Archive for visual culture
November 4, 2011 at 11:53 AM · Filed under art, Design, india, photography, visual culture
We had a little show and tell at IFTF on Friday where we all brought in examples of good things to read.
I wanted to bring Indian blogs that I like a lot. But I also thought I needed more than my own finds – ones that focused on design, technology, art and/or culture. Because it was late in San Francisco, I was overlapping significantly with the daylight part of India’s diurnal cycle. Who better to ask where the good content was than some trusted colleagues from the subcontinent?
It turned out to be a little more difficult than I expected. I got a handful of good responses when I posted it on my twitter feed – maybe 35% of all those I asked. Some replies were more relevant for what I was looking for: well organized, thoughtful commentary, minimal ads, a clear editorial focus, and, above all, unabashedly Indian.
However, a few replies also cited how difficult it was to think of blogs or magazines – from a specifically Indian context. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult. Perhaps much of Indian culture is derivative in one way or another and that we often run into conflicts when we cite what is “purely” Indian (I’m gonna get in trouble for this last sentence 
. Or maybe the blogs are just difficult to find, in a different language, or just not cool enough.
It also seems a lot of blogs don’t maintain momentum – as if they aren’t “serious” enough to be sanctioned. I was super bummed not to see much from the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) or even from Srishti for that matter. I guess new media isn’t supposed to be linkable from home institutions (but please correct me if I’m wrong).
Then again, maybe it’s not allowed. You’d be surprised how many social disincentives as leveraged at people just trying to share good ideas, insights, and sensemaking (#justmyexperience). But that’s changing – I hope.
In any case, here’s a first go, and this list is fantastic.
What are your favorites? I’d be especially down for some Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, or other links too. Post ‘em in the comments if you like – and better yet – tell me why I’m wrong. Enjoy!
http://issuu.com/wkdelhi/docs
Portland Ad Agency Weiden and Kennedy opened an office in Delhi. This is their culture mag. Really well-done, visually-compelling, and curiously out of the mainstream – but then I guess that where the advertising peeps always play.
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/
I’ve been really impressed with the quality of articles coming from caravan. Timely topics (the first I ever read was about UIDwallas) and good layout.
http://www.randomspecific.com/
A killer visual culture and design research-based collection. Smart commentary and vibrant, reality-based images permeate the senses.
http://praja.in
Want to know what’s happening in the mobility and public transport scene in Bangalore? This is transport politics writ large. Great levels of participation.
http://designpublic.in/
A series of conversations about design and innovation in the public interest – by the good peeps at CKS.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/
It seems a bunch of massive media outlets are learning to pay attention to India.
http://masalachaionline.blogspot.com/
Desi graphic design.
http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/
Respected NID Prof. M P Ranjan on design thinking, design research, and some massive issues in sustainability and inclusion.
http://www.hobnook.com/
TBD
http://www.sarai.net/
Old school, super school, the source for critical thinking about cities, new media, art, and culture
http://poolmagazine.wordpress.com/
Looks like Tiger Beat – for the Indian design caste.
http://helterskelter.in/
chaos and control. like it.
http://www.openthemagazine.com/
Bordering on info overload, but the writing looks promising.
http://www.designwala.org/
Arch + design for developing world.
http://www.medianama.com/
Tech and business details.
February 27, 2011 at 12:05 PM · Filed under boundary objects, Design, making it public, metaphors, service design, symbolic systems, visual culture
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;)
June 13, 2010 at 8:15 AM · Filed under art, evolution, symbolic systems, visual culture
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
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/routledg/csac/2004/00000013/00000001/art00004
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.
February 24, 2010 at 11:15 AM · Filed under community interaction design, design ecology, ecoregionalism, symbolic systems, teaching and learning, visual culture
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.
February 3, 2010 at 12:05 PM · Filed under art, boundary objects, cinema, cognitive justice, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, metaphors, narration, teaching and learning, visual culture
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).
August 13, 2008 at 10:56 PM · Filed under art, critical theory, Design, interdisciplinary, metaphors, visual culture
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
June 16, 2008 at 9:31 AM · Filed under boundary objects, community interaction design, interdisciplinary, making it public, maps, network entrepreneurship, science, teaching and learning, technology, visual culture, visualization
This is a nice compilation of resources assembled for a course entitled MAPPING CONTROVERSIES in MIT’s STS program. The course focuses “…on developing aptitudes for combining multiple ways of knowing: textual interpretation, intensive search in heterogeneous databases, and design tasks; all of which point to the invention of new tools of representation for an increasingly complex environment.
Sounds fun.
Addendum: you can also view an explanatory video about Mapping Controversies, narrated by Bruno Latour
May 20, 2008 at 5:57 PM · Filed under art, biology, biotechnology, boundary objects, visual culture
Regine Debatty discusses biology, art, and technology
April 4, 2008 at 3:39 PM · Filed under cognitive justice, Design, technology, visual culture
Check this: This report is intended to help companies design specifically for the so-called base of the pyramid in Emerging Economies such as Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya.
An EMERGING ECONOMY is a country that is experiencing rapid informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. In the past, some of these regions have been understood as being in the process of industrial development, and were therefore described as ‘developing countries.’ Alternatively, they have been described as ‘emerging markets’ for goods and services created in the industrialized nations of the world. Our conception of Emerging Economies, however, recognizes that these parts of the world are not merely slow to industrialize, nor merely markets, but strategic centers for the emerging networked knowledge economy.
One of the biggest challenges found in India is convincing others about the value of design and design research. On the other hand, I have never been in a better place for learning and conducting research that takes into account the views, perspectives, and voices of others. Call it a post-colonial mandate or whatever, but in terms of making design adaptable and responsive to user needs, the context couldn’t be better for innovation and the creation of appropriate technologies and product service systems.
January 24, 2008 at 11:23 PM · Filed under complex systems, Design, design ecology, ecoregionalism, interdisciplinary, proposals, technology, visual culture
The Emerging Economy Report is coming! This is a project I’ve been working on over the last few months. It’s been in development for almost a year and a half and represents research in seven countries, all of which have been identified as emerging economies. An emerging economy is a country that is experiencing sustained economic growth as a result of rapid informationalization and limited or partial industrialization. Economic growth in the information economy will continue to be driven by these emerging economies who will benefit from rapid informationalization, innovation, and ephemerilization of the economy, leapfrogging many of the requirements and costs of the Industrial Revolution.
We’ve been working to develop insights into global trends and user perspectives across seven nations including: India, China, Indonesia, Kenya, Brazil, Egypt, and South Africa. By examining specific case studies, visual research, economic trends, and user perspectives on (among other things) technology, access to information, heathcare, and economic resources, we have been able to create strategic knowledge for those wishing to do business in these emerging economies.
The 7 emerging economy countries studied in this report account for 46% of the world population. The report offers a variety of innovative recommendations that will help businesses engage with these economies.
Visit emergingeconomyreport.com to find out more.
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