Swiss artist Matthieu Cherubini was kind enough to share some his thoughts and process behind the social bot rep.licants.
rep.licants.org is a service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.
The experience of an enhanced virtual self as users are invited to install a bot on ther favorite social network account and become a replicant. Provided with “virtual prothesis for the social media introvert”, people who use the service have started to uncover what it means to automate social interactions.
GH: You are an artist! Why did you start working on rep.licants? Is it similar to your other work?
MC: rep.licants is the work that I did for my master thesis. During my studies, I developed an interest about the way most of people are using social networks but also the differences in between someone real identity and his digital one. I do not have a big experience about creating personal projects, I began seriously to do it during the past 2 years, so previous to rep.licants I did two other “serious” personal projects and they were related to this thematic aswell. One The Pursuit of Happiness is about hacking into Facebook account of random users in order to steal their private messages for seeing what they were looking for on this social-network. The second one Afghan War Diary is about linking data coming from Counter Strikes servers and Wikileaks and displaying the result on Google Earth.
Back to rep.licants – when I began to think about a project for my master thesis, I really wanted to work on those two thematics (mix in between digital and real identity and a kind of study about how users are using social networks). With the aim to raise discussions about those two thematics.
GH: What was the process like for you?
MC: At first I just had the idea about creating a webservice where people could subscribe on it and mix themselves with a robot. But I really didn’t know where I was going exactly. So I began the project as an experiment.
The first step was to study what people could do on Facebook (I began with Facebook only) and how a bot could reproduce those same actions by linking himself to other services that its user is using or by getting new informations on other sources.
[img_assist|nid=3969|title=|desc=This schema roughly demonstrates how the bot is working.|link=node|align=left|width=400|height=142]
After I programmed a version of the bot, according to this previous study, with few functions and I asked to some of my teachers, tutors and classmates if they wanted to be volunteers for this experiment…I had 3 volunteers who did the experiment for like 4 months. I was asking them weekly what the bot was doing, if they were feeling the bot was lacking of something important, … During this 4 months I redesigned a bot for Facebook by taking into account the feedbacks of my three volunteers.
In same time I also decided to do a version of the bot on Twitter and the process was almost the same as Facebook.
GH: What have people’s responses been? Have Facebook or Twitter responded at all?
MC: The responses has been very mixed some are over negatives and some are very positive ! I’m happy about that because it’s very interesting: the negative responses are mainly from people who were thinking rep.licants is a real and serious webservice which is giving for free performant bots who are able to almost perfectly replicate the user. And if they are expecting that I understand their disappointment because my bot is far from being performant ! Some were negatives because people were thinking it is kind of scary asking a bot to manage your own digital identity so they rejected the idea.
For the positive responses it’s mainly people who understood that rep.licants is not about giving performant bots but is more like an experiment (and also a kind of critics about how most of the users are using social networks) where users can mix themselves with a bot and see what is happening. Because even if my bots are crap they can be, sometimes, surprising.
But I was kind of surprised that so many people would really expect to have a real bot to manage their social networks account.
Twitter never responded and Facebook responded by banning, three times already, my Facebook applications which is managing and running all the Facebook’s bots.
GH: How do people use it? Have there been any interesting stories of how people have used rep.licants?
MC: For what I know and after some questions/feedbacks received by users, I would say that some people use the bot:
a. Just as an experiment, they want to see what the bot can do and if the bot can really improve their virtual social influences. Or users experimenting how long they could keep a bot on their account without their friends noticing it’s runt by a bot.
b. I saw few time inside my database which stores informations about the users that some of them have a twitter name like “renthouseUSA”, so I guess they are using rep.licants for getting a presence on social networks without managing anything and as a commercial goal.
c. This is a feedback that I had a lot of time and it is the reason why I am using rep.licants on my own twitter account: If you are precise with the keywords that you give to the bot, it will sometimes find very interesting content related to your interest. My bot made me discover a lot of interesting things, by posting them on Twitter, that I wouldn’t never find without him. New informations are coming so fast and in so big quantities that it becomes really difficult to deal with that. For example just on Twitter I follow 80 persons (which is not a lot) all of those persons that I follow is because I know that they might tweet interesting stuffs related to my interests. But I have maybe 10 of those 80 followers who are tweeting quiet a lot (maybe 1-2 tweet per hour) and as I check my twitter feed only one time per day I sometimes loose more than one hour to find interesting tweets in the amount of tweets that my 80 persons posted. And this is only for Twitter ! I really think that we need more and more personal robots for filtering information for us. And this is a very positive point I found about having a bot that I could never imagine when I was beginning my project.
GH: Have there been any interesting disasters or failures in the interactions as a result? Or any surprising bugs?
MC: One surprising bugs was when the Twitter’s bots began to speak to themselves. It’s maybe boring for some users to see their own account speak to itself one time per day but when I discovered the bug I found it very funny. So I decided to keep that bug !
GH: My own experience with rep.licants revealed to me an aesthetic of antagonism. What does an aesthetics of antagonism mean to you?
MC: I’m not sure but maybe something which is hostile in my project ? Or maybe the way the bots are running ? As they are very buggy, they do a lot of things which could be opposite. One time they could find a content which is absolutely match to the user but the next one is absolutely opposite of what the user is or like.
