2004-11-12 Design Engaged notes - During the intro - What are the oblique strategies? "Fake it", "Maintain/grow", "Simplest solution" * Ben Cerveny, The Growth of the Soil The nitrogen cycle. Huge growth of metadata, all these applications making things. Nitrogen hits the soil and decomposition occurs. There's a breakdown. The tags decompose into a soup of metadata that can be attached to brand new datasets. Metaobjects that have references to multiple sources of information, eg "amsterdam" is a metadata tag that is related to all kinds of things. [but really, it's not an object, right?, it's *just* a surface area without the thing itself. it's more like the gates of an airport, numbered inside and out and accessible from both worlds, but you can't cross into the airplane-world without a collaboratoive diving suit.] now there's a soil, we can have sorting mechanisms, self-organisation. spiders [worms?] to join affinities. the tending of an application which is constantly underway, in flow. ["sloppy tripples" says matt jones] [from the perspective of the airport, the outside is a virtual space, or at least one that is at a slightly different angle, so instead of travelling through it with your house+job+clothes+etc (which is a nicely abstracted extelligence object) you have to cross it with a plane and the cooperation of 366 other people. eating is like this--because of your mouth+taste+stomach acid, food can only pass through your lips in certain structured groups: meals.] model the metadata as biological growth, specifically the growth of plants. ["brownian tree" says matt jones, and shows me an entry on wikipedia] [what ben is says that: "L-system algorithm"/"DLA"/"rules of expression" is a way of mapping the growth structure of a system. instead of looking at static relationships of the metadata, look at its growth patterns and see how it branches. dynamic growth makes it more comprehensible, like "common fate" i guess, we can see objects only when they're in motion.] "there's a botany of these different structures" (sunflowers, poppies) [how does this get expressed in physics? those quasars looked like a tree structure, but maybe in a different kind of space there was a series of bifurcations of the different forces that won at different stages of evolution of the quasar, and there are tight poppylike bifurcations, and looser rhizome ones too.] [and there different systems that encourage different kinds of gardens of metadata?] book: "Organic Information Design" matt jones: how to you represent this? does it have to be visual? [could you, as the tag system grows, represent tags which are particularly canalised, or becoming-canalised, or tags which are on the verge of breaking up, having synonyms. that way, if you see a tag which is breaking up, you can start being active in metadata in that area, pushing it where the definitions are loose. this seems like a new way of doing politics--instead of having a single growth point of a political party, the manifesto is the airport into policy space, a fractal surface area, and by looking at that compared across parties and over time, we can concentrate on the fuzzy areas and push into them. is that transhuman politics, when we can hold more that 6 growth points simultaneously? is bao a metaphor for that, as opposed to the chesslike calcification of extelligence politics [politics as architecture versus politics as discussions]. the technology we have now is *all* about extelligence, this is the trend since literature culture. what is the *other* direction, politics and technology as discussion which is dynamic and must be maintained or ceded? different from my computer and my notepad.] # * All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace ethical considerations in ubiquitous computing. lead article at boxes & arrows right now. http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/ all_watched_over_by_machines_of_loving_grace_some_ethical_guidelines_for_user_ex perience_in_ubiquitouscomputing_settings_1.php ubiquitous systems should default to harmlessness, a mode that ensures user's physical, psychic and financial safety (if it breaks, move to ambient temperature, not siphon your account, etc). [i like this, an intrinsically conservative system that surrounds us will allow people to become more radical because there will still be a balanced world in the end.] book: Thomas Disch's 1974 novel, 334 [I also need to read We] ubicomp systems: be conservative of face [do not embarrass people] the "safe word" concept to jump out of ubicomp. [i was talking about safe words to jump you out of a scene with tom coates at work the other day, but what was the context?] hw: the government will offer you a program which will control, but someone else, hidden in a country where they can't get caught, will offer you a program that gives you your privacy, which is like your body. [privacy == body. good!] tc: shame/humiliation has a social use. mws: but the problem is when it gets universalised. [yes, people experience shame by imposing shame. the shameless end up in control.] # * Making Differences: Teaching and writing about interaction design "information is the difference that makes a difference" -- reaction to the conduit metaphor. scientific american: hacking a black hole, the black hole as an information processing machine that radiates information. linguistic anthropology, somebody who did this? found that writing came from tokens for counting. - sumerians had tokens that