2005-10-11 Day 1, talk notes Design for decline. Or, a user's guide to the end of the world Adam Greenfield With the drop in oil production, travel gets difficult. Our world gets local. Some consequences: - knowledge is local; values are local - ie, copper might be worth more as raw metal than as the deployed electricity grid. The cables might be melted down """ Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will be hearing ourselves. """ (good quote) # Has design lost its way? Matt Ward "design cannot claim autonomy from social change" design has a double function. design is reflective and constitutive (it is a product of society, but it is also world shaping) early utopians become conservative. they designed spaces for control. totalising social spaces [sounds like social software] later, radical designers moved towards anti-utopias. designing for difference. "terroristic meta-narratives" different uses and actions define the architecture. continuous monuments. the movement forward can't forget about the chewing gum and the dogshit, otherwise we'll lose our way. # A Historical Primer of Political Artifacts Joshua Kaufman Book: The Whale and the Reactor, Asearch for Limits in an Age of High Technology, by Langdon Winner artifacts have political properties: - invention, design, or arrangement of artifact becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a community (we live in this place) - soem artifacts are inherently political (eg, atomic bombs) some of these are in city planning. eg, robert moses' low overpasses. these restricted buses from moving around NYC, but allowed rich people with automobiles to move freely (this was deliberate). cyrus mccorrmick II's molding machines these disrupted labor artifact can be used to increase power or privilege over others we don't often inquire whether a device has been design in a way to produce consequences *prior* to its intended uses we must move beyond a language of "tools" and "uses" mechanical tomato harvester - increased productivity - but the tomatoes were harder and didn't taste so good - cost was reduced only a little ($5/tonne) - 32,000 people lost their jobs over the coming decades artifacts allow us to order human activity in many ways questions: is it possible to predict this? # Design in the Parliament of Things Anne Galloway "To assemble is one thing; to represent to the eyes and ears of those assembled what is at stake is another." - Bruno Latour it's very hard to act when you can't pin something down. [ie, what are the consequences of assembling? if we don't know what an assembly is, it's hard to tell.] objects are matters of fact; apolitical how we can we get away from thinking about things like that? use the word "thing" -- it comes from "assembly," meaning "coming together" (but not "unity") from matters-of-fact to matters-of-concern oldest parliament in the world is the icelandic Althing from realpolitik to dingpolitik (Latour) because we are so divided by contradictions, we have to assemble. that's okay. walking is controlled falling. [this is already very hopeful. i've been feeling very blocked about *what to do*, and this is a way of getting past that: how to reconcile without losing the isness.] from representation to re-presentation: what would it mean to step back and take all those little parts and *let* them be little parts? avoid pretending there's no difference. [now stating the problem] characteristics of now: invention & capitalism; speed & mobilisation we're required to focus on the novel, with speed. we're required to mobilise skills. to mobilise an army, you get rid of the obstacles. you induce speed. there are forces to make us work faster, work better, move past objections. this is inherent in product design. you have a boss saying "do something!" "my dreams and hopes are turned towards any process which would get people interested in the consequences coming together and being able to impose their questions, objects, counter-propositions..." when you're at speed, there's no time to "talk things through" [i want to know why "talking things through" is good. i know it is, but i want to know the mechanism by which conversation brings improvement] [aside that it's the *presentation* of the military as efficient, and science as *objective* is the dangerous thing.] [reminds me of the python mailing list and the atom syntax list. voting doesn't produce consensus. the force of decision making has its effects on the artifact. the reverse of the semiotcracy.] the force of efficiency is not doing good things to us. hopefully we'll get to a space where it seems nonsensical that we allowed anyone to tell us what to do. how do we design in this parliament of things? there's no easy answer. everything in place right now is fighting against this idea. there's one place to start: it means slowing down. bring it back to the local, community, women. give them a voice; you don't have to agree with them. we can suspend judgement, and allow things to be thought through. response to my question about consensus: we don't need consensus, we don't *need* an answer, we just need convergence. question: in the early days of spellcheck, derrida became deride, and disney became dissent. heidegger became "headgear" question by matt ward: how does this slowness translate from this room, to the person working in the factory? anne: get outside. # What's wrong with blog design Johnny Haeusler runs spreeblick.com, one of the most read blogs in germany issues are: - everything is treated the same, visually (short links, podcasts, longer political essays with heavy discussion) - difficult for new readers (chronological order, most recent articles give a false impression of what sort of content is there) - search results are displayed by date, not relevance [suggestions of alternate displays seem more like ftrain.com (the many columns) and tumblelogs (which appear differently). or even plasticbag.org's best posts.] # Public by Design? Michele Chang as a way of looking at privacy and public space: Seattle's public library library provides a number of services and interfaces to the city not only is the library a microcosm of the city, it has a mandate that everyone is welcome. looking at the activities, practices and rules (overt and implicit) in libraries, with cultural anthropologists at intel. themes: claiming territory. leaving belongings and walking away - notes - strollers (there was no space to do this, even in the children's section) - bags (really big ones) sliding scale of permanence (some patrons can sleep in the space, in college libraries. not in public libraries) controlling territory - signage/rules - please place periodicals here; please be quiet - guidelines for controlling content (distribution of approved materials) - because of liability issues? - limitations on what bags are allowed in the library - guards are sometimes needed too; the hint of force what kinds of technologies are public goods? - wifi? yes - electricity? probably - internet hubs? no - what onus is on the individual? are we shifting to a model where everyone has to have a laptop? is this an individualising technology? furniture design - are the chairs now out of date, to huddle around a computer? - people use cafes in the library to converse, a shift? the institution of a library is at odds with its mandate. is this a statement with greater implications? matt ward: libraries are specific. foucault said, heterotopic spaces. given it's so specific, can you find analogies to other spaces? answer: people hanging out (like a street corner) anne: what's different about all these libraries? if you only had the difference, what would that look like? foe: uk libraries have two mandates now: safe public space for children, and getting online. (michele says that there are now separate internet terminals for adults and children) matt jones: older libraries were about horizontal; new are about vertical (terminal screens) [this is from a talk by someone from ideo]. how this been observed, and what are the privacy implications? michele: it can look like a call-centre, all those screens. # Clouds, Space, and Black Boxes Thomas Vander Wal Person interacts with - Personal Infocloud - Local Infocloud - Global Infocloud [and the Unknown, which is not discussed here] Personal: We track things that match - our interest/ideology - location - friends - work (network, affiliations) - social network - portals this is a clearing house of filters for recommendations. we aggregate, then use the filters of people whose opinions we trust (in certain domains). aggregation + trust + privacy there is an unease we have when we aren't able to have privacy is there a black box to manage all this information? it should filter our personal information so that systems, eg A9, only get access to a certain slice of our information. [i'm reminded of the foaf site that aggregated lots of information that was already in the open. when presented together, it was scary, because people could move around it and see it easily. this is data mining. i would question whether information can be compartmentalised. how about data mining with photo recognition? we don't realise what's important until the technology comes around.] # Bad Consciousness Louise Klinker on CrimeWire live/work; experience design and service design crimewire: play on the limewire experience to make the software reflect the feeling of badness you get when using it. question by liz: we all know what's fair. we have a sense of justice. this tool helps us expose those negotiations. # Ambient but not uniform Malcolm McCullough sharing some uncertainties about the concept of taking into account "civic space" [laptop closed; taking paper notes] # The Skin of Objects Fabio Sergio Stimulus #1: Mies van der Rohe Brick Country House, 1923 to design this, he asked the question "what is the brick? what is the message of the brick?" the shape of the brick makes straight lines