Purse Lip Square Jaw

Homeward bound

2009-10-19T13:06:00.000-04:00

[cc image by luigi53]

Variations on this picture of Wellington's cable car seem to be the obligatory tourist photo from my soon-to-be new home. Pretty, huh?

Now with only a week to go before the official move I find myself thinking about how much I'll miss my friends and family, but I honestly don't feel like I'm leaving home.

Growing up overseas taught me that home is where you live. I remember quite vividly that the people who were always comparing where we lived to some far-away (and often idealised) "home," or who were always waiting to "go home," were never actually happy where we were.

I don't want to be one of those people, always wanting and waiting to be somewhere else. And I don't want to miss out on finding and making a new home where I am. So instead of focussing on where we're leaving, I'm going to focus on where we're going.

I'm imagining that I'm actually homeward bound.

Shaping things, spaces and emotions

2009-10-09T10:32:00.057-04:00

"Soft-Maps are quilted maps of neighborhoods and parks that represent someone's unique place in the city. Each map is meant to be used: wrap your children in them, have a picnic, pull them close during the next Nor'easter. Not only beautiful, these blankets can be used as a mnemonic tool. As your child grows up with a Soft Map, they learn to read their neighborhood and its landmarks in a tactile, easily remembered way.

Handmade custom Soft-Maps can be designed and constructed at any scale: the small town you grew up in, the city or country you're lonely for, or the college campus where you met your mate."

I love Emily Fischer's blanket maps because they represent lived space in such a mundane but rich way.

I like that the maps can picture any place: somewhere you've lived or somewhere you'd like to live; somewhere real or somewhere imaginary. I like that the maps can include stable structures like streets and buildings, as well as more transitory elements like a particular path taken through a place on a given day.

But any map can do that. What makes these maps special, I think, has everything to do with being soft and flexible, made to wrap the body and comfort it. Intimate objects for intimate spaces.

Leah Evans' textile maps are also gorgeous:

Left to right: Blue Satellite, Soil Survey and Energy Isthmus

But it seems to me that these quilts ask to be hung on a wall, rather than wrapped around a body. It can't just be the bird's eye view—the maps above have that too—so maybe it's the map content? Evans explains:

"It is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests me most of all. Often, people ask me for specifics about the places and symbols in my work. Most of my pieces are not based consciously on specific places. For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes. Through my research and experience, I have decided that maps create more questions than they answer."

I guess what I'm trying to understand is how the materiality of something affects how we experience it. Both artists' quilts are soft maps, but they aren't affective in the same ways. This suggests that material alone isn't enough, or rather that the affective significance of an object depends on more than its materiality.

It depends on the shape the material takes, the content or meaning expressed, the ways in which is can be used, and...?

Taking on material, empirical and conceptual objects

2009-10-08T08:55:00.000-04:00

Colleagues from the Interaction Research Studio, the Department of Design, the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process and the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths have organised what looks to be a fascinating seminar series on the overlaps and disjunctures between design and the social sciences. If you're in London, please check it out - and then tell me all about it!

Design and Social Science Seminar Series 2009-2010
The Objects of Design and Social Science

Common to both design and (parts of) the social sciences is a shared pre-occupation with objects. On the one hand, design is concerned with making and interpreting objects including the finished article (e.g. consumer products), ‘experimental’ design aids (e.g. prototypes), and projective representations (e.g. scenarios). Recently, design has also begun to re-engage with more speculative objects whose ambiguous functionality contributes to the exploration of the social and the material, the political and the aesthetic. On the other hand the social sciences also work with objects, including categorical objects such as race, gender, and health, empirical objects ranging from the mundane to the exotic, and conceptual objects such as the notions social scientists use to understand and theorize the social. Here, the sociology of science and technology has been especially productive, introducing notions such as boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), epistemic objects (Rheinberger, 1997), immutable mobiles (Latour, 1990), quasi-objects , black boxes (Latour, 1988) to name but a few. Accordingly, a focus on material, empirical and conceptual objects brings into sharp relief overlaps and disjuncture between the two disciplines and a rich space for dialogue.

This seminar series will seek to bring into view and explore existing objects of both design and social science as well as draw out objects of novelty for both disciplines. In doing so we will seek to engage with emerging issues and topics in both disciplines such as the outputs of speculative and critical design, participation, engagement and publics as well as addressing notions concerning heterogeneity, process and event. This series will continue to serve as a platform for opening up interdisciplinary research futures.

