Purse Lip Square Jaw

Of endings and beginnings

2008-08-14T08:42:00.006-05:00

First things first. Thanks so much for the many warm and supportive comments posted since my defense. I am very grateful for having had such extraordinary readers for so many years.

As you know, this blog began as a record of my experiences as a PhD student. And as some of you may recall, it was always my intention to end the blog with the completion of my doctorate--so this is my final post.

Over the next few weeks purse lip square jaw will be redesigned. My dissertation will be made available online in its entirety, and although the blog will not be updated, the complete archive will remain here.

Of course, I will continue to blog at spaceandculture and I am very excited to be starting on new adventures.

Next week I take up a year-long position as Assistant Professor in Design & Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montr�al, where I will be teaching the social and cultural dimensions of new technologies, art and design practice. I hope to bring the sensibilities of sociology and anthropology to design and computation arts, and I'm looking forward to working with, and learning from, truly world-class colleagues and students.

The redesigned purse lip square jaw will provide links to all my courses, as well as to a new research project on the cultures of design and some upcoming publications.

Thanks again for all the support--it's been an incredible six years--and I hope to still see you around.

Now: Hey! Ho! Let's Go!

UPDATE 25/08/08:
The plsj tumblelog collects things I notice, and it's more fun than this blog.

Dr. Purse Lip Square Jaw

2008-07-11T14:13:00.005-05:00

It's official!

After more than two hours of intense questioning, the examining committee declared that my dissertation would be accepted with no revisions required, and recommended for a University Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement.

First order of business as Dr. Galloway?

Get my freak on ;)

A never-ending story

2008-06-19T07:46:00.006-05:00

I've got some consulting work to finish, a bit of reading and writing to do, classes to start planning, and 87 email in my inbox that need answers.

All I want to do is roll Katamari.

Announcement and invitation

2008-06-11T11:22:00.012-05:00

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE OF URBAN COMPUTING AND LOCATIVE MEDIA
by Anne Galloway

Dissertation for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Sociology & Anthropology
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

To be defended in public on Friday 11 July, 2008 at 09:00 in Loeb Building A715

(image fibre design)

Supervisor
Rob Shields, Henry Marshall Tory Chair and Professor, Sociology and Art & Design, University of Alberta

Committee
Gitte Lindgaard, NSERC/Cognos Chair and Professor, Psychology, Director Human Oriented Technology Lab, Carleton University

Carlos Novas, Assistant Professor, Sociology, Carleton University

External Examiner
Mike Michael, Professor, Sociology, Goldsmith�s College, University of London

-----

Read the introduction (pdf)

-----

Thanks to everyone online and offline who accompanied me in this adventure--I could not have done it without you.

Special thanks go to Jason Kiss, who made all this possible and worthwhile. I am also deeply grateful to Bob Krukowski, Nikki Guerrero, Craig Davey, John Stevenson, Daphne Guerrero, Jean Burgess, Matt Webb, Timo Arnall, Rod McLaren and Molly Steenson for their support when things got hard.

This dissertation is dedicated to my mum, Betty Jean Galloway, who taught me to never give up.

Networks of Design

2008-05-31T11:01:00.008-05:00

Networks of Design

3-6 September, 2008
University College Falmouth
Cornwall UK

Networks of Design "responds to recent academic interest in the fields of design history, technology and the social sciences in the �networks� of interactions that inform knowledge formation and design. Studying networks foregrounds infrastructure, negotiations, processes, strategies of interconnection, and the heterogeneous relationships between people and things."

Thematic Strands

Networks of Texts: including images, documents & databases
Networks of Ideas: including theories, disciplines & concepts (among them ANT)
Networks of Technology: including mechanical & virtual technologies
Networks of Things: including material & technological artefacts
Networks of People: including collectives & individuals

If I could choose one conference to attend this year, this would be it, and if their website were better designed I'd be able to link directly to the completely amazing line-up of people and papers.

(I also hope to one day finally see an academic conference website that at least publishes abstracts, if not full papers, as well as author contact information. Apparently the irony of excluding these is lost on them.)

In any case, keynote speakers include Bruno Latour and my friends Matt Ward and Alex Wilkie will be presenting "Made in Criticalland: Designing Matters of Concern." Right on.

Mai 68 : une r�volution sociale

2008-05-01T06:33:00.012-05:00

NY Times photo essay: Paris, May 1968
IHT: May 1968 - a watershed in French life
Reuters: Forty years on, France still fascinated by May 1968

And let's not forget that today is International Worker's Day.

