Of endings and beginnings

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 Montréal, 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

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

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

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

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 révolution sociale

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

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 Pörtö. 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

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

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

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.)