One of the things I’ve discovered during my own use of a rep.licants Twitter bot is that it likes to retweet messages I’ve exchanged with an acquaintance – sometimes even the same mmessage more than once. This has a somewhat awkward effect of bringing attention to that interaction when it wasn’t really warranted.
Around the same time Matthieu and I conducted the interview, this video of a chatbot having a conversation with itself went viral – perhaps in part because the conversation immediately turned towards more existentialist questions and responses. The conversation was recorded at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, where the faculty are researching how to make helper bots.
The best part of the video happens when one chatbot implores that he is not a robot – but rather a unicorn. How the bot determined that is not widely known, but it does invoke an important visual element and narrative theme from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – where the main character Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) has dreams of unicorns. The character of Gaff (played by Edward james Olmos) is also seen making origami unicorns – an apparent reference to his knowledge that Deckard is replicant.
The questions that rep.licants poses are deep human and social ones – laced with uncertainties about the kinds of interactions we count as normal and the responsibilities we owe to ourselves and each other. Seeing these bots carry out conversations with themselves and with human counterparts (much less other non-human counterparts) allows us to take tradition social and technological research into a different territory – asking not only what it means to be human – but also what it means to be non-human.
The CDC’s done a really smart thing. They lied. They created an entirely “unscientific” risk to respond to a completely “scientific” human bias. The CDC provided an emergency management and disaster preparedness plan in case of a Zombie Apocalypse. This says two things to me: 1) the CDC is serious enough in its priorities to ignore the boundary work that usually goes on in science organizations that tries to keep culture and science separate, and 2) they understand that human bias often impedes our ability to prepare for more “rational” risks.
So I would call this a media coup – especially if (as I suspect) there was a huge spike in visits to their sitesince the story crashed the server. I’m sure it helped that some people are actually predicting a zombie apocalypse this weekend.
What I like about this is the acknowledgment that people are interested in fiction at least as much as they are in reality. As a scientist or policy maker in disaster management, it’s worth recognizing that people aren’t going to respond or think a certain way just because it makes the most rational sense. Zombies may make more sense because they tap into deeper fears and hopes and long-held narratives that are embedded in our cultural fabric.
post-normal science
Humans have all sorts of biases, and instead of assuming that people are going to just believe elements of science based on their rationality, we ought to start mixing the science with some more compelling narration. This may be a good indicator of its practical value of working with a paradigm of post-normal science. Post-normal science is typically characterized by cases where facts are uncertain or contested and values are in dispute. Because so much of science and its applications relies on us to make rational choices, and yet we often don’t, there’s a case to be made that the transition of new scientific meaning from discovery to practice is post-normal because it is highly influenced by our cognitive biases.
Using zombies to carry the more important message of preparedness – and the specific steps to take – is way more important than the reality of a zombie apocalypse. Then again, better safe than sorry!
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:
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).
Along with #1 is a tacit assumption that such expertise exists.
A formalized plan was scuttled because a non-expert group didn’t have a system for making clear choices.
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.
It was stated in the end that there are needs, but these remain hidden or unarticulated.
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.))
Design is a sticky practice. It is looped with contradictions, uncertainties, and material constraints. Bringing something new into the world, be it an artifact or service raises challenges that few individuals can surmount – if at all. Despite the dominant view that geniuses, visionaries, and otherwise crafty individuals are solely responsible for designed creations, organizations play a far greater and often unattributed role. Perhaps it is because of the aesthetic flair worked into the surface of the object or experience, or maybe it’s the personality of the driving individual that points us in the direction of these myths. And they are myths, because even the most brilliant designer owes their success at the end of the day to at least one group – their participants, their users. More likely is “rock-star” designers owe the production of a product or service to many more who inhabit a long chain in the process of design, implementation, and distribution.
Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry, South Wall"
Somewhere along the chain of causation between creative individuals and their users there exists a group of people, places, ideas, and things that operate synchronistically and synergistically to develop ideas into concepts, concepts into prototypes, prototypes into experiences, experiences into practices, and practices into lessons. These sets of translations encompass different skill sets and relationships, few of which are possible without deep and varied interactions across different environments.
Taking stock of an emerging design practice is something we do often these days. I think it springs from places that have recognized and internalized failures for what they are – opportunities – and from people who embrace reflection as positive forces for learning and adaptive change.
Our environments are changing. And they will continue to do so. Even if we find pathways to design static landscapes that include fixed social interactions, the resources and habitat available to us and other species will remain in flux. Consider that in 2008, we reached the threshold where 50% of the world’s human population resides in urban dwellings (and possibly also 50% of the world’s population of cockroaches, starlings, street dogs, and sewer rats).
It’s also true that the biosphere can no longer be considered ‘natural’ in the same terms that 18th century Romantics did, as something pure, something to be conserved, something separate. The landscapes of our contemporary experience are human enmeshed – neither dominated nor resistant to our desires to interact, to use, and to understand. They show our preferences for stable communities supported by agriculture that reinforce a growing feedback loop between population growth and energy consumption. The Anthropocene, as this epoch is now commonly referred to, places a point on some linear timeline where people demonstrated their best applications of the idea of progress. Perhaps it is only our external concept of the sublime that are disappearing from the human range of experience.