The Brief Origins of May Day: "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

Mended spiderwebs

2008-04-30T07:31:00.005-05:00

Artist Nina Katchadourian lists The Mended Spiderweb series as an uninvited collaboration with nature, and I don't know what is more impressive: that she tried to repair broken webs, or that the spiders rejected her mends and properly repaired them.

"The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on P�rt�. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat 'wilted' condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them. Each 'Rejected Patch' is shown next to the photograph showing the web with the patch as it looked on site."

(via)

Biomaterials research watch: future silk

2008-04-29T08:11:00.005-05:00

Long-time readers may recall my fascination with the desire to mass produce spider silk--something notoriously difficult because spiders are highly territorial and cannibalistic and cannot be housed together in the numbers needed to make this possible. For those unfamiliar, spider silk is one of the holy grails of materials research because it has a tensile strength greater than steel, the extensibility of rubber, the water uptake capability of wool, and is biodegradable.

Fibre researchers are particularly interested in its potential use in biomedicine, and since the early 2000s researchers have looked at different ways that the necessary silk proteins could be created. Cows, hamsters, transgenic goats and even bacteria have all been made to produce the proteins needed to make silk, but it has proven much more difficult to replicate a spinneret, the spider's spinning mechanism. This is further complicated by the desire to "improve" on the spinneret by making it capable of faster spinning, since the biotech industry moves faster than nature.

In 2006, engineers at MIT came closer to understanding how spiders spin silk, and today's news reports that German researchers have constructed "a device that consists of three channels etched into glass" that can control the levels of salt and proteins needed to make silk. However, the same article also quotes researchers at Oxford Biomaterials saying that "certain wild silks are stronger when you unravel them than natural spider silks" so it may be that spiders get passed over for Chinese and Indian wild silkworms.

Still, processing silk is very expensive, and it's hard to say how viable either will be for the type of mass production needed to keep American soldiers alive longer, let alone to make implantable medical textiles for the rest of us.

Phenomenology, smart materials and ambient robotics

2008-04-28T13:33:00.008-05:00

Jill Coffin was another Digital Media PhD student I met at GA Tech, and I had the pleasure of talking with her about phenomenology in art and design practice (pdf), as well as the opportunities and challenges of collaborative work.

Although I'm not much of a Rorty fan--I prefer the work of Merleau-Ponty and especially the ethics that arise from Alphonso Lingis' phenomenology--I was impressed by Jill's desire to find common ground with HCI researchers by focussing on embodied interaction - especially since such collaborations with artists affect notions of scientific validity.

People who keep up on ambient computing might also recall Breeze, a cyborg tree project that was exhibited at ZeroOne in 2006. Like XS Labs' Kukkia and Vilkas dresses, Breeze uses the shape memory alloy Nitinol to guide its movements.

YouTube: Breeze

Robotany is a collaborative of Jill Coffin, John Taylor, and Daniel Bauen to combine nature and robotics. At the Robotany blog, you will find "documentation and tips on how to build ambient robots using smart materials."

We talked a bit about totems and talismans as participants in embodied interaction--and all without claiming anthropomorphism--but I think that's a topic that deserves far more attention than we were able to give it over tea.

Now, if I could just remember the name of the conference she was telling me about...

Computing culture at Georgia Tech

2008-04-28T07:46:00.000-05:00

Back from a lush, if a bit too warm for my post-winter constitution, Atlanta, I'll cover my talk in a separate post--but first I want to talk about the amazing grad students I met. They appear to work in a much more driven and stream-lined university environment than mine, and while I have some reservations about this educational model, there's no doubt that good people are getting some good work done there.

[Campus sculpture photo by highstrungloner]

It was really good to see Susan Wyche again, and if you're not familiar with her doctoral research on technology and spirituality in cross-cultural context then I highly recommend it. I wish I had more time to talk with Chris Le Dantec, a doctoral student "researching the social impact of technology, specifically looking at how marginalized communities like the homeless are affected by the social changes inherent in the adoption of new technologies." His work with Keith Edwards, Designs on Dignity: Perceptions of Technology Among the Homeless (pdf), was recently awarded best paper at CHI 2008, and it's well worth reading. Normally, value-sensitive design (pdf) makes me a bit nervous because of its tendency to reinforce universal humanism, but their paper really emphasises the importance of creating context-sensitive information and they fully recognise that technology is not a panacea for social problems. Furthermore, the paper raises important concerns about connection versus disconnection, since "the need to stay connected to the rest of society is a major concern for the homeless, yet as those connections become increasingly mediated by technology, the risk of losing touch becomes greater."