Seminar 1 | Wednesday October 14th
Introducing the Objects of Design and Social Science
With: Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths

Seminar 2 | Wednesday November 4th
Buildings as Things
With: Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester

Seminar 3 | Wednesday November 18th
Speculative Objects
With: James Auger, Royal College of Art & Jimmy Loizeau, Goldsmiths

Seminar 4 | Wednesday January 27th
Objects and Services
With: Chris Downs

Seminar 5 | Wednesday February 17th
From objects to issues?
With: Noortje Marres, Oxford University

Seminar 6 | Wednesday March 10th
Object fair
With: Bill Gaver, Tobie Kerridge, Mike Michael & Alex Wilkie, Goldsmiths

All seminars run from 4:00pm - 6:00pm and are hosted by the Interaction Research Studio, 6th Floor, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW.

People possessing objects possessing people

2009-10-06T13:34:00.011-04:00

[marbles by fdecomite]

In 1920 Virginia Woolf published a wonderful short story called Solid Objects. It's most often described as a tale about a politician who sadly gives up politics, but I prefer to think it's about a man who happily takes up other things.

It begins with his discovery of a piece of glass:

"It was a lump of glass, so thick as to be almost opaque; the smoothing of the sea had completely worn off any edge or shape, so that it was impossible to say whether it had been bottle, tumbler or window-pane; it was nothing but glass; it was almost a precious stone. You had only to enclose it in a rim of gold, or pierce it with a wire, and it became a jewel; part of a necklace, or a dull, green light upon a finger. Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay. Or the oak sides of a sunk Elizabethan treasure-chest had split apart, and, rolled over and over, over and over, its emeralds had come at last to shore."

I love how such a mundane object, just by being touched and taken in, becomes precious.This is transformation in the true sense. But I'm even more taken by Woolf's description of how a person can become possessed by objects as well:

"Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. So John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything - china, glass, amber, rock, marble - even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there - thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantel-piece."

What a lovely way to be reminded that if we are able to transform objects, then objects, too, are able to transform us. Continuing with the story, we can further witness John's almost ecstatic transformation:

"One day, starting from his rooms in the Temple to catch a train in order to address his constituents, his eyes rested upon a remarkable object lying half-hidden in one of those little borders of grass which edge the bases of vast legal buildings. He could only touch it with the point of his stick through the railings; but he could see that it was a piece of china of the most remarkable shape, as nearly resembling a starfish as anything - shaped, or broken accidentally, into five irregular but unmistakable points. The colouring was mainly blue, but green stripes or spots of some kind overlaid the blue, and lines of crimson gave it a richness and lustre of the most attractive kind. John was determined to possess it; but the more he pushed, the further it receded. At length he was forced to go back to his rooms and improvise a wire ring attached to the end of a stick, with which, by dint of great care and skill, he finally drew the piece of china within reach of his hands. As he seized hold of it he exclaimed in triumph."

And eventually, we see that his possessions come to possess him:

"[T]he meteorite stood upon the same ledge with the lump of glass and the star-shaped china. As his eyes passed from one to another, the determination to possess objects that even surpassed these tormented the young man. He devoted himself more and more resolutely to the search. If he had not been consumed by ambition and convinced that one day some newly-discovered rubbish heap would reward him, the disappointments he had suffered, let alone the fatigue and derision, would have made him give up the pursuit. Provided with a bag and a long stick fitted with an adaptable hook, he ransacked all deposits of earth; raked beneath matted tangles of scrub; searched all alleys and spaces between walls where he had learned to expect to find objects of this kind thrown away. As his standard became higher and his taste more severe the disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken lured him on. Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career - that is his political career - was a thing of the past. People gave up visiting him. He was too silent to be worth asking to dinner. He never talked to anyone about his serious ambitions; their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour."

And so, in the end, John was left to his things. One abandoned; the other kept. Both transformed.

Making the insubstantial substantial

2009-09-28T09:36:00.003-04:00

This weekend I went through my MA research in search of Penny Dransart's incomparable work on Andean camelid herding, and got distracted by my books on ancient Peruvian textiles. Most often made with alpaca wool, their weaving techniques were incredibly sophisticated, and I've never seen their match.

Now imagine the awe a textile geek like me experienced this morning when I saw the cloth pictured above. I didn't even know weaving like this was possible, and curators know of only one other textile of its kind, which was exhibited in 1900 and subsequently lost. So what makes it so impressive? It's made entirely of spider silk!

Made in Madagascar from the silk of more than one million female golden orb spiders, it took almost one hundred people four years to produce—and yes, that is its natural colour. (Stunning!)

"The task of silking a spider starts with a small machine — designed centuries ago when the first attempts to silk spiders were begun — that holds the spider down. 'The spiders are harnessed ... held down in a delicate way,' Godley says, 'so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there's a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o'clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o'clock. They're in boxes, they're numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature'."