There is much greater landscape diversity than has ever existed, but certainly it is less inhabitable by the majority of the world biological diversity. Landscape diversity is created not only by people and their continued interpretations of “safe” and “prosperous”, but also by animals and plants that push and get pushed into their own new and divergent niches. Patches of materials are being collected and redistributed to form wild hybrids and pure spaces– bacteria-resistant surfaces, show rose gardens, crude oil-slicked sandy beaches, tourist-friendly rainforest, wildlife mobility solutions, skyscraper concrete pillars, semiconductors, and extra-terrestrial orbiting robots – to name just a few.
Each time new patches are created, they exemplify the desires and possibilities available for their inhabitants. They provide food, space for living, courses for exercise, obstacles for navigation, challenges and threats between groups that aim to occupy more patches, places to hide, and places to trade. Evolutionary history has demonstrated that cooperation confers a significant strategic advantage to those who choose to communicate, share, and build together. In human terms, one need only look at the migratory patterns of individuals from rural to urban settlements to understand that there is a direct and perceived economic advantage from sharing land, resources, infrastructure, and culture on people’s livelihoods – not to mention social mobility.
Detail from wall illustration at the Golden Temple, Namdroling Monastery, India
Design practices are widening. They are gaining breadth proportional to their influence on economic productivity, their ability to expand social engagement and political empowerment, and perhaps because of the impact that social studies of science and technology has provided to our appreciation of artifacts as catalysts for knowledge. Scientists and technologists are viewed as inventors, individual carries of the modern ideal of progress. We now recognize that images, laboratory spaces, institutions, public media, and mechanical parts play as significant a role in chance events, innovation, and the acquisition of scientific and technological dogma by civil society.
One of the implications of an expanded design practice is the gradual inclusion of organizations as ‘objects’ for design. Organizations were once the purview of managers, business executives, policy makers, and human resources consultants, but they can now be confidently lumped together with paint, plaster, and photo emulsion.
I’m sure this is raising red flags for some who read this, and it should. It’s a scary proposition for some to think that individual behaviors can and should be designed and organized. But it is a fact that individual and group behaviors are already structured by the designed and so-called natural environment along with normalized social interactions and perceptions of social agency. The only thing we gain by ignoring the structures that are already in place (albeit unconsciously) is the freedom from self-awareness, individual and collective agency to solve more challenging and complex problems. The more we ignore these unconscious behaviors (eating habits for example) that already exist, the more they leads us into deep patterns and habits that can be difficult to get out of for reasons of fear, inexperience, ability, or just a lack of awareness.
This is not to say it is all negative. If we had to pay attention to everything we did, we would fall apart from exhaustion while trying to make complicated decisions. Many of our biases may have developed because they habituate us into safe spaces for interaction. Unfortunately, as our societies and environments change, those safe spaces may be retreating, and it’s worth reflecting on our biases and how our individual and group dynamics promote infrastructures for flourishing.
Organizational management has become a major discipline of the 20th century with the adoption of increasingly complicated tasks and industrial processes. It stands to become more integrated into our systems and psyche, but will management theories dominate – or will design envelop management in favor more distributed processes of self-organization consistent with cybernetics and decision theory?
Groups change, and so do their goals. It is a part of life and society, and it always will be. The questions that we ought to be asking is how, where, through whom, and when do they change?
There is ample evidence that organizational behavior is at the root of innovation and robustness across enterprises. The shape and tenor of a group of people, each with different tasks, and working towards a common goal varies widely – not to mention the tasks, people and goals – and that’s assuming those goals are shared among the group members! Without going into the theory and practice of organizational behavior for which there is a massive literature, I simply want to raise the point that organizational design may be a more recent practice and one that plays a role in or strategies for adaptation, sustainability, and inclusive growth.
In part II, I’ll look at some examples where designers are tackling organizational design as project and process.
The image above was the first draft. This is the second. Thanks to Aliya for good, perceptive comments.
attachmentModel_v2
Premises:
Culture as the processes that allow the uptake of processes, procedures, information, beliefs, values and social norms.
Cultural affiliations are attachments.
Attachments and reattachments are limited (quantity) and constrained (quality) by pressures.
Aspiration is a cultural step in creating capability.
Based in part on: Appadurai, A., 2004, ‘The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition’, in Rao, V. and Walton, M., (eds.) Culture and Public Action, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, California, pp 59-84.
If you are willing to accept some non-human based research in pursuit of the human, you might find these helpful. They have a pretty heavy biological and philosophical bent to them. Some like Gablik, Miller, Darwin, and Dissanyake provide pretty sweeping theories for the evolution of art and design (with varying levels of detail and different forms of evidence). Others deal mainly with theory and
research derived from observation of non-human animals. Still others use social science and humanities based approaches to the question (Loos/Danto (with Gablik replying in ‘progress in art’), Bergson, Luhmann). Also see Bobbi S. Low’s cite for what may be the only scientifically testable prediction in the bunch.