All of this reminds me of my conversations with Carl DiSalvo. I first met Carl when he was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and now he's Assistant Professor at GA Tech. We continue to share an interest in activist research: This visit I pointed him to work in activist anthropology and he pointed me to a new book, Engaging Contradictions: The Case for Activist Research (pdf here), that looks quite interesting. We also share a commitment to designing with and for emergent publics-in-particular, rather than pre-existing publics-in-general, although I wish we had more time to talk about the limitations of defining citizenship along the lines of what can be gathered by individuals through sensing technologies.

I also had a great conversation with Jasper Sluijs, who finished an MA in cultural studies before starting his MS in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. We talked about Deleuze and Brian Massumi's work on affect, and the politics of using 'official' data in personal informatics and data visualisation projects. When faced with 'facts' it's very difficult to intervene as citizens because the matters at hand appear done or closed, while a focus on unresolved concerns still offers the possibility of action and hope for change. For example, rather than presenting crime statistics or environmental data as objective truths, it would be interesting to explore how these data are collected in the first place, or how different types of data could be collected. Not only does this encourage more actionable research and design projects, but it makes explicit the politics and ethics of their underlying logics and practices.

Jasper collaborated on Greetings from Atlanta!, an interactive postcard and short paper on re-appropriating the city (pdf), and I also briefly met Adam Rice, another Masters student and part of the team that worked on the Imaging Atlanta: Transportation project. A visual exploration of transportation "not in motion," the panoramic photos and descriptions of Atlanta transport scenes "allow us to view and consider our movement through space and perhaps more importantly, to devote pondering attention to the spaces we move through, but often fail to see."

And last, but certainly not least, Ozge Samanci was kind enough to demo Tangible Comics for me, and I was really impressed by her enthusiasm for exploring the boundaries of comic book form. Not only is their embodied comics storyline fun (and feminist!) but it was wonderful to actually feel my body moving through a graphical narrative. Ozge's personal comics are also lovely representations of ordinary things and everyday life. (I submitted a link to Drawn! and I hope her work gets some more exposure there.)

Affective Politics in Urban Computing and Locative Media

2008-04-23T06:30:00.003-05:00

The Responsive Objects, Surfaces and Spaces (ROSS) research group at Georgia Tech has very kindly invited me to give a lecture tomorrow, so this afternoon I'm off to Atlanta.

With my dissertation going to defense soon, I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to present a core point of my argument to such a smart and creative group for feedback.

Affective Politics in Urban Computing and Locative Media
Emerging technoscientific knowledges and practices can be seen to actively mobilise and manipulate particular affects to political ends, including the very definition of what constitutes political action. Building on ethnographic research with several pervasive computing design projects, this presentation addresses some of the affective politics that accompany the treatment of cities as interaction design spaces and publics as co-creators. By advocating playful presents and hopeful futures, a number of contemporary projects in urban computing and locative media seek to re-invigorate urban public spaces and re-vitalise the public sphere. But the associated forms of technologically mediated spatiality, temporality and embodiment raise interesting questions about technological determinism and the limits of critique. What kinds of relations are possible in these scenarios? Which concerns are intensified, or diminished?

Georgia Tech ROSS Lecture Series
Thursday, April 24, 2008 - 12:00pm
TSRB 132

I hope to see you there and for anyone else who is interested, I'll post my slides and notes here afterwards.

Intensities and multitudes

2008-04-18T19:49:00.008-05:00

Pieter Bruegel
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
1562

"In Bruegel's rendering, the violence is expressed not in the bitter nature of the battle--indeed St Michael and his sparse troops do not appear particularly threatened by the demons--but by the intensity of the fall--infernal and endless--of this crawling, hideous multitude that invades the entire surface of the picture, in a remarkable unity of action which increases its impact."

Social sciences and design: managing complexity and mediating expectations

2008-04-15T10:25:00.008-05:00

For reasons of pedagogy and social responsibility, Tony Dunne is one of my favourite designers and I'm particularly taken by his ideas about designing for debate. In setting briefs for students in Design Interactions at the RCA, he says "design proposals should pose questions rather than provide answers, making complex issues tangible, and therefore debatable." To purposely intervene in an issue without trying to solve a problem is a difficult activity, but one with extraordinary possibility if done well. Plus, the archaeologist in me knows the ability of material culture to make "tangible, and therefore debatable" things that are complex, fragmented and strangely ephemeral.