represented bushels of wheat, fields etc. traded on clay tokens inside envelopes (the tokens *were* the objects). then they put marks on the outside of the envelopes to represent what was inside the envelope, and eventually the tokens just disappear. [so all of our writing now is on the surface of bubbles that metaphorically have a token that joins the real to the virtual inside, but that airport gate (a two-way receptor cell, a *hinge*, the difference that makes a difference), has since vanished. into our brains?] # * The complexity of life and what it means for design "patterns of compensation" to deal with the complexity of the world, which we've been realising for the past 50 years. [this corresponds with the rising of cybernetics.] [- we're good at confabulating: two ways of learning, one in language (which is more rationalist, but not as able); one which is unconscious (and is much more able to handle complexity) - animate, inanimate, tools: all 3 are in the fundamental ontology] # * ezgov, talking about RUP [it's a design process from RUP Rational. It sounds like GURPS, it's a process for designing processes. you can get a UX add-on to add new roles, deliverables or something. could you design the process design process as a process itself? in that case it's be more like a nomic. and could you sell a set of cards to play with the process beforehand, to learn the system better, to allow play?] http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/rup/ # * Self-centred design (Dan Hill) book: paul dourish, in action book: stewart brand, how buildings learn tom moran: the focus on usability in UCD has distraction from the usefulness of the situation which the user is being put in. also, will UCD scale to large social/global levels? boiling this down to a persona might just not work. "design is dissolving in behavior" [matt jones just showed me a screen from a presentation: "mundane is the new fun"] # * The Future Human: Who Will Designers Be Designing For? ben: "you're designing a language, and language shapes the way you perceive and approach the space" [we have ontic powers, especially in this virtual space] # * Vast Conforming Suburb of the Soul [molly] we make pervasive computing for cities, but that's because cities are sexy. much of the thinking is happening in london and new york, which are urban. [which points to an interesting point: we need to make situated, localised devices to sit in nations & regions offices.] book: rich warren, the purpose driven life. book: building suburbia, dolores hayden book: anthony townsend's thesis # * Questions on the commodification of space [Matt Ward] http://triptychresearch.typepad.com/ book: Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life "we are social, spatial, temporal beings" book: henri lefebvre, the production of space. also writings on cities. also, introduction to modernuty book: iain borden, skateboarding, space and the city situationist has become the de rigeure theory of designers. why? [situationism: all about the spectacle] boredom, frustration [two others from earlier: fear, humiliation] book: [practice of everyday life. situationism is about reclaiming agency from the spectacle. i can see the roots of craft and embeddedness in this] # * location location location [chris heathcote] "i think in frameworks not services" [chris produced a layer diagram of kinds of location, breaking it down into movement/fashion/nature/etc. i need to get over my fear of constructing frameworks and making divisions--too many abstractions, and not enough making typologies. i need more published stuff like that which i can build up and refine in order to discuss the world.] situated software. maybe you ignore location and take advantage of physical things: a wifi node has a position and a range. [this is like the physical tombs which extend human relationship ties into the real world, making a virtual face.] # * being in the world [matt jones] the active cover with NFC has now launched NFC tags don't just carry data, they can carry behavior: macros. the phone has the reader/writer and the NFC can tell the phone to do something. tags get thrown away once they're used once. little bits of behaviour which are littering the environment, waiting to be found. the spirit world. the object just having action scripts attached. semiotic spirit world. objects which have behaviour attached, but it only happens when the phone activates it. these are more like tools. [what are the visual affordances of these tags? anything you want i guess, but that's not built in.] [nice font, i'd like to know what matt used for this] [you need nfc tags that can remember. when you've found a location in your phone which is handy, hit it on one of the 6 faces of the "bookmark this" sugar cube. how does this kind of stuff relate to anoto? there the behavior was on the server.] # [jack's presentation included a video of hockney talking about perspective. western pictures include 1 perspective, so the person is static, outside the picture. chinese pictures included many perspectives, as if you're standing at many points in the picture. a picture of active experience. video forces you into a single perspective thing.] # * timo stickering space, repetition is really important [interesting kind of repetition. at a certain point, all the stickers are identical, but from then on they can no longer take part in each other's lives. they leave each other. patterning.] when stickers are removed, there's patterning.