"Peers picks up the thread of the story. 'It's called dragline silk,' he says. 'A spider can produce up to seven different types of silk. The dragline is what frames the web; it's the thicker silk on the outside. Also, it's extremely strong. The first panel that we wove, we were quite stunned by the fact that it sounded a bit like guitar strings, pinging like metallic guitar strings. I mean, it is a very, very unusual material.' A very careful person simply pulls the thread out of each spider and wraps it on a spindle. It's then put on a hand loom and woven. The main threads consist of 96 twisted silk lines. The brocaded patterns in the tapestry — stylized birds and flowers — are woven with threads made up of 960 spider silk lines. Peers says they never broke a single strand, yet the tapestry is as soft as cashmere."

"This intricately-patterned spider silk features stylized birds and flowers and is based on a weaving tradition known as lamba Akotifahana from the highlands of Madagascar, an art reserved for the royal and upper classes of the Merina people (who are concentrated in the Central highlands). Silkworm silk has been used for a long period in Madagascar, however, there is no tradition of weaving spider silk in Madagascar."

The textile is currently on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There's also a short video about it at the link above, worth watching if only to hear about how sticky the material feels. Cool.

Towards Rural Computing and the Internet of Companion Species

2009-09-23T15:55:00.010-04:00

After spending seemingly endless years researching and writing a dissertation, I don't think it's unusual to want to get as far away from the topic as possible. So I'll be the first to admit that this time last year I didn't want to hear the phrase "urban computing" ever again, and if anyone asked, I said that I was more interested in rural computing.

Sheep Crossing by Dana Spencer

At the time, the imperative to get on with urban computing was bound to people quoting that well-known and UN-endorsed statistic about half the world's population becoming urban. (If only people showed that kind of interest in, and commitment to, issues that affect women—also half the world's population!)

So when I read Russell Davies' recent post on what he's called "ruricomp," I perked up. In fact, I even made a little cheering sound when I read this bit:

"Half of us - an entire half - still don't live in cities. This may be a shrinking proportion of the world but it's still a lot of people, and (apart from some privileged bits of the West) it's the poorest, less mobile, less educated proportion. Most people are moving to cities to escape poverty, surely the people left behind merit some attention."

Yes! As I've said many times, who and what get excluded from design visions are just as interesting and important as what and who are included. Western philosophers have long held that a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest or least fortunate members (in other words, who we ignore or abandon) and contemporary notions of cultural citizenship rely precisely on how well we interact with people who are different from us.

During my doctoral defense, the examiners were quite concerned about a design imperative that, at worst, seemed to condemn rural spaces and people to irrelevance and, at best, reinforce some of the current divides that actually serve to disadvantage both "sides." I found myself ill-equipped (and unwilling) to provide an argument in favour of predominantly urban, or even exurban, computing. And I began to think more seriously about what might constitute non-urban or rural computing.

Those who know me know how much I love animals, and so it won't come as a surprise that when I think of rural life I think about all the animals. More specifically though, I think of where the Internet of Things might meet Donna Haraway's notion of companion species. How are we all connected? What do we make (of) each other?

I was doing research on farming and country life in New Zealand, the crises currently facing the wool industry, and how Icebreaker has been so successful in marketing their merino products by tracking their wool back to individual farms through their wonderful baacode service.

We know that RFID is widely used in livestock management, but that's not what Icebreaker is working with. So what if they were? And what else could we come up with if we started doing new technology design research in more rural contexts? What new relationships and opportunities would we discover?

While my first reaction to Icebreaker's current catalogue cover was "Oh Hell, No!" it's basically the same statement that led me to my new research project, Counting Sheep.

I'm interested in better understanding how the Internet of Things relates to agricultural production, and some of my first fieldwork will tackle wool-related cultural industries like the Golden Shears shearing and wool handling championships in Masterton. Next year marks the 50th anniversary, so I'll be in full ethnographer mode for the early March events, and again at the amazing Running of the Sheep event in Te Kuiti, in April.

I'm not sure what kinds of connections between sociality, spatiality and materiality I'll find, but I come from a country that has a strong rural constituency and I'm going to another, so I think it's high time to see if Russell is right:

"[M]aybe we could think about network technologies as a way to reintegrate rural and urban rather than accelerate the dominance of one over the other ... If we can stop the countryside becoming a Cursed Earth, we might not need a Mega-City."

What do you think?

Visualisation, materialisation and affect

2009-09-15T14:08:00.012-04:00

This is Luke Jerram's glass sculpture of the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, from his gorgeous Glass Microbiology series, which includes E. coli, SARS, smallpox and HIV (in order, below).