For details on how to design for debate check out this talk from last year's Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign event in Potsdam:

[Video]

Now, the idea that design can play a productive role in managing complexity is hardly new, but I do see a lot of potential in designing and using objects (things) to engage publics around particular issues, or matters of concern. Pushing this connection between sociology, anthropology and design, I see this kind of work as another way to facilitate public understandings of emerging technologies, or to mediate public science and the co-production of scientific knowledge--but there's no reason to limit its application to the realm of technoscience as it is equally well-suited to intervening in many aspects of everyday life. (Proboscis' Feral Robots and Snout projects also demonstrate a lovely combination of technoscience and everyday life.)

Paola Antonelli writes in Seed Magazine about curating MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition:

"Fundamental to this emerging dialogue between design and science is the appreciation of the role of scale in contemporary life. Today, many designers have turned on their heads several late 20th-century infatuations, for instance with speed, dematerialization, miniaturization, and a romantic and exaggerated formal expression of complexity ... The focus now is on ways to break the temporal rhythms imposed by society in order to customize and personalize them. If design is to help enable us to live to the fullest while taking advantage of all the possibilities provided by contemporary science and technology, designers need to make both people and objects perfectly elastic ... These new principles embody the great responsibility that comes with design's new power of giving form and meaning to the degrees of freedom opened by the progress of science and technology."

It's certainly nice to see designers seriously take on something other than the creation of consumer products, but I'm not sure design has that much power to change the world. Still, this general perspective ties in with some interesting theoretical and methodological issues in contemporary social and cultural studies that are worth exploring further. (In fact, Goldsmith's Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process ran an interesting seminar series this year on design and social sciences, featuring friends and colleagues including Matt Ward, Alex Wilkie, Tobie Kerridge and Nina Wakeford. I also see that Mike Michael and Bill Gaver have been working more on the intersections of sociology and design, so that should also be interesting to follow.)

My dissertation deals quite a bit with the expectations that surround urban computing and locative media, or the ways that particular technosocial visions serve to shape relations in the present and delineate future scenarios that include some things and bracket out others. While this may appear to be of purely sociological or anthropological interest, by acknowledging the role that design plays in these processes, design can also reflexively and responsibly intervene again through the creation of objects that mediate these expectations. Such activities also bring issues of scale and temporality to the forefront, arguably better enabling a wider range of people to act in situations that affect them. But in order to get a sense of how these activities can also limit what we can do, check out this assessment of UK think tank Demos' Mobilisation document and the enactment of future users (pdf).

In any case, as soon as I've got the dissertation defended (stay tuned for news on that!) I'd like to do more work in this area. There's just so much to think, and do and make...

It's a mad, mad, mobile world

2008-04-13T06:02:00.010-05:00

As widely reported, The Economist has tackled the topic of mobility in a special report, starting with a piece called Nomads at last:

"Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it.

'Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing.'

The most wonderful thing about mobile technology today is that consumers can increasingly forget about how it works and simply take advantage of it."

The first description and Castell's claim are seriously sticking in my brain, not least because "permanent connectivity" is quite different from standard definitions of either mobility or nomadism, and it's difficult to reconcile this view with news that wireless cities are easier said than done.

The unrestrained glee of the last statement I excerpted just makes me sigh, mostly because I remember Yvonne Roger's warning that the purely convenient and efficient life raises ethical issues not unrelated to those of "the world of the landed aristocracy in Victorian England who�s day-to-day life was supported by a raft of servants that were deemed to be invisible to them."

And speaking of mobile technologies, Nokia Design seems to be everywhere these days. Check out this long NY Times Magazine story on the work of Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns. And they've been busy recruiting as well: Adam Greenfield is off to Helsinki this summer to start his new "plum gig", and Julian Bleecker reports leaving academia to pursue a more "relevant" career.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I have serious concerns about academia, but I figure that's all the more reason to try and improve it. Call me a Canadian socialist, but I believe in government and non-profits and academia, and I don't see how turning my back on them will help me or anyone else. Plus, I'm pretty sure that "escaping" academia for the corporate world just implicates us in a different set of problems. Still, I wish both Adam and Julian only the best. Congrats gentlemen! I know I'm not the only one looking forward to seeing what your insights and enthusiasms bring.

Oh, and while I'm still on the topic of nomads and Nokia, did you know that Nokia China recently sponsored a 100 day roadtrip? Sharing this memory is made possible by Nokia and my N73/N95.

To see what some artists are up to in the arena of the mobile these days, check out wooloo.org's NEW LIFE BERLIN, "a contemporary art festival dedicated to new modes of moving and existing." The June 2008 event will be structured along three themes: transnational communities, artistic social responsibility, participation and intervention.

Teasing only the ones we love

2008-04-01T08:48:00.009-05:00

NY Times: April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks

"[P]ractical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found � an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness.

