggested to obviate the invocation of an external actor ‘selecting’ among individual variants. Darwin largely ignored Wallace’s suggestion, but he put the phrases ‘natural selection’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ into direct competition in his reply to Wallace:

The term Natural selection has now been so largely used abroad & at home that I doubt whether it could be given up, & with all its faults I should be sorry to see the attempt made. Whether it will be rejected must now depend “on the survival of the fittest”. As in time the term must grow intelligible, the objections to its use will grow weaker & weaker. I doubt whether the use of any term would have made the subject intelligible to some minds, clear as it is to others; for do we not see even to the present day Malthus on Population absurdly misunderstood.

Dawin went even further and inserted the term into the 5th edition of “On the Origin of Species.” Unfortunately, ‘survival of the fittest’ turned out to be fairly resilient and has led to a great deal of misunderstanding – in part because it became equated ‘natural selection’ which Darwin had not intended.

Young (1993) sums it up nicely:

“Natural selection – Darwin’s metaphor – needn’t therefore embarrass us now, because it’s allowed. It’s allowed once again to acknowledge the purposiveness, the final causes, the analogies to human intention, embedded in our concepts of and about nature. …the metaphorical nature of fundamental concepts in so-called basic sciences – affinity, gravity, natural selection – dissolves the barrier between scientific discourse and other modes of expression.” This makes one wonder what other metaphors would be just as productive – connecting to different modes of expression across existing barriers.

Biologists are now caught between choosing to use the metaphor in its anachronistic form, refusing to see its metaphorical quality altogether, or using it to support teleological evolutionism.

Another possibility to to attempt to synthesize what we have learned since Darwin to apply ever more imprecise metaphors in the hope that they too will stimulate enough refraction in meaning to generate productive research questions.

References

Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2930/ (letter no. 2930; accessed 5 September 2010)

Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-2931/ (letter no. 2931; accessed 5 September 2010)

Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5140/ (letter no. 5140; accessed 5 September 2010)

Darwin Correspondence Project Database. http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-5145/ (letter no. 5145; accessed 5 September 2010)

Young, R. M. (1985). Darwin’s Metaphor. Cambridge University Press.  pp92-112.

Young, R.M. (1993). Science as Culture (no. 16) 3 :375-403.

Towards the last quarter of 2010, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) held an open contest to design its new logo. They constraints they articulated included dimensions and the need for it to show the work “evolution” or “SSE”.

Mock-up journal cover

I’ve been a member of SSE in the past, and I’ve also been interested in the dynamic between values, visual communication, and scientific advancement. SSE’s mission is to promote the scientific understanding of organic evolution, and that role has always occupied it with controversies around evolution as science and cultural currency.

For these reasons I was very excited to give it a shot. I was also very anxious to see how some of my current and former peers would respond to this sort of public engagement around something so central to communication of values – a logo. Designers and organizations that actively seek to build relationships with their customers and stakeholders know that branding and identity creation and co-creation is extremely important for a holistic engagement strategy. I count many of the stakeholders involved as friends, so I took on this project with a very deep sense of urgency and meaning. However, because it was a contest, all of the design work would be speculative. Still, I was excited to see how the SSE community and its stakeholders would react to the range of designs.

As a result of the contest, the competition generated more than 40 logos from more than 30 designers. However in the end, the kind of community discussion and open engagement never materialized. A letter about the results had this to say:

A slide show of the logos was sent to a panel consisting of the SSE council as well as a graphic artist and a publisher’s representative. Everyone was asked to explain what they liked about their favorite designs, and we took a poll. Originally, we had intended to send a selection of designs to our membership for a vote, but the council was unable to achieve consensus on which designs these could be. Neither was the council ready to adopt any particular submission as our logo. We did award the $1000 prize for the design that was most highly favored by the panel, but we will continue to work with to devise a logo that suits our needs.

As I read this I thought it was hugely interesting. A handful of things stand out:

1. Non-experts (except perhaps for the graphic artist) are being asked to make strategic decisions about branding, identity, and service design (somewhat ironic in my opinion).
2. Along with #1 is a tacit assumption that such expertise exists.
3. A formalized plan was scuttled because a non-expert group didn’t have a system for making clear choices.
4. It wasn’t made clear at the outset how the designs would be evaluated or how the visual characteristics and metaphors should map to the organization’s goals and mission.
5. It was stated in the end that there are needs, but these remain hidden or unarticulated.
6. A small number of people were involved in the selection process and were not ready to adopt any of the submissions.

As you can probably guess, it was likely a pretty lively discussion among the group. They acknowledged that the the diverse range of styles and content were useful for them to see. They also indicated that they would be more effective in working with a graphical artist to design a logo that expresses the identity of the society. That’s great for them, but has the community at large gained anything from the process, and will it embrace future designs any better than it has in the past?

Working with designers can be tough, but working with the right ones can be refreshing, especially when they are actively involved early in the process. It’s pretty clear from the context that the society was working under the archaic model of design, where logos are pretty things that don’t do much other than identify the organization – and also that everyone’s opinion is both valid and meaningful. Designers know their stuff, and they can make informed judgements about seemingly minor differences.