"These transparent glass sculptures were created to contemplate the global impact of each disease and to consider how the artificial colouring of scientific imagery affects our understanding of phenomena. Jerram is exploring the tension between the artworks' beauty and what they represent, their impact on humanity."

"The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of ‘presence’ do pseudocoloured images have that ‘naturally’ coloured specimens don’t? How does the choice of different colours affect their reception?"

"In response to these questions, Jerram has created a series of transparent, three dimensional sculptures. Photographs of these artworks will be distributed to act as alternative representations of each virus."

"The sculptures were designed in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol using a combination of different scientific photographs and models. They were made in collaboration with glassblowers Kim George, Brian Jones and Norman Veitch."

This is a video of glass blower Kim George, working on Jerram's HIV virus design. Choosing glass as his sculptural material is really interesting, not least because it's difficult to work with:

"I'm also pushing the boundaries of glassblowing. Some of my designs simply can't be created in glass, Some are simply too fragile and gravity would cause them to collapse under their own weight. So there's a very careful balancing act that needs to take place, between the limitations of current scientific knowledge and glassblowing techniques."

But the translucency of glass is also important: first, because the actual viruses are transparent organisms, and second, Jerram is colour-blind so he has a different, even idiosyncratic, relationship to colourised representations, and this impacts the way he works.

But the matter of authenticity, or authentic representation, is quite complex in this case. While his sculptures may be "truer" representations precisely because they are not coloured, they are even more distanced or abstracted from the "original" viruses in the sense that his designs are based on other pictures and models. Nonetheless, in the Guardian article on Jerram's work, it's suggested that the clear glass sculptures look "less threatening than popular scientific imagery would have us believe" and this gets straight to the question of affect.

A quick Google image search yielded these two representations of the HIV virus. While the basic shape is similar, the different colours and textures suggest slightly different—if equally vivid—organisms. I'm not sure I find either one particularly "threatening," but the one on the right is a bit creepier because it seems to have little hairs or tentacles (which, obviously, creep me out).

But back to the matter of colour. The top image is one of Jerram's HIV sculptures and the one underneath it is David Sayer's coloured photograph of another one. While both objects are effectively the same, the artificially coloured one appears more dramatic—which must surely be part of the reason the photo received an award from the Institute of Medical Imaging in 2007. But drama (or fear) is not the only way to move people, and isn't beauty really just the ability to move and be moved?

For example, Jerram posts a letter he received from a stranger:

Dear Luke,
I just saw a photo of your glass sculpture of HIV.
I can't stop looking at it. Knowing that millions of those guys are in me, and will be a part of me for the rest of my life. Your sculpture, even as a photo, has made HIV much more real for me than any photo or illustration I've ever seen. It's a very odd feeling seeing my enemy, and the eventual likely cause of my death, and finding it so beautiful.
Thankyou.

This person was clearly affected by Jerram's sculpture, and did not find it easy to resolve the emotional conflict arising from seeing some sort of beauty in his/her killer. And I wonder, was this affect/effect easier or harder to come by without colour?

But I also wonder if we're just more effectively convinced by three-dimensional material objects? This becomes particularly interesting in the area of (scientific) data visualisation, which quite simply is not data materialisation. I've written many times on the importance of objects in social interaction, and Jerram's sculptures bring to mind Elias Canetti's crowds—but those are connections which I'll have to flesh out another time.

Lucky London-based folks have the opportunity to see all of Luke Jerram's virology sculptures at The Smithfield Gallery from 22 September to 3 October, 2009 and his H1N1 sculpture was recently acquired for the Wellcome Collection.

via

Update 16/09/09: I can't believe I forgot about GIANTmicrobes - here are the plush versions of E.coli, H1N1 & HIV. Talk about different affective potential!

Update 12/10/09: My favourite science mag, Seed, has a short article on Jerram's work and his focus on "the animation of otherwise hidden phenomenon." David Ng also chimes in with some thoughts on the "complicated relationship between science and art" - something that might be of particular interest to designers making "conceptual" pieces and the challenge of answering the more empirical or technical concerns of scientists and engineers.

Textiles, patterns and bodies

2009-09-14T14:21:00.003-04:00

A few years ago, at a wearable technologies conference, I gave a talk on seams and scars (pdf). It's not a great paper, but I always liked how it connects textiles, bodies and patterns to ask questions about time, beauty and goodness (i.e aesthetics and ethics).

When I was checking out the Central Saint Martins MA Design for Textile Futures programme's 2009 degree show this morning, I also saw some photos from the Fine Art - Byam Shaw degree show. It's a shame they posted photos without any descriptions or attributions, but I was really taken by this embroidered (christening? funeral?) gown:

It seems so creepy-but-pretty, like a body inside-out, a cadaver, or an old anatomical model. (That last link via the always-awesome Morbid Anatomy blog, which reminded me to also hunt down a link to Bioephemera: Art + Biology.)