The 1960s activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman reportedly divided practical jokes into three categories. The bad ones involve vindictive skewering, or the sort of head-shaving, shivering-in-boxers fraternity hazing that the sociologist Erving Goffman described as 'degradation ceremonies.' Neutral tricks are more akin to physical punch lines, like wrapping the toilet bowl in cellophane, depositing a massive pumpkin on top of the student union building, or pulling some electronic high jinks on a co-worker�s keyboard (though on deadline this falls quickly into the 'bad' category).

What Hoffman called the good prank, which humorously satirizes human fears or failings, is found in a wide variety of initiation rites and coming-of-age rituals. The Daribi of New Guinea, for example, have children make a small box and bury it in the ground, telling them that after a while a treasure will appear inside but they must not peek, according to Edie Turner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia.

Invariably the youngsters succumb to curiosity � only to find a sample of human feces.

The Ndembu of Zambia have an adult in a monstrous mask sneak and scare the wits out of boys camping outside the village as part of a coming-of-age ritual in which they are showing their bravery.

'These kind of tricks are very common,' Dr. Turner said, 'and they are really a way to put a person down before raising them up. You�re being reminded of your failings even as you�re being honored'."

I'm all for "tempering success with humility" but for the more political variety, nothing beats RE/Search's PRANKS! and PRANKS 2.

How The University Works

2008-03-26T06:27:00.005-05:00

I recently read the introduction (pdf) to Marc Bousquet's new book, How The University Works, and this bit is really sticking with me:

"Degree in hand, loans coming due, the working partner expecting a more fair financial contribution, perhaps the question of children growing relevant, the degree holder asks a question to which the system has no answer: If I have been a splendid teacher and scholar while nondegreed for the past ten years, why am I suddenly unsuitable? Nearly all of the administrative responses to the degree holder can already be understood as responses to waste: flush it, ship it to the provinces, recycle it through another industry, keep it away from the fresh meat. Unorganized graduate employees and contingent faculty have a tendency to grasp their circumstance incompletely�that is, they feel 'treated like shit'�without grasping the systemic reality that they are waste. Insofar as graduate employees feel treated like waste, they can maintain the fantasy that they really exist elsewhere, in some place other than the overwhelmingly excremental testimony of their experience.

This fantasy becomes an alibi for inaction, because in this construction agency lies elsewhere, with the administrative touch on the flush-chain. The effect of people who feel treated like waste is an appeal to some other agent: please stop treating us this way�which is to say to that outside agent, 'please recognize that we are not waste,' even when that benevolent recognition is contrary to the testimony of our understanding ... The difference in consciousness between feeling treated like waste and knowing one�s excremental condition is the difference between experiencing casualization as 'local disorder' (that authority will soon rectify) and having the grasp of one�s potential for transforming the systemic realities of an actually existing new order. Where the degree-holding waste product understands its capacity for blockage and refuses to be expelled, the system organizing the inside must rapidly succumb."

I feel my excremental condition. Bring. It. On.

See also: Bousquet's How The University Works Blog and Tiziana Terranova and Marc Bousquet, Recomposing the University, Mute Magazine, 2004

Techno-determinism, temporality and the problem of critique

2008-03-24T10:03:00.007-05:00

Pervasive computing is X (although it could be Y or Z).

Good things should be enabled.
Bad things should be opposed.

X is good, so enable the technology.
X is bad, so oppose the technology.

In opposing pervasive computing that is X, one supports those who would enable it to the degree that one is denying the possibilities of pervasive computing being Y or Z (instead of X).

Just thinking about the problem of collusion...

"So, then, how do we analytically separate the possible or impossible inevitability of the future from a [given] case? I suggest we do it by separating the (alleged) inevitability of the future from the inevitability of the present. There is such a thing as the inevitability of the present ... If, then, we want to criticise technological determinism, we should not criticise descriptions when they describe an unfolding of a present, even when that present consists of a long chunk of time, like, say, 20 years ('cars and roads will still be the dominant machinery of transportation in 20 years time'). If, however, we want to argue that a particular unfolding of events is an unfolding of a present time, we have to argue the case empirically. It cannot be assumed. And the arguing may be difficult and uncertain."

-- Lars Risan, The Duration of the Present and the Risk of Not Telling Large Stories

Thx Sam.

Underground aesthetics and ethics

2008-03-23T15:17:00.010-05:00

SeeShell by Johanna Brewer

"SeeShell is my new project, an augmented Oyster Card (the RFID-enabled Underground ticket) holder which displays, over time, the journeys a rider has taken.