I do think that through the process the society gained a better understanding of how the quest for identity formation reveals unspoken values and commitments in some interesting ways. That’s one of the better things that design does: it makes things visible. Values becomes lines on paper. Assumptions get turned into letterforms. Goals become shades of color. What is really cool is how the design process can activate those discussions. Indeed it can lead to co-creation.

The value of design is to create a substrate for the vocalization of values that people are unable or unwilling to share. This is participatory design, and there are a variety of techniques for making this a more robust process. The first iteration in design is always just a starting point, with many examples to continue the process with. The design process is a continuous one with multiple rounds of iteration and feedback. Values (usually derived from mission statements) are what SSE is effectively selling to its members and society at large. With values, there is never an end point or product. A logo is simply an indicator of those values; it can be honest or something different altogether.

Given the public controversy that can sometimes follow a group like this, engaging in a forthright community discussion about the values it intends and how they are perceived can itself be valuable for opening up the process of doing science to the lay public. I agree that it can be dangerous, but then again, physics has been very good at doing this, perhaps because its outcomes are used by so many people in everyday life and because its concepts can also be so abstract.

In general, designers are discouraged from doing speculative work – i.e. work that contributed as a reasonably finished product in anticipation of future compensation. Contests are basically speculative work, but they usually trade off the probability of a financial award with other benefits – usually in the form of some public exposure. Most designers will agree that speculative work and competitions usually devalues the profession (see AIGA’s policy on spec work). Non-profits often exploit this kind of work, though I doubt other consulting services would receive similar treatment (imagine a contest for accounting services for example). So one part of a publicly engaging discussion is just that – publicizing the results, however satisfactory, so that it opens up additional communication that may not serve the direct interests of the SSE.

I do feel it was unfortunate that the committee wasn’t able send the preliminary designs to the wider SSE community. They indicated that they didn’t have an effective mechanism in place for responding to such input. If I had been able, I would have told them about this thing called Web 2.0 and gone on to demonstrate the variety of tools for collaboration (e.g. OpenIDEO, Kluster, or some of GOOD’s contests). I think it would have served as a fun and compelling way to engage in a discussion about science and society.

P.S. The visual identity system you see here is up for grabs;)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a Viennese philosopher intent on language, its meaning, and its interactions with the physical environment– or more precisely, the public space of use. His writings have influenced education, mathematics, art, and others for their critical approach to language, meaning, metaphor, and our representation of a shared environment. His work Philosophical Investigations (2nd Ed., Trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe) takes a decidedly non-linear approach, where his analysis of language straddles a landscape in which games are played, rules made, and mental images resonate with the spoken and written word.

Interspersed within Philosophical Investigations are a handful of passages that describe some general properties of games. In the book, they connect to other passages that explore language-games, rules, imagery and so on, but I’ve chosen these for their generality. In the work, the discussions proceed from an unwrapping of language and games into and understanding of the rules for play – i.e. grammar. Here we are only interested in the meaning of a game.

I’ve extracted these passages, to separate them (for the moment) from language. You’ll see lots of errors in the text because used OCR (optical character recognition). I was tempted to tidy it up, but given the general theme of the work, I think it’s fitting. Enjoy!

3. Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication;
only not everything that we call1anguage is this system. And one
has to say this in many cases where the question arises “Is this an
appropriate description or not?” The answer is: “Yes, it is appropriate,
but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of
what you were claiming to describe.”

It is as if someone were to say: “A game consists in moving objects
about on a surface according to certain rules …”-and we replied:
You seem to be thinking of board games, but there are others. You
can make your definition correct by expressly restricting it to those
games.

3I. When one shews someone the king in chess and says: “This is
the king”, this does not tell him the use of this piece-unless he already
knows the rules of the game up to this last point: the shape of the king.
You could imagine his having learnt the rules of the game without ever
having been shewn an actual piece. The shape of the chessman corresponds
here to the sound or shape of a word.

One can also imagine someone’s having learnt the game without
ever learning or formulating rules. He might have learnt quite simple
board-games first, by watching, and have progressed to more and
more complicated ones. He too might be given the explanation “This
is the king”,-if, for instance, he were being shewn chessmen ofa shape
he was not used to. This explanation again only tells him the use
of the piece because, as we might say, the place for it was already
prepared. Or even: we shall only say that it tells him the use, if
the place is already prepared. And in this case it is so, not because the
person to whom we give the explanation already knows rules, but
because in another sense he is already master of a game.

Consider this further case: I am explaining chess to someone; and I
begin by pointing to a chessman and saying: “This is the king; it
can move like this, …. and so on.”-In this case we shall say: the
words “This is the king” (or “This is called the ‘king’ “) are a definition
only if the learner already ‘knows what a piece in a game is’. That is,
if he has already played other games, or has watched other people
playing ‘and understood’-andsimilarthings. Further, only under these
conditions will he be able to ask relevantly in the course of learning the
game: “What do you call this?”-that is, this piece in a game.

We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something
with it can significantly ask a name.