Donath, J.S. Signals, Truth and Design. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, forthcoming.
Burke, E. 1757. A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. R. and J. Dodsley, London.
Endler, J. A. 1992. Signals, signal conditions and the direction of evolution. American Naturalist 139:S125-S153.
Gablik, S. 1976. Progress in Art. Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York.
Kirkpatrick, M. 1982. Sexual selection and the evolution of female preference. Evolution 36:1-12.
Miller, G. F. 2001. Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria. Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 2:20-25.
Ryan, M. J. 1990. Sensory systems, sexual selection, and sensory exploitation. Oxford Surveys of Evolutionary Biology 7:157-195.
Scheib, J. E., S. W. Gangestad, and R. Thornhill. 1999. Facial attractiveness, symmetry, and cues of good genes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 226:1318-1321.
West-Eberhard, M. J. 1979. Sexual selection, social competition and evolution. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123:222-234.
Loos, A., & Opel, A. (1997). Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Ariadne Press (CA).
Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000),
Christy, J. H., and P. R. Y. Backwell. 1995. The Sensory Exploitation Hypothesis. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10:417-417.
Laland, K. N. 1992. A Theoretical Investigation of the Role of Social Transmission in Evolution. Ethology and Sociobiology 13:87-113.
Miller, G. 2000. The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. Doubleday, New York.
Nettle, D. and H. Clegg. Schizotypy, creativity and mating success in humans. Proc. R. Soc. B (2006) 273, 611–615
Kavolis, V. Community Dynamics and Artistic Creativity. American Sociological Review, Vol. 31, No. 2. (Apr., 1966), pp. 208-217.
Luhmann, N. Art as a social system. Stanford University Press. Stanford, Calif. 2000.
Network Theory—the Emergence of the Creative Enterprise. Albert-László Barabási. Science 29 April 2005:Vol. 308. no. 5722, pp. 639 – 641
Low, Bobbi S. 1979. Sexual selection and human ornamentation. In Chagnon, Napoleon A., and William Irons, eds., 462-87. – describes a test of sexual selection for art as the comparison of stable versus unstable symbolic systems
Danto, A. C. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia University Press, New York.
Darwin, C. 1871. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. John Murray, London.
Endler, J. A., and A. L. Basolo. 1998. Sensory Ecology, Receiver Biases, and Sexual Selection. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 13:415-420.
Lenski, R. 1999. A Distinction Between the Origin and Maintenance of Sex. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 12:1034-1036. -distinguishes between the orgin and maintenance of sexual reproduction
Turney J. (2004). THE ABSTRACT SUBLIME: Life as information waiting to be rewritten. Science as Culture, 13, 89-103. Retrieved July 17, 2008, from
Dissanayake, E.: What Is Art For? Seattle, University of Washington
Press (1988)
Dissanayake, E.: Homo Aestheticus : Where Art Comes from and Why. 1st University of Washington Press ed. Seattle, University of Washington Press (1995)
Healy, S., & Braithwaite, V. (2000). Cognitive ecology: a field of substance? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 15(1), 22-26.
Bergson, H. (2005). Creative Evolution. Cosimo Classics.
Ryan, M. J., Phelps, S. M., & R, A. S. (2001). How evolutionary history shapes recognition mechanisms. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(4), 143-148. Retrieved July 17, 2008, from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VH9-42PC695-G&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=7e622bb148b27c4cbf3d290d0a790563
Arak, A., & Enquist, M. (1995). Conflict, Receiver Bias and the Evolution of Signal Form. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 349(1330), 337-344.
Endler, J. A., & Basolo, A. L. (1998). Sensory ecology, receiver biases and sexual selection. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 13(10), 415-420.
Jansson, L., & Enquist, M. (2003). Receiver bias for colourful signals. Animal Behaviour, 66(5), 965-971. Retrieved July 17, 2008, from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W9W-49J8TBN-J&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d7fd52368874c927aac68023a8029efd
Scourfield, J., N. Martin, G. Lewis, and P. McGuffin. 1999. Heritability of social cognitive skills in children and adolescents. Br J Psychiatry 175:559-564.
It’s not often that unfunded proposals make their way into disinfecting daylight. Sometimes you try again, and sometimes you just let them waste away among the dusty electrons of your hard drive.
I don’t know which category this one falls into, but I do feel it’s worth sharing and making public. Perhaps someone will even comment with improvements. I can only hope.
In any case, this proposal was dependent on a constellation of partnerships (and funding) to make the project move forward–at least from my perspective. Sometime a little cash can help develop needed projects and spur collaboration. This was a submission to the Knight News Challenge which is supposed to announce its winners sometime in mid-June. Since I know I’m already out of the running, there isn’t really a compelling reason not to share—but please tell me if there is!!!
envirocasting logo
Anyhow, here is most of it—-minus some names to protect the innocent—–except one: this logo was created by Zack Denfeld, and we’ve used it on a variety of projects. For more, you should visit his launchpad.