When a user passes their Oyster card (which is inside the SeeShell) over the touch-in point at the gate to the station while they are entering or exiting, the SeeShell, using RFID, senses which station the user just passed through and over time a map of the stations they have visited begins to emerge on their Oyster Card holder.

When you purchase an Oyster card it is not necessary that you give up your identity, but you must register the card if you want to purchase a monthly or yearly pass. Registration allows you to recover a lost or stolen card, but obviously comes with the trade-off of having all of your journeys (which are traceable) linked to your name. The Oyster system already tracks users' journeys but there is no convenient way for the users to access or make use of that data.

By building SeeShell on top of an already existing system, I hope to show how lived patterns of mobility might be leveraged in new ways and placed back into the hands of their creators."

In a paper on underground aesthetics (pdf) for IEEE Pervasive Computing last year, Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer, Karen Martin, Paul Dourish, and Scott Mainwaring explain how Londoners used to give their paper day-travel tickets to strangers at the tube station when they were done travelling for the day and wouldn't need them anymore. They also describe how free newspapers are commonly left behind so that other passengers can read them. While the authors recognise these material objects as "potential interaction points" that "acknowledge current and future passengers," I think they underestimate the ethical implications. Whether or not there is any direct (i.e. conversational) interaction, in both scenarios people act as though they are socially obligated to each other. The ethic of this paper-based aesthetic involves collective action. In political terms, we could call it community or citizenship.

The SeeShell project works within the framework or system afforded by the Oyster card. Since the RFID-based card is a personalised and reusable device, there is no opportunity or need to share it in the same way as the day-travel card example above. We might even go so far as to say that its use encourages personal rather than social relations. By positioning agency in terms of how "users can conveniently access and make use of data," the SeeShell project may indeed offer the individual new means of self-awareness and aesthetic expression. But this kind of parasitic or participatory surveillance does nothing to encourage a social ethic that binds people to each other, or a sense of citizenship that challenges the surveillant assemblage and its atomising effects.

I'm not saying that I don't like the project, or that all projects need to be social and political. What I'm saying is that as new technologies attempt to shift from interaction models to participation models, we might take a closer look at what we mean when we describe design in terms of user empowerment. What kind of agency or power is this?

Quote of the day

2008-03-18T08:37:00.003-05:00

"The engineering sensibility, which so often seeks to breed out the unusual and enable replicable results, has a very hard time with the idea that people might want to find what they weren�t looking for."

-- Rick Prelinger, [iDC] Media dies more slowly than some would like

Reimagining the everyday

2008-03-13T10:50:00.004-05:00

I love getting email about new research, art and design projects that address theories and critiques of everyday life!

Alexis Lloyd's paper Performing the Mundane: Interventions in Everyday Life (pdf) "explores the ways in which artists are utilizing design objects, performance, and interventionist practices to create spaces for play, ritual, and poetry in the midst of everyday experience. Specifically, the paper examines these issues through an analysis of the works of Andrea Zittel, Improv Everywhere, and Tim Etchells."

While Alexis' locative media projects are also interesting, it was actually The Concrete Jungle street art installation that made me smile the most. Maybe it's my love of miniatures and animals, but there is something simply joyous about this kind of interaction design. Sure some critics could dismiss it as cloying, but consider these two points. First, unlike most work in ID, it doesn't cater just to the technological elite. In fact, I imagine all sorts of gadget-less people quite delighted by small gorillas swinging from fences, and rhinos storming over parking meters. Secondly, it does not require any direct interaction. While walking down a busy urban street, to simply catch a glimpse of a tiny lion stalking a tiny herd of antelope is enough to change one's frame of mind without demanding immediate action. In other words, the intervention is subtle and open-ended. Very, dare I say, everyday life.

**

I love carnivalesque moments or events precisely because they disrupt time and space, and force me to acknowledge things that I might otherwise miss or avoid. But I also like to remember that Walter Benjamin characterised boredom as "the apogee of mental relaxation," the "dream bird that hatches the egg of experience," the "threshold to great deeds." In places that constantly seek to move faster, to stimulate further, the ability to actually be bored is a triumph of sorts. It means we haven't been captivated by the spectacular, that we've managed to resist the logic of efficiency.

In their Open 11 essay, Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering The Panopticon from the Inside (pdf), Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg remind us that when we design for urban computing the important question is "whether we can develop procedures, methods, possibilities, spaces for 'selective connectivity', which make it practical to choose to extract ourselves from the electronic control grid from time to time and place to place." At the end of the article they list a bunch of interesting projects that offer the possibility to disconnect--note how some are illegal.