And we can imagine the person who is asked replying: “Settle the
name yourself”-and now the one who asked would have to manage
everything for himself.

54· Let us recall the kinds of case where we say that a game is
played according to a definite rule.

Th~ rule may.be .an aid in teaching the game. The learner is told it
~d gtven pract1c~ in applying it..-Or.it is an instrument of the game
~tself.-Or .a :ule IS employed neither in the teaching nor in the game
ttself; .nor IS rt set down in a list of rules. One learns the game by
watching how others play. But we say that it is played according to
such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from
the practice of the game-like. a.na~ral.law governing the play.-B~
t how does the observer distinguish in this case between players’
mistak~s and ~orrect p~ay?-There are .characteristic signs of it in the
pla~ers behaviour, Think of the behaviour characteristic of correcting
a slip o.f the tongue”. It would be possible to recognize that someone
was doing so even WIthout knowing his language.

66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”.
I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and
so on. What is common to them all?-Don’t say: “There must be
something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but
look andsee whether there is anything common to all.-For if you look
at them you will not see something that is common to all, but
similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To
repeat: don’t think, but look I-Look for example at board-games,
with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card-games; here
you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common
features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ballgames,
much that is common is retained, but much is lost.-Are they
all ‘amusing’? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there
always. winning and losing, or competition between players? Think
of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a
c~ild throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has
~sappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the
difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of
games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement,
but how many other characteristic features have disappeared 1 And
we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same
way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear.

And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network
of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall
similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.

68. “All right: the concept of number is defined for you as the
logical sum of these individual interrelated concepts: cardinal numbers,
rational numbers, real numbers, etc.; and in the same way the concept
of a game as the logical sum of a corresponding set of sub-concepts.”-
It need not be so. For I can give the concept ‘number’ rigid limits
in this way, that is, use the word “number” for a rigidly limited concept,
but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not
closed by.a frontier. And this is how we do use the word “game”.
For how IS the concept of a game bounded? What still counts as a
game and what no longer does? Can you give the boundary? No.
You can draw one; for none has so far been drawn. (But that never
troubled you before when you used the word “game”.)

.”B~t ~en the use of”the wor? is unregulated, the. ‘game’ we play
WIth It IS unregulated. –It IS not everywhere CIrcumscribed by
rules} but n? more are there any rules for how high one throws the
ball In tennis, or how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has
rules too.

69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine
that we should describe games to him, and we might add: “This and
similar things are called ‘games”’. And do we know any more about
it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what
a game is?-But this is not ignorance. We do not know the boundaries
because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundaryfor
a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable?
Not at alll (Except for that special purpose.) No more than it took
the definition: I pace = 75 em, to make the measure of length ‘one
pace’ usable. And if you want to say “But still, before that it wasn’t
an exact measure”, then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one.Though
you still owe me a definition of exactness.

70. “But if the concept ‘game’ is uncircumscribed like that, you
don’t really know what you mean by a ‘game’.”–When I give the
description: “The ground was quite covered with plants”-do you
want to say I don’t know what I am talking about until I can give a
definition of a plant?

My meaning would be explained by, say, a drawing and the words
“The ground looked roughly like this”. Perhaps I even say “it looked
exact!J like this.” – Then were just this grass and these leaves there,
arranged just like this? No, that is not what it means. And I should
not accept any picture as exact in this sense.

Someone says to me: “Shew the children a game.” I teach them
gaming with dice, and the other says “I didn’t mean that sort of
game.” Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before
his mind when he gave me the order?

75. What does it mean to know what a game is? What does it
mean, to know it and not be able to say it? Is this knowledge somehow
equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were
formulated I should be able to recognize it as the expression of my
knowledge? Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely
expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing
examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other
games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should
scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.

100. “But still, it isn’t a game, if there is some vagueness in the
~ules”.-But does this prevent its being a game?-”Perhaps you’ll call
it a game, but at any rate it certainly isn’t a perfect game.” This means:
it has impurities, and what I am interested in at present is the pure
article.-But I want to say: we misunderstand the role of the ideal
in our language. That is to say: we too should call it a game, only we
are dazzled by the ideal and therefore fail to see the actual use of the
word “game” clearly.

200. It is, of course, imaginable that two people belonging to a
tribe unacquainted with games should sit at a chess-board and go
through the moves of a game of chess; and even with all the appropriate
mental accompaniments. And if we were to see it we should say they
were playing chess. But now imagine a game of chess translated
according to certain rules into a series of actions which we do not
ordinarily associate with a game-say into yells and stamping of feet.
And now suppose those two people to yell and stamp instead of playing
the form of chess that we are used to; and this in such a way
that their procedure is translatable by suitable rules into a game of
chess. Should we still be inclined to say they were playing a game?
What right would one have to say so?

563. Let us say that the meaning of a piece is its role in the game.Now
let it be decided by lot which of the players gets white before
any game of chess begins. To this end one player holds a king in each
closed fist while the other chooses one of the two hands at random.
Will it be counted as part of the role of the king in chess that it is used
to draw lots in this way?