Describe your project:
Envirocasting adapts global weather information to the cultural and operational needs of local [international disaster preparedness organization] branch offices and communities, supporting their risk assessment and preparedness needs. A wealth of information exists to support disaster preparedness, but a gap exists between the design of information services and their local use-contexts, limiting widespread use and effectiveness. The benefits of these information services are clear to local decision makers, and they are anxious to put the tools and news sources into practice.
However, exposure to digital news platforms is low, and the capacity to use them in decision making contexts is minimal as a result of this disconnect between design and use.
Envirocasting takes a design anthropology approach to inform the design, distribution, and acquisition of digital weather information services to local decision makers. Design anthropology seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human. Using this approach, local patterns of information consumption and culture related to futures, information design, and technological metaphors can be identified, allowing for the design of appropriate services. Design principles as well as specific, local use-applications will aid in the distribution and assessment of weather forecast efficacy. Thus, weather news for risk assessment can flow more precipitously to decision makers, allowing them to coordinate the disaster preparedness efforts more quickly and strategically.
Simulation games for local communities will support learning and the application of information services in context. This provides use-case memories of the future and practice in managing uncertainty with minimal risk.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Envirocasting aims to localize climate information by making it simple, non-technical, clear, easy to use, and as meaningful as possible. Maps are relevant when their colors, numbers, icons, and scales are relevant and supported by culture and context. Information that connects with specific actions can be used confidently in planning and decision making. Specific use-cases communicated by local communities will drive the development process and will help weave the digital media fabric with aesthetics, narratives, and metaphors. Games support critical thinking and social play to help decision makers and communities explore the dynamics of news and information-based decisions for climate-related disaster preparedness.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)
Envirocasting innovates by translating connections between design and use. When local conditions refract the design and dissemination of information from distant or multiple sources, innovation is an inherent byproduct. Envirocasting is designed with the mind in mind, understanding cultural legacies that influence the recognition of uncertainty and metaphors. It bridges experience, play, and interactions, creating memories of the future. The project identifies appropriate implementations of open-source digital information services and defines a set of prescriptive resources for innovating across disaster risk contexts and cultural processes based on abstractions and lessons from six local communities in three countries.
What unmet need does your proposal answer?
A fact-finding mission conducted surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops over two-month periods in 2008 and 2009.
Explicit unmet needs include:
An Increase in the Accessibility and User-Friendliness of Climate Information Products
New Products to Fill Information Gaps for Needs–Starting with Improved Flood Forecasting Tools
Training in the Use of Climate Tools and How Climate Information Could Trigger Action Such as:
Learning to access and interpret climate information tools.
Learning how to monitor seasonal forecasts in conjunction with medium and short-term forecasts.
Understanding how to take gradated actions.
Channels of communication and decision-making to receive and take action based on time-sensitive climate information.
And don’t take my word for it:
What will you have changed by the end of your project?
More-Measurable outcomes:
Prototypes that adapt weather information services to local use-contexts.
Documents that communicate design processes for cross-cultural communication.
Heuristics or ‘rules-of-thumb’ for the design of climate information services for risk assessment.
Country and local use-context reports that document specific patterns of information acquisition and behavior.
Relevance of climate information for local decision-makers.
Ability to align information with decision and action.
A folktaxonomy of climate information and categories for creating a cultural consensus model (CCM) to realize translations in cognition and practice among cultural contexts.
An index of context-specific actions and the values associated with them.
Less-measurable outcomes:
Perception of the design process and innovation pathways for news and information about climate-driven risks.
The relationship between information providers, researchers, designers, policy makers, and implementing offices providing the opportunity for continued support, training and dialogue necessary to realize the potential benefits of using climate information.
Channels of communication between information providers and decision makers and between decision makers and community constituents (incl. digital information services).
The scope of the implementing organizations to conduct cross-cultural research and information adaptation projects.
How will you measure progress and ultimately success?
The uses of weather and hazard preparedness information can be measured using surveys, interviews, meetings and workshops and compared to current estimates of use and use cases, but those data are useful differently for different people including the decision-makers, their constituents, their supporting agencies, and funders of this project. Thus, we intend to cast progress in varied terms for the different stakeholders and partners.
Some of these guiding questions include:
What are the iterations, changes, and improvements to existing systems?
What does the trajectory of individual decision-maker’s tasks or questioning look like?
How do other elements of the media ecology change and what stakeholders are invoked or leveraged in the process?
Success, on the other hand, is more elusive. Disasters are sporadic and may not always afford a direct link between information effectiveness and risk reduction. However, existing case studies show that these types of information, when combined with specific actions, can lead to significant reductions in both the vulnerability and negative effects of a disaster such as flooding. The key to assessment it to engage in a continual processes where we value choices and transitions in practice. The design of this project take into account the high-stakes involved in the decision-making and information uses by providing opportunities for both high stakes (post-hazard) and low stakes (simulation-games) assessment.
Do you see any risk in the development of your project?
The biggest risk at present is that the organizations listed do not have a history of working together (this is indicated by the generic names rather than their proper ones), but this is also where the opportunity exists. The leadership (particularly of the larger orgs) is wary of their participation in the project without first-hand knowledge of all partners and/or certain funding. This conversation is ongoing at the time of this application and continues to develop. If the proposal moves through to the next round, we should at that point be able to name each of the partners in more specific terms.