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Returning to the notion of wild versus domesticated spaces, Robert Willim wrote to tell me about an interesting project he's done with Anders Weberg, Domestic Safari: Home as a Wild Place. They asked "What if we started to see the material worlds of domestic settings as wild places? Is there a potential for the exotic and uncanny in the inconspicuously mundane?" and eventually came up with a ten minute film that takes the viewer through three different homes in Finland, Italy and Sweden. As they explain: "This audiovisual excursion aims to call forth imaginaries and a profane illumination that disorient and estrange the materialities of everyday reality."

Personally, I did find it disorienting. There are bits that appear to take place underwater or on the forest floor, rather than in a house--and the music can be more than a bit discomforting. This is no home I'd want to live in! But I'm intrigued by the idea, and I hope they put up some more documentation. I'd like to know what they think we can learn from repositioning the domestic as the wild...

Art calls

2008-03-13T08:02:00.006-05:00

Iraqi Memorial: Commemorating Civilian Deaths

"The purpose of this project is to honor and commemorate the deaths of thousands of civilians killed since the commencement of 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' on March 19, 2003; to establish an Internet archive as a living memorial that will serve as a repository of memorial concepts; to mobilize an international community of artists to contribute proposals that will represent a collective expression of memory, unity and peace; to encourage the vigilance of contemporary memory in a time of war; to stimulate an understanding of the consequences and costs of 'the war on terror'; to support the moral imperative of recognizing the deaths of Iraqi civilians; and to create a context for the initiation of a process of symbolic, creative atonement."

Call for Proposals and Guidelines for Entries

DEADLINE MARCH 31, 2008

Update: Foreign Policy in Focus | Memorializing Iraq

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Rhizome Commissions Program

In 2009, Rhizome will award seven commissions with fees ranging from $3000-$5000. This year, Rhizome has expanded our scope, formerly focused strictly on Internet-based art to encompass the broad range of practices that fall under new media art. This includes projects that creatively engage new and networked technologies to works that reflect on the impact of these tools and media in a variety of forms. With this expanded format, commissioned works can take the final form of online works, performance, video, installation or sound art. Projects can be made for the context of the gallery, the public, the web or networked devices.

Download the Call for Proposals (doc) | Submit a Proposal

DEADLINE MARCH 31, 2008

If it can't be made at home, maybe it can be made in transit

2008-03-11T08:42:00.005-05:00

For years I've been waiting for someone to invent the energy-efficient refrigerator that grows food instead of just storing it. I always imagine the outside door full of plants that are both edible and beautiful. My own year-round greens and micro-greens garden, some heirloom tomatoes and beans, a few organic mushrooms grown in a dark section at the bottom... Perfect!

Well, it doesn't look like my fridge will be happening anytime soon, but I'm always interested in organic, local and sustainable agricultural processes. Enter the future of fungal freshness: Agata Jaworska's thesis project Made in Transit, "a supply chain concept in which the food grows on board a vehicle on the way to the supermarket, shifting the paradigm of packaging from preserving freshness to enabling growth, and shifting �best before� to �ready by'." (via)

I have some concerns about the labour repercussions--a local organic farm employs and trains dozens of young people every year--but I appreciate Jaworska's explicit acknowledgment that the Made in Transit concept is complementary to, and not a replacement for, other kinds of production. I also agree with her that it raises interesting and important questions about sustainability and the relation between local and global systems:

"Developments in local agriculture can go on as normal, just as developments in my mother�s garden will also go on as normal. For this project I was interested in tackling global chains and wondered if they could be done differently, and indeed address their sustainability...Indeed, next time a kid asks me where mushrooms come from, I�ll have to tell him that they may soon come from trucks...And is this a utopia or a dystopia? Well it�s not as romantic as going to the forest but I hope it turns out to be more sustainable than the way it is currently done, given our global state of affairs. I think it shows that sustainability is not as clear cut as one would think, and dare I say, that local is not always better than global?"

The whole interview is worth reading. If you're looking for more visuals, I'm not sure the accompanying two-minute animation does the concept justice, but Jaworska's recent presentation at a Pecha Kucha event in Rotterdam starts to get at the kind of details that allow us to imagine the potential of her vision:

YouTube: Made in Transit at Pecha Kucha

Packaging geeks can also get more info on the growing containers in this Culiblog post. And even if you're not that kind of geek, it's a great blog all-around so why not check out the entries in the locative food and urban agriculture categories?

And last but not least, if food and culture interest you as much as they interest me, I can highly recommend a subscription to Gastronomica, a brilliant journal on food and culture.

This winter: 374 cm and counting

2008-03-08T22:49:00.005-05:00

Current view from the front porch.