564. So I am inclined to distinguish between the essential and the
inessential in a game too. The game, one would like to say, has not
only rules but also a point.

567. But, after ali, the game is supposed to be defined by the rules I
So, if a rule of the game prescribes that the kings are to be used for
drawing lots before a game of chess, then that is an essential part of
the game. What objection might one make to this? That one does not
see the point of this prescription. Perhaps as one wouldn’t see the point
either of a rule by which each piece had to be turned round three times
before one moved it. If we found this rule in a board-game we should
be surprised and should speculate about the purpose of the rule.
(“Was this prescription meant to prevent one from moving without
due consideration?”)

568. If I understand the character of the game aright-I might
say-then this isn’t an essential part of it.
«Meaning is a physiognomy.))

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.

A Model of Mitochondria in the Cell

What is a mitochondrion? It’s an organelle (kind of like an organ in your body) for a cell.  They generate much of the chemical energy used by a cell to carry out its different processes.

I have been working on a project for the last few months that extends work on what I call Silking Systems. By calling it Silking Systems, I’m trying to emphasize the patterning of silk and textile production as a set of relationships, things and interactions to accomplish varieties of silk/non-silk relationships, rather than as modes of behavior or production which are static – or should I say pre-threaded?

In 2008, some of my students researched How Silk is Made (after How Stuff is Made) for my class on Design for Sustainability. Their work documents the collection and processing of the silk fiber from cocoons to the thread you find in finished textiles.

Steps to a square cocoon.

In attempting to learn about sericulture from scratch, I visited some local producers in Karnataka, India and pulled in some textual research and advice – including Joseph Needham’s classic series on Science and Technology in China (1998 ed).

The most recent concept that I want to document here is pretty simple. Human mitochondrial genome sequences are woven in sequence using silk to produce a pattern that matches the mitochondrial nucleotide patterns.

Ashwathnarayann

Checking the loom's warp.

I have a few implicit goals and a few explicit ones as well. An implicit one is that I am attempting to push the relationship between craft, production, economic agency, and hybridity. I am drawing to some extent from the idea that economic value is generated through recombination – that goods and/or services emerge and create value when they are mixtures of other (especially unrelated) things.

Transferring the silk thread for the weft from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Eric Beinhocker details this concept of value through hybrids along with an evolutionary algorithmic perspective on economics in his book The Origin of Wealth (2006). The book was recommended to me by Cesar Hildago, a Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Development. Cesar’s work on complex networks has also influenced this project, starting with his article on the Product Space of Nations (2007) and continuing with images like figures 1 and 2 which came out of his research. The network graphs make it easy to see how different economies differ in the products they export.

Fig 1. This image maps the products produced by the United States in 2000. The squares are things they are good at – in the US's case vehicles, chemicals, forest products, for example.

Fig 2. This image maps the products produced by India in 2000. The squares are things they are good at – in India's case textiles, chemicals, and diamonds, for example.

My thinking is that by challenging some aspects of the status quo in silk and textile production, new value propositions might be found. This comes, perhaps, by demonstrating that square cocoons are possible or by remixing molecular genetics and weaving to create a series of silk stoles based on a mitochondrial haplotype found frequently in southern India.

Preparing the shuttles from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Another goal is to simply visualize the mitochondrial genome – and to make it as accessible for teaching and learning as possible. Making it tactile and making it in silk allows people to touch, feel, and to see individual sequence variation. Silk thread is a good scale for this sort of thing – not too small and not too big either. So in viewing these stoles (which measure about 5 meters each in length) one is challenged to look for patterns and they are rewarded with the same.

The mitochondrial sequence used to produce the pattern next to shuttles that carry the silk thread through the warp.

Weaving silk using a mitochondrial sequence from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Checking and threading the warp. You can see the silk fibers and how thin a single one is. It takes years to master silk weaving because it is a very delicate and dexterity-rich process.

Finished pattern stretched on the loom.

I’ll expand this article as the project develops further, but I’ll end now with one nagging curiosity. The pattern that is being produced is engaging and pleasing. It makes me wonder if it in some ways exploits a bias we humans may have towards certain arrangements. Specifically I’m thinking about pink noise patterns…but I need to search more.

References

Needham, J., & Kuhn, D. (1988). Science and civilisation in China: spinning and reeling. Vol. 5. Chemistry and chemical technology. Pt. 9. Textile technology. Cambridge University Press.

Beinhocker, E. D. (2006). The origin of wealth: evolution, complexity, and the radical remaking of economics. Harvard Business Press.

Hidalgo, C. A., Klinger, B., Barabasi, A., & Hausmann, R. (2007). The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations. Science, 317(5837), 482-487. doi:10.1126/science.1144581

This was a post that I initially wrote for the ‘Telling Stories’ discussion group that is made up of recipients of the Wellcome Trust’s International Engagement Award.  The group practices public engagement with public health and science from a variety of different perspectives and goals.  In this post, I was exploring the role of narration and also looking at the idea of suspense as created by communication (or the lack of) between researchers and members of the public.

Part 1.
I can start by locating the visual arts as a source or medium for engagement. The answer is: myriad. In the last ten years or so (and even before) the arts domain has taken on science and technology in bushels. Some of the response of the arts has been driven out of curiosity and the desire to take on the mantle of science for aesthetic reasons. For others it has been a source of tactical engagement with the very substance of knowledge production in the sciences, defense and military establishments, and the diffusion of technology in everyday life.

There are way too many example to adequately cover here, except to say that the Wellcome Trust is a major stakeholder in this area and has been for at least a decade as far as I know. I remember a festival in South Kensington that I happened upon almost ten years ago called Sparks which featured may artists working specifically with the life sciences in some form or another. Exhibitions were held at the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum, among others (http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/festival_of_science/91…). It was largely a cultural series of events, continuing a dialogue which I have witnessed firsthand in many forms and places afterwards. It seems to me that the role of the arts in these debates has largely been restricted to Europe, but I have seen some signs in the US and now in Asia that the visual arts are playing a more tactical and more integral role in the development of engagement vectors with the public, practitioners, and policy makers.

Some examples:
Last year we conducted a workshop for artists at NCBS (http://cema.srishti.ac.in/content/bioart) which focused on introducing cell and molecular biology methods to artists so they could use them as media for performance, communication, and engagement. It was conducted in collaboration with Oron Catts, a well-know bioartist from Australia (http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/) with extensive experience in using the trappings and discourse of the lab to open up critical thinking about future scenarios and paths of social and technological development.

A group of our students is taking part this week (and won an award) in the international genetically engineered machines (iGEM) competition held at MIT in Boston, USA. This is a group of art students working at NCBS (our host in Bangalore) to develop synthetic organisms, in part to provide a forum for engagement and critical dialogue at these meetings that is not just motivated by the accumulation of capital wealth or basic functional research via biotech (http://hackteria.org/). The result was a highly influential discussion about the role of amateurs in creating public knowledge using science and technology.

Project Vision (htt p://symphysis.wordpress.com/designing-for-converging-cultures-a-diplo…) is an ongoing project here in Bangalore that uses new media (i.e. web 2.0, sensors, physical computing, interactive story-building software, locative media like mobiles and GPS) to develop forms of intimate science where urban, poor, school-aged students run their own experiments and communicate first-hand experiences with nature and their environment.

Moon Vehicle is a community project maintained by Joanna Griffin (http://www.aconnectiontoaremoteplace.net) that bridges storytelling, artifacts, and arts-based methodologies to create peer communities between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), astronomy buffs, schoolchildren, and others in order to reconstitute new narratives of science and technology as they apply to satellites, space exploration and the once and future missions to the moon.

Another timely example comes from Denmark. The Rethink exhibition (http://www.rethinkclimate.org/) combines contemporary art into political debates surrounding climate change responses in anticipation of Copenhagen.

In the US, The Center for Post-Natural History (http://postnatural.org/) takes on biotech and the conversion of biological organisms to intellectual property.

There are many, many others. But I think it’s safe to say that they have had varying impact and effect. Unfortunately (in my view) we haven’t yet developed a coefficient of art to assess its effect on other domains. Some of the examples I have cited have a distinctly critical edge. Others are more about raising awareness or, more to the point, about connecting different social communities and groups (e.g. science practitioners and schoolchildren).

One of the most important things I have learned in the last few years about public engagement with science comes from the field of science and technology studies. Sociologists, philosophers, and historians have started to demonstrate the value of media (especially visual) in the production of science and technology and the resolution of debates about scientific truth and public acceptance. The production of artifacts, objects, and “things we can wrap our heads around” is very important it turns out.

I think the lessons from history and sociology leads to some clarifying questions such as “What is the material basis for engagement?” and “What is engagement made of and where does it live?”

Part 2.

My perspectives
Many of my perspectives on public engagement are shaped by my experiences as both a practicing scientist studying evolution, ecology and behavior in lab and field settings, as an artist and designer working to develop communication and engagement tools, and now working to assess options for better decision making in public health, energy, and infrastructure.

As a biologist, my perspective is further shaped by host-parasite dynamics and their implications for disease in populations. I am also influenced by network science and complex systems. As such, the interaction is the focal point of engagement. How the interaction is created and maintained is significant for me.

As a designer, so-called design thinking influences my approach to engagement. This often means thinking critically about how the engagement process can transpire as part of everyday life–that is, part of the daily routine that people struggle with and recreate everyday.

I think the questions raised in previous posts about the motivation behind “science’s” engagement with the “public” and who makes up the “public” are critical because they help to identify the costs and benefits of engagement and the location of engagement as it pertains to the public. Still I think we need to constantly open up our assumptions further to scrutiny.

Of Scientists and Risk
I know scientists to be a very heterogeneous community involved with many others in the production of knowledge. In general, the people are exceedingly nice, driven by their own curiosity and desire to create understanding that will make a difference, however far downstream. Science, however, is also composed of lots of others, including the organisms and the tools used to develop new hypotheses and results. By far the most practical defining feature might be its place–where it is done and how that place structures the kind of interactions that in turn lead to what we call new knowledge.