On a related note, I also recently learned about Ninette van Kamp's Souffrez Pour Moi project:

"Van Kamp's pieces use artfully placed seams, beads, and textured fabric to create intimate, temporary patterns in the skin. Using luxury fabrics and materials these special jewel-encrusted undergarments explore how beauty and suffering are subtly intertwined."

I really like patterns on the skin and these temporary ones are quite lovely. Much more appealing than the pillowcase creases I find on my face most mornings, these designs remind me of dermographia, a skin condition that allows for incredibly beautiful patterns to be etched onto the skin—just check out excalipoor's arm or Ariana Page Russell's skin one and skin two series:

While it's clear that the human body is inscribed both metaphorically and physically every day, it doesn't seem difficult to further treat the body (or skin) as a canvas or living textile. In addition to a very long cross-cultural history of tattoos, branding and scarification, notable artistic explorations include Shelley Jackson's SKIN project, "a story published on the skin of 2095 volunteers," well-known examples of body painting like Veruschka's modelling work in the 1960s and Greenaway's 1996 film The Pillow Book, and the more mundane expressions collected in the Words on Skin Flickr group.

Ultimately, I think this is all interesting because it gets me back to concerns about how people and things are made. What do we flaunt, and what do we hide? What do these choices say about what we value?

PLSJ resurrected

2009-09-13T16:39:00.008-04:00

After more than a year since my last post, I've decided to pick up blogging again. (Yay!) But before I really get into it, I have some news to share.

In November I take up a new permanent position as Senior Lecturer in Design Research at the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington. Besides being super excited about moving to New Zealand, I'm proud to be joining such impressive colleagues and students doing world-class design.

I'm looking forward to my first year of teaching in the new Culture+Context specialisation programme—which means developing courses in design+culture and design anthropology, as well as co-teaching a design research class. I'm also really looking forward to growing the Design Culture Laboratory and getting started on my new research project, Counting Sheep: Using RFID to Explore NZ Wool Industries.

One of the things that got me most excited about this job is the incredible—and I should add unique—opportunity I'm being given to truly unite my studies in sociology, archaeology and anthropology. I'm looking forward to working with historical and emerging material cultures in terms of situated and embodied practices, and really thinking, doing and making stuff on an everyday basis.

On a related note, I have to thank Timo Arnall for giving me the opportunity to start making these connections while working on the Touch project. Earlier this year I completed re/touch, a website that "brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch to help designers and researchers create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios, define game play or otherwise get inspired to think, make and do things touch-related." The Oslo super-team designed an interactive exhibition for re/touch that showed at Nordes 09 a couple of weeks ago, so keep an eye on the project blog for more on that. And more later on my current work, which involves a material culture analysis of the project's RFID objects collection.

In other news, I've also expanded my duties with the Space and Culture journal, where I now serve as Web and Book Review Editor. That means I've really got to up my game at the space and culture blog, and I'll be looking for people interested in reviewing books for us. (Hint, hint, free books!)

And last, but not least, I've actually started writing and publishing stuff again. Teaching six classes last year made it difficult, but I've got an article called “Locating Media Futures in the Present, or How to Map Emergent Associations and Expectations" coming out in Aether: The Journal of Media Geography, as well as a chapter on "The Affective Politics of Urban Computing and Locative Media" in Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, Ulrik Ekman's awesome edited volume for MIT Press. I've even got a couple more articles under review, which should finally take care of all my dissertation-related research. Of course, I'll post copies of everything here as soon as I can.

So. That's more than enough for now. I've got loads of stuff to do, but I'll be back soon!

Of endings and beginnings

2008-08-14T09:42:00.006-04:00

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 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

2008-07-11T15:13:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-19T08:46:00.006-04:00

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

2008-06-11T12:22:00.012-04:00

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

2008-05-31T12:01:00.008-04:00

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 révolution sociale

2008-05-01T07:33:00.012-04:00

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

2008-04-30T08:31:00.005-04:00

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 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

2008-04-29T09:11:00.005-04:00

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

2008-04-28T14:33:00.008-04:00

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

2008-04-28T08:46:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-23T07:30:00.003-04:00

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

2008-04-18T20:49:00.008-04:00

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

2008-04-15T11:25:00.008-04:00

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

2008-04-13T07:02:00.010-04:00

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

2008-04-01T09:48:00.009-04:00

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

2008-03-26T07:27:00.005-04:00

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