Looking down the street this afternoon.

Representing the political agency of technological devices

2008-03-04T09:47:00.002-05:00

Light Trail at Speed Bump by lilduckling

"In my view, the bottleneck is in the difficulty of describing what happens to agency when there are no anthropomorphic characters. And there is no vocabulary�no accepted vocabulary�to talk about that. So every time you do that, immediately people say�I know because I have done it many times�people say, �Oh, you anthropomorphize the nonhuman.� Because they have such a narrow definition of what is human, that whenever a nonhuman does something, it looks human, as if it�s sort of a Disney type of animation. So if my �sleeping policeman,� actually a speed-trap, begins to really do something, people say �yes, but you are projecting human intention onto it,� even though it has been made precisely so that there is no policeman there and there is no human intention there and you break your car if you speed...I think that the bottleneck is that we don�t know how to define the nonhuman at all."

-- Where Constant Experiments Have Been Provided: A Conversation with Bruno Latour

In Guaman Poma's chronicle of the Inka there is an illustration of December's [June's] Inti Raymi festival, named after Inti, the Inka Sun God. In it, Inti and his consort Mama Killa (Mother Moon) wear human expressions.

A great Peruvian archaeologist once told me that Western scholars always misunderstand the sun in Inka culture. Inti, he explained, has a face not because the Inka anthropomorphised him but because the Europeans had no words to describe humans and non-humans as if they were the same.

I've always assumed he was referring to animism, but now I'm more intrigued by this question of lacking words to describe non-humans, and what this means if we try to account for relations between humans and non-humans.

If Crang and Graham are right, the biggest threat in a world of pervasive computing is the delegation of political agency to inanimate objects (i.e. computers) and invisible forces. In such a scenario, I find it useful to think of humans and non-humans as the same. Well, not actually the same, but certainly not different. I'm reminded that every RFID tag has a person--many people--attached to it. People who make decisions, people who are implicated and interpellated. And I wonder how can we best reveal--best represent--the people, the actions, the politics that are normally hidden in these devices. How can we communicate what these devices do? Or how they act?

Timo Arnall's Touch Project has investigated how RFID transactions can be visualised, including these RFID icons by Alex Jarvis and Mark Williams at Schulze and Webb, and Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim came up with these Everyware icons (pdf). In all these examples the driving metaphor is the transaction, or the exchange between human (user) and non-human (computer)--which is, of course, very useful from a usability and user-centred design perspective. It also makes sense if we assume that most of these devices will be used in commercial contexts.

But I'm interested in the political agency of these devices. I'm interested in ways we can represent the political relations they embody--something which must begin, I believe, with the explicit recognition that these exchanges or transactions involve unequal power relations.

How can we represent the reality that a given device or environment is collecting and correlating data in ways that are more powerful than our ability to resist? How can we demonstrate tactical potential in the face of strategic control? Perhaps more simply, how can we represent a given device or environment as an assemblage of people, places, practices, objects and ideas? How can we draw (out) its relations to others?

"Holding theorems in their hands": The Hyberbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project

2008-03-04T08:23:00.005-05:00

"For Ms. Wertheim...the project embodies the 'beauty and creativity that comes out of scientific thinking,' what she refers to as 'conceptual enchantment.' As it turns out, the gorgeously crenellated, warped and undulating corals, anemones, kelps, sponges, nudibranchs, flatworms and slugs that live in the reef have what are known as hyperbolic geometric structures: shapes that mathematicians, until recently, thought did not exist outside of the human imagination ... It wasn�t until 1997 that Daina Taimina, a mathematics researcher at Cornell who had learned to crochet as a child in Latvia, realized that by continually adding stitches in a precise repeating pattern she could create three-dimensional models of hyperbolic geometry. For the first time mathematicians could, as Ms. Wertheim said, 'hold the theorems in their hands'."

-- NY Times: Want to Save a Coral Reef? Bring Along Your Crochet Needles (Um, that would be crochet hooks and knitting needles.)

"Every person who takes up this craft creates new species of crochet organisms and we have come to see the project as a collective experiment in textile-based evolution. Just as all living creatures result from variations in an underlying DNA code, so the species in these handi-crafted reefs arise from deviations in a single simple algorithm. Slight variations in the kind of yarn, changes in the rate of increasing stitches, even shifts in crochet tension make significant differences to the morphology of the finished form ... Ways of constructing once perceived as 'merely' women�s craft, and dismissed from the cannon of scientific practice, now emerge as revelatory forms of a more complex, embodied way of thinking about the world both mathematically and physically."

-- The Crochet Coral Reef At The Chicago Cultural Center