Let’s be clear. In the West, science and by extension public health is hardly the product of scientists alone. Many individuals are involved from students, to researchers, financial managers, glassware technicians, viruses, lab rats, secretaries, publishers, reviewers of literature, politicians, middle-school teachers, clergy, university boards, ethics review panels, biotech company shareholders, news media and so on. All of these individuals are possibly working to do one thing–identify sources of risk and manage the uncertainty that arises out of the everyday interactions of people and their environment. If they can scrape out a living in the meantime, all the better for them. So yes, in a sense I would also say that because risk and uncertainty are trying to be minimized, science and technology have a lot to do with securing and locating ways to create wealth. And yes, all of this scales greatly with the complexity of the science (think: CERN or the HapMap project).

I prefaced this as part of the Western tradition 1) because it is of direct lineage from Christian emphasis on divine intervention and design, and 2) because I have found that (in Asia at least) very different traditions underlie the identification of risk and the communication of uncertainty. My sense is that in Asia these are intrinsically related to variation in the ordering of time, and I’m anxious to discuss this with others that know more than I do.

“The Public”, User Needs, and Witnessing
On the public side, I would prefer to say civil society–that is those who are engaged in social contracts relating to economics, technology, common goods, governmentality and so on. And I agree that it is correct to say that it is an even more heterogeneous group.

One way to think about civil society is much like designers think of their users. There is a simple axiom that underscores the work of many successful designers: user needs drive the acquisition of a product or service. Public heath knowledge and science can be that product. Yes, this is a very functionalist way of looking at it, but this principle of participatory design involves end users in the design process to help ensure that it meets user needs and is usable. It has been a successful strategy for architecture, software, and business (the customer is always right, right?). Why should science and its cognitive technologies be an exception?

By adopting user perspectives the scientific community can recognize that its practices may or may not resonate with user needs: socially, by ensuring equal access for disenfranchised groups, economically: by creating new opportunities for capital development and financial transactions, and politically: by improving the quality, speed, and sensitivity of social technologies to the needs of local users. It’s not that science doesn’t already do these things. It just isn’t always evident to the average user. In the realm of health, sometimes it’s just a matter of making the benefits clear so that they justify whatever costs there are in the user’s mind.

One of my favorite case studies come from evolution and its approximately 50% public acceptance in the United States. Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolutionary theory and biology, acquire evolutionist and creationist beliefs. Evans describes how Western religious and philosophical traditions emphasize essentialism, teleology, and intention, and in the process limit the cognitive appeal of natural explanations for the origins of species. She argues that because these ideas tend to show up repeatedly in public representations, they constrain the inferential reasoning capacities of the developing mind. It’s an observation that suggests science’s own predilection for categorization is at the root of evolutionary biology’s social friction.

I think these cognitive biases come into play often, for good and bad. I’ll want to describe some others, but I need to take a detour first.

Engagement, Stories, Suspense, Scenarios, and Fallacies
I personally feel that if scientists, policy-makers, and funding bodies are willing to involve cultural workers like artists and designers in the process of science and its associated applications, there is good news for broader participation because they cultural workers tend to excel at reconfiguring essentialist categories, and they often like to do it in public. There is some indication that this may be a general rule because visualization involves so much codification, creation of meaning, and translation of concepts and ideas into tangible, material artifacts for cognition and discourse. In effect, the sensory object is a vector for witnessing.

Witnessing
In their book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, authors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe three types of public witnessing of science: the direct performance of experiments in social spaces (imagine if the laboratory were a chapel or temple), reporting experimental methods in a manner that enables someone to replicate the experiments themselves (like primary journal articles that recount the plot), and virtual witnessing by producing in a reader’s mind an image of an experimental scene that displaces the need for direct witness or replication (this, I argue, is much like a story in someone’s mind constructed from the plot). We need more of this public witnessing if science is going to connect with society in a dynamical way.

Suspense and Narration
The idea of witnessing in science is intimately tied to the production of suspense in narrative. 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 curiousity 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 thinking about public engagement 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.

The difference between surprise and suspense is also relevant. This passage from a conversation between Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut helps to make the difference clear.

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the audience knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.”

Suspenseful Science?
My reason for taking this detour is to try to show some of the different narrative techniques that can be used in the construction of public health engagement and of science in the collective mind of civil society. Curiosity, surprise, and suspense (pure/impure) are all narratives tactics for engagement.

Curiosity is important for people attending to and learning on their own, but I don’t think it necessarily develops in people unless the benefits are of satisfying it are known to them.

Surprise is also relevant and critical to sensations of astonishment–and of being placed in a new reality that will cause dissonance and therefore growth.

Suspense, while composed and related to surprise and curiosity, has a more pedagogical function. It builds up knowledge of scenes and constraints using what I think Shapin and Schaffer described as virtual witnessing. The audience/spectators build the story themselves, creating it from the narration and plot to fit their own needs, and to adapt it to their own context and location-based experience. I think this is especially true for impure suspense because pure suspense rings of master narratives and the hindsight needed to create contrasts among moral outcomes. Life is not so much like that. Impure suspense allows us to decide the moral outcome during the process. We are never sure if we have chosen the right one, and we may not know even after the “movie” has ended.

So how can public engagement efforts use suspense to build better acclimation and participation among its audiences?

Scenarios and Fallacies
One possibility lies in the construction of scenarios about the future. Scenarios are descriptions of alternative future states where narration helps to articulate the shape and distribution of actors, procedures, and resources. Scenarios can be general or highly detailed, and they can be shown or represented in a variety of ways from verbal description, acting or role playing, visualization and imagery.

I’ve recently delved into the techniques of scenario development. They serve a number of important functions for individuals and organizations. The most important is perhaps building out aspirations and ideas of what the future could hold–even if the present lacks those characteristics. In this way preferred futures can be imagined, but even when the future is imagined to contain destructive relationships, it aids the processes of critical thinking and adaptation. For individuals, recognizing opportunity and constraint is the first step to capitalizing on it or avoiding its pitfalls. Arjun Appadurai has been highly influential in defining aspirations, or the capacity to aspire to a better future, as an important feature of cultural capacity. Scenarios, as extensions of aspirations, are a way to work forward, to rearrange the systems and see what new hybrids emerge and how they might affect well-being.

For organizations, scenarios can help create common ground. The dredge up assumptions and interactions to create a big picture where knowledge can be exchanged. When scenarios are combined with games and simulations, they provide an opportunity to work through challenging situations, to create memories of the future, and out of these take the confidence to undertake critical adaptive change without incurring any of the risks that real experiences entail.

One of the discussion themes asked what happens when artists and others ‘misinterpret’ the science or present it in a biased or misleading way. Rather than seeing this as something necessarily counterproductive, creative interpretations provide circumstantial detail that may be critical for the social fluency of science. A creative depiction of evolutionary technologies, such as Chris Landau’s The Flocking Party (http://theflockingparty.com/), should therefore be seen as a ‘minority report’, suggesting possible avenues for experimentation or areas of conflict between science and society.

On the contrary, critics of scenarios have argued that they aren’t effective in the development of policy precisely because of the detail they incorporate into their ‘worlds’. Morgan and Granger (2007) have argued that scenarios come with an implicit expectation of liklihood–that any particular scenario is more likely to occur in the future. As I already stated, predicting the future is not a goal for scenarios, but critical responsiveness to uncertainty is. Morgan and Keith based their argument on a common fallacy (and I will include another) that I think are important for us to consider as we take on public engagement through narrative.

In adding detail to a scenario or, let’s say, a compelling tale of science, we create compounding descriptions that run the risk of invoking the conjunction fallacy. A frequent example was developed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They gave respondents the statement:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

and asked: Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Logic and probability tell us that #1 is more probable since it is increasingly unlikely that she is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

The issue here is that we want to include more detail and visualization in our stories, but in doing so we possibly risk compounding peoples’ expectation of what is and is not likely to happen.

Vividness is another concern. According to wikipedia, “The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Although misleading vividness does little to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.”

The availability heuristic says that we often place events we have just seen or experienced in our memory more prominently, even if we know them to be less frequent occurrences. I can’t tell you how many times my Mom called me late in the evening when I was in college to warn me abut something she might have just seen on the evening news as a possible risk. The detail that many forms of media and engagement provide can also bias judgments that we would otherwise weigh more carefully.

I think somewhere there is a sweet-spot. I like this account of The Critical Art Ensemble as a group that routinely replicates scientific experiments in public spaces such as malls and parks in an effort to publicly verify political claims ranging from the presence of GMOs in the food chain to the terror threat of biological warfare. One of CAE’s projects with co-collaborator Beatriz de Costa is described by Regine Debatty from the blog we-make-money-not-art this way:

GenTerra is essentially a participatory “theater”…Scientists and artists are talking the public through the process and implications (whether they are purely profit-driven or feature some utopian qualities) of transgenics. Materials are then provided to allow people to get a hands-on experience by creating their own transgenic organism…After that they become actively involved in risk assessment by deciding whether or not to release bacteria from one of petri dishes of the release machine.

Even if the feedback generated doesn’t make it back to the lab or policy office, it’s a form of participatory design that seeks out users of science.

Another example was developed in Europe and has now spread. Some of you may have read about Science Shops as one possible form of engagement that pits user needs in direct contact with professional researchers. Here is a blog post about this that I wrote awhile back (http://blog.cstep.in/?p=319).

This is one of the best popular articles I have read on the psychological factors affecting individual and group decision making in complex, high-stakes uncertainty. The focus of this article is on climate change, but the implication can be translated to other problems just as easily. This is simply because of the scale and the way that problem itself is generated. The scale is large and usually prohibits people from seeing the impacts of decisions, while it is also caused by many individuals making choices that contribute to the problem.

It amazes me that in all of the discussion documented in the article, there is never a mention of designers, artists, or any other such expertise that actually spends the majority of its effort on communication, messaging, experience design, and the use of sensory mechanisms to motivate behavior. It makes me sad that there is the recognition that, when it comes to communication, it’s always about the researchers doing the communication. This can be improved, yes, and there are also many design-thinking guidelines one can pull out of the article. How many can you spot?

The Green Issue – Why Isn’t the Brain Green? – NYTimes.com.

Yesterday I made a point of visiting the exhibition “Design in the Age of Darwin” at the Block Museum of Art on Northwestern University’s campus in Evanston, IL. The title of the exhibition caught my attention when I was flipping through a Chicago guide while visiting with some family there. The terms “design” and “Darwin” are usually brought up in a controversial opposition. However, this exhibition promised to take a deeper look at the relationships present in the fundamental orderings of Darwin’s work on natural selection and decorative design.

The exhibition takes a sort of auteur-like approach, focusing on a few men prominent in the decorative arts at th turn of the century and just before the birth of so-called modernism. The title includes the notables William Morris and Frank Lloyd Wright as well as C.F.A. Voysey, Louis Sullivan, and Christopher Dresser, an English botanist turned industrial designer.

I wrote in the comment book that the exhibition was well-presented, but that it lacked an engagement with the discipline of evolution as well as any other social and cultural field beyond traditional notions of design.

The missed opportunity lies in the ability to untangle well-tread debates of form versus function from ideas about natural and sexual selection, the role of mutation as a creative force, and the cultural and social appropriation of “selection” in the burgeoning onslaught of mass production and “upward mobility”.

I would have liked to see, for instance, a more overt discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spandrel and the famous (at least within evolutionary biology) paper “The Spandrels of San Marcos”. In it Gould and Lewontin take on the adaptationist perspective which basically says that form must have function and needs a explanation. The adaptationists neglected the role of happenstance (technically, genetic drift) and frequently created “just so” stories to explain the unexplained. Gould and Lewontin’s view was that evolution is a side-effect of a true adaptation, where some traits arise from correlations between a networked body (i.e. gene networks), rather than arising from natural selection. Admittedly, I haven’t read the catalog for the exhibition, but here was a golden opportunity to flesh out the role that complex dynamism plays in evolution. As it stands, the exhibition just furthers the paradigm of intention and selection in the interplay of form and function.

I would agree with the curator’s thesis that Darwin’s ideas contributed to the design sensibility of the age, but it was probably only the case insofar as both Darwin and these designers relied on the metaphor of selection.

Another missed opportunity was the role that social Darwinism played in the development of modernism. For an excellent paper on the subject, see Christina Cogdell’s “Products and Bodies: Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology.”

What was there were some fantastic examples of Arts and Crafts and Prairie-style decorative and architectural renderings from Chicagoland area collections. It seems almost like the curator was constrained in the availability of ideas and objects to articulate the thesis, and while the show is a unified presentation, there isn’t anything novel to suggest that accounts of art history haven’t yet “speciated”. For the discipline’s sake, let’s hope it doesn’t go extinct.

Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 205(1161), 581-598. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/77447

Cogdell, C. (2003). Products or Bodies? Streamline Design and Eugenics as Applied Biology. Design Issues, 19(1), 36-53. Retrieved August 13, 2008, from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/074793603762667683

I’m picky when it comes to using metaphors. They reveal so much about the biases and commitments that underscore our thinking and, more importantly, how that thinking gets translated into physical manifestations and action.

Cathy Davidson at HASTAC has written a sharp brief on the use of the word ‘selection’ as it pertains to evolution and natural selection. She writes,

Having spent a day pulling book after book after book off my shelf, and looking at the proforma and obligatory evolutionary argument that almost inevitably comes in the final chapter of an otherwise careful description and discussion of brain functionality, I am convinced that the word “selection” has a lot to answer for.

The point she makes in the article is that the use of the word selection is directly linked to ideology. I think she is right here, and it should have been incumbent on the evolutionary biology community to recognize this and have proffered a solution early in its history. My fear is that, to do so, would be seen as a mocking retort to creationists that so recently cloaked their arguments in the guise of intelligent design. Well, maybe that a good thing.

Expanding on the relationship of the selection metaphor and its connection to ideology, Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolution, acquire evolutionist and creationist beliefs. Evans describes how Western religious and philosophical traditions emphasize essentialism, teleology, and intention, and in the process limit the cognitive appeal of natural explanations for the origins of species. She argues that because these ideas tend to show up repeatedly in public representations, they constrain the inferential reasoning capacities of the developing mind. It’s an observation that suggests science’s own predilection for categorization is at the root of evolutionary biology’s social friction.

Maybe we ought to have namethis.com come up with a new term.

Gabriel A. Harp
Leonardo. August 2007, Vol. 40, No. 4, Pages 376-381

Evidence from language, history and form suggest an analogy between the cinema and the genome. The author describes some of the relationships between cinema and the genome and points to opportunities for discovering unmarked categories within the genome and new methods of representation. This is accomplished by evaluating existing metaphors presented for the understanding of genetics and revealing how current scientific understanding and social concerns suggest a cinematic alternative. The formal principles of function, difference and development mediate discussion and serve as heuristics for investigating creative opportunities.