Supply-side risks (design-mediated)
Inability to generate meaning either through lack of empathy or translation of needs to designers
Research products are not absorbed and implemented during the design processes because they are non-normative, unclear for direct application, left uncommunicated, or other
Partner coalition denatures from lack of shared goals or mental models
Emphasis on technological development or information diversification over use-context and user needs
Existing insights, stakeholders, and methods are unknown or unengaged
Irrelevance, inability, or non-linkage of digital mediums and meaningful information services
Cultural heterogenetiy too great for scaling of appropriate information services
Ability and capacity of project managers to recognize and adapt to other sources of risk
Expertise of project partners is missing or unleveraged
Translation of local use-contexts into primary research is distorted or biased
Demand-side risks (user-mediated)
Low frequency acquisition of technology platforms, information services, and/or symbolic systems
Scripting of use and application to local decision making is unclear
Appropriation for local use-cases is nonexistent
Assembly does not fit into the local context of everyday life
Cannot be integrated into normal practices, culture, and concerns
Practice with information and platform is sparse
What is your marketing plan? How will people learn about what you are doing?
The conduits for marketing are, in many respects, already in place. The organizational structure and extent of [intl. disaster preparedness agency] branch offices will facilitate branding and distribution using existing networks of community organization, tactical planning, and response offices. Though the value of the services should be self-evident in the design and cognitive acquisition of the services, the goal is to help users to practice using and applying these information services. We also recognize that aesthetic values can elevate the recognition of value and the maintenance of that value through everyday use. Thus, arriving at these values will be a principle objective for all participants.
In order to increase domain knowledge, the outcomes can be shared among the participants, their centers, and via professional and interest networks including the design research community which actively engages with similar project goals. Because some of the project partners include university centers, schools and research organizations, the outcomes will be shared with emerging professionals including graduate students and visiting fellows.
Tactically, the marketing plan for simulation game-based training is slightly more difficult because it requires additional preparation, training, and presentation. Nonetheless, with a bit of effort, these games will reinforce the marketing strategy for the primary goal of adapting weather information using the same local community branch office network structure. We also expect to develop videos that demonstrate our process as well as the use and value of the informations service under construction. But ultimately, the best marketing will be the effectiveness of the adaptation process.
Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant? If it is to be self-sustainable, what’s the plan for making that happen?
Envirocasting is the application of a process to translate meaning across cultural contexts with relevance for local concerns. We do not view it as an experimental process so much and an underutilized one. Luckily, there are many resources, case studies, and additional expertise to draw from in the process. Our goal is to assemble them and to draw the pieces together into relevant platforms and prototypes for weather information services.
The project will accomplish this goal as a one-time research project that will publicly document its methods and outcomes as guides so that they can be applied in new use-contexts and for wider information arrays. We fully expect that the different project partners will continue to apply the work and experience in varied ways after the initial project, although they may carry it out to their own ends.
Our method for fostering rhizomatic-like dissemination of the results (and thus, sustainability) is to link with additional strategic partners whose networks span varied social groups, languages, use-contexts, and concerns. Furthermore, the acquisition and integration of the research (as well as the information services it supports) can be broadly advocated from a policy perspective because successes arise from its application and benefit in specific, local communities. The overall plan for sustainability is to demonstrate that these information service platforms reduce risk by enabling decisive action before pending hazards become disasters. If this is demonstrated, sustainability will ensue, even if not in the form described in this proposal.
I’ve been casually reading Scott Atran and Douglas Medin’s The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature since I came back from the U.S. in January. I picked the book up for a few reasons. One, I was familiar with Scott Atran’s work after running across it while I was studying at the University of Michigan. Atran is an anthropologist who has been working to integrate psychology and anthropology in pursuit of a better perspective on how the natural environment and the social landscape interacts to affect belief, behavior, and practice. Two, I am interested in how cognition facilitates learning and behavior, especially in a shared resources or public infrastructure context. Some of Atran’s more recent work deals with negotiations and intercultural understanding for problems ranging from terrorism, common resources, and Iran’s nuclear policy. Third, the discussions and research in the book can be helpful for artists, designers, teachers, and evolutionary biologists who want to gain better control or understanding of how, effectively, epistemology develops.
I found one particular passage to be quite helpful for a project I am working on at the moment. It deals with relevance drawing from Sperber and Wilson’s book on communication and cognition. Relevance is a pretty subjective measure of how much something matters to someone. The articulation of relevance in these pages shows ghosts of Bateson’s difference that makes a difference, but here there is an efforts to start to describe exactly what aspects of cognition make something relevant–that is, how does the environment and one’s interactions in it affect meaning? pay attention teachers…this is where it gets relevant to learning.
Here’s some notes:
Relevance: if processing an input at a certain time yields cognitive effects.
Cognitive Effects =
revision of previous beliefs
derivation of contextual conclusions following from input taken together with previously available information
So:
greater cognitive effect = greater relevance
While:
greater effort = lower relevance
Thus:
Salient information has greater relevance given the lower effort it requires. Atran and Medin make this point be describing their research with different groups’ interpretations (interpretations = mappings from objects, situations, problems, and events to words. In an interpretation, one word can mean many objects) of ecological relationships and taxonomy. They also studied school children who had a more nuanced view of ecology and compared them to urban children to try to help understand why they had different experiences in the classroom. The conclusions supported the idea that textbooks and instruction was not relevant enough to support the expansion of learning among those with more nuanced perspectives (perspectives = mappings from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word).
Learning, then, is guided by what is already known. What is learned first often becomes a category ideal. It’s like when your idea of what tastes good, what a certain kind of flower is, or how to do a task is based on what you first learn. It’s also affects things like what we think of when we think of a bear. My image of a bear may be based on North American species like the black bear or grizzly. In India, an image of a bear may be based on their Himalayan relatives.
This seems to resonate somewhat with patterns of cognitive bias studied across different organisms in evolutionary biology in an attempt to get a better understanding of sexual selection. Cognitive or sensory bias, as studied in evolutionary biology, refers to an organism’s set of preferences. It’s similar to judgment biases studied by psychologists and micro economists (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman). However, in biological terms, sensory bias often has a genetic/sensory basis and can significantly affect mating and reproduction. Some well-studied examples include how Tungara frogs (Ryan lab at UTexas) or even crickets (Zuk lab at UC Riverside) influence mate choice with different call structures or signals (e.g. deep, red, loud, frequent, etc).
So in an experimental, teaching, or design setting, good examples of categories are ones that are familiar, have a high word frequency (use = familiarity + context), or that represent ideals. So as we design interfaces, software, interactions, and signs for access, it makes sense to consider categories that are culturally relevant and that have legacies of use in context. Additional learning uses these categories as supports (scaffolds?) to build on.
This is why representation of goals and categories is so important. The implicit organization of knowledge around goals creates category ideals, subsequently driving category based inference–that is, the creation of new knowledge from what already exists.
So in terms of deriving an experimental practice from these ideas, a student at CEMA, Aliya, has been trying to look at how naming objects as concepts (decategorization?) rather than the names they have been given. Thus a “chair” becomes a “people holder” or a “step ladder” depending on new contexts of use. It leads to the question, “How do we take objects from everyday life & create a stimulus that provides an opportunity for reflection & engagement on the use, interaction, and consumption that the object supports—all while waiting for whatever that object does?”
A colleague of mine recently received a request for a response on the topic of designing interculturally. It came from a graduate student in design who wrote about how his research “focuses on examining how culture influences visual language and what that means for contemporary designers who are increasingly asked to design across cultural boundaries”. The goal of his research is to create a guide to intercultural design.
The request from the grad student was forward to a listserve along with a statement of alarm from my colleague about the standards of graduate education. I’m not sure what he was alarmed by, but he seemed to be concerned about the empirical validity of the questionnaire the student had sent. I replied to forward by asking, “So what alarms you exactly about the questions as posed? That is, what is it about his culture and your culture that makes this way of designing a guide so alarming to you?”
My colleague’s reaction to the student’s request made me wonder why the empirical validity seemed to be so lacking. The student was making an earnest effort (something I may personally have to do in the near future) to gather varied perspectives on the topic of intercultural design. Perhaps my colleague knows of a right way to do intercultural design or if there are more ‘empirical’ ways of conducting design research and of designing.
In any case, I took on the student’s questionnaire and found it more difficult than it seemed at first. If anyone reading this has any perspectives and ways of going about intercultural design that are developed and seem to work, please share!
Here is the questionnaire with my responses:
Background information
Describe your current job. Please include your job title.
My current job title is artist-in-residence. Typically artists-in-residence work with or at an institution to create artworks. They interact with faculty, staff and students to share their processes and sometimes even collaborate. However, I refer to myself as a design ecologist since that might better describe what I do. Initially I came to the institution I work for under the assumption that I was helping to start up a graduate program and research lab in experimental and new media.
My work ranges from research into the traits and practices that characterize experimentalism and how they contribute to new knowledge and hybridity in form, practice and context. I’ve taught classes and developed curricula much as a faculty member at a college or university would. I’ve led workshops, labs, and helped to organize conferences. I research and write about design in cross-cultural contexts, and how to work across those contexts based on the kinds of knowledge that each creates. I am particularly interested in how experimentalism and objectivity are made. I also work to apply research in psychology, sociology, & anthropology to understandings of bias (cognitive and social) so that we can design more fluidly across different social orders. Today I attended a grad review session to give feedback to students. I also try to connect where possible people, projects and institutions where I see great value in their working together or in the synergy of their approaches to knowledge and its application. Other days I just do graphic design or sculpture…still others…I call people and do all the mundane stuff that goes with helping to contribute to the maintenance of a project or organization.
Describe your cultural background. Is your cultural background evident in your work?
Please give examples.
My cultural background is based in the East Side of Detroit. It borders two edges, the suburbs and the Grosse Pointes. The Grosse Pointes are a wealthy edge of the city on the lake, while the suburbs are mainly made of of people who left Detroit or who inhabit communities that sprung up outside of it. I lived in a pretty culturally-mixed lower-middle class neighborhood composed of houses built in the early 20th century. I lived sort of at an edge, a hybrid zone if you will. I went to Catholic school (like most of my family) in Grosse Pointe Park and I visited relatives in the suburbs. I went camping in the woods as a kid. We had a house, but we were never well-off. My parents were divorced when I was in second grade. My mom worked her way through grad school to support and get my sister and I through school. I lived in the midwest most of my time through college. I travelled to far away places a few times through the generosity of relatives. I learned to be critical of what was presented as fact or as law because I saw it being used arbitrarily and without it’s own self-reflection or criticality. Maybe I just didn’t like nuns telling me what I should and should not do. Late in college I started working with a group of evolutionary biologists. Later still I studied organizations and cybernetics. I prefer soccer to other sports. Especially in playing.
Is my cultural background evident?
It depends where you look. I think it is. I come from a strong maternal line that last generation had 10 brothers and sisters who lost their father and breadwinner during the Great Depression. Plus they were Catholic. So for me to be interested in organizations, feedback, management, systems, knowledge construction, sustainability, robustness, and critical inquiry + truth and justice…yeah I’d say so.
Cultural considerations in design
How important is it for you to understand the culture of your audience?
It depends on the context and what I am trying to do. One question I ask is if my understanding matters at all. Most people in the world are muddling by, understanding very little, and they seem to be doing just fine. Then again, there seems to be a lot we can learn about each other–culturally speaking. I think there is a lot to be gained in understanding each other’s culture if and when there are conflicts. Often times this is because we are holding assumptions about how the world works deep inside us, and we aren’t making these known. There was a recent study of negotiations between Palestine and Israel that showed how what one believed to be the sticking point in the negotiations was not the case at all. The researchers showed how a ‘reframing’ of values could allow negotiations to proceed by articulating what could be exchanged for material compensation and which values were beyond material compensation–even though it was assumed they were not—because of cultural assumptions.
Are there any specific steps you take to understand the culture of your audience?
Absolutely! I think first it makes sense to assess exactly what you mean when you say ‘culture’ I like Atran et al’s (2005; the cultural mind) discussion of culture:
“it is important to note that the question of how culture should be defined is separable from the question of how best to study it. Although we think a definition of a culture in terms of history, proximity, language, and identification is useful and (if not too rigidly applied) perhaps even necessary as a beginning point, it does not follow that the cultural content of interest must be shared ideas and beliefs.”
They go on further to describe some of the many ways culture is looked at by different fields and people with different interests, and they determine that cultural definitions are based on utility on one hand and the scope of interest (e.g. scale or subject) on the other. In the end they see culture as that which allows the uptake of processes, of procedures, information, beliefs values and so on. So culture then is not the nouns (belief, behavior, value, etc) that we commonly associate with culture–rather it is the means by which we acquire those nouns.
table
Cross-cultural comparison of the number and distribution of words used to describe container-like objects.
Another step beyond this definition would be to lay one’s own cultural assumptions bare. I’ve attached an image from Malt et al. (1999; knowing versus naming) that shows a comparison of the number of items or objects that words across three different languages. You can see quite clearly that are quite different distributions of words for these items when you compare. Now ask what this means for different locations, use patterns, numbers of items and how these items interact with language!!! The most important point here is to assume nothing!!!
Ask what the starting points of culture are and move on from there. Design is an appropriate place to do that since so many aspects of what we use to create culture are DESIGNED! Nature is another, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to disentangle nature and the social. I think objects and artifacts are great because they tell us some much when we fail to use them “correctly”. The workplace is yet another spot where different cultural artifacts and practices converge.
Please give examples. Describe a specific project. How/why did the culture of your audience influence your choice of the following design elements:
The project I am thinking of is one I recently submitted a proposal for. The goal is to identify culturally appropriate ways of communicating climate change and risks associated with it for disaster preparedness. Here is how the audience(s) I think would influence the following elements:
Shapes: How are names associated? What do they reference? Are there assumptions or associations that people have with them?
Colors: What level communicates versus disturbs? Are there associations or not (e.g. red = hot)?
Images/photographs: How does framing, angle, & focus matter? And how does the semeiotic relationships between the elements in the images narrate and structure our engagement with it and with other things (see van leeween and kress for more on that one)?
Symbols: In what context does the symbol make sense? In everyday life? In an abstracted work setting?
Layouts: What is the flow of information and meaning? Where do/should narrative elements appear?
Other? Time, the temporal view, how do we access the future? the past? the present? On what terms and with what detail and agency?
Are there any specific steps you took to verify you were using the above elements in a culturally appropriate way? Please give examples.
No not yet with that one, but all of the above considerations were based on prior field research that identified some of these as core concerns in their engagement with the design of these information systems. So going back to question 4: do field research. Talk to people and ask them questions…about what makes them upset..about what they don’t understand…about what seems ‘alien’.
What advice would you give to other designers working on a similar project?
It it a similar cross-cultural project or a similar guide?
Either way: GO SOMEWHERE WHERE THE CULTURE IS NOT YOURS. PAY ATTENTION. DOCUMENT YOUR FRUSTRATION. THEN YOU WILL BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT MUCH OF THE WORLD IS EXPERIENCING RIGHT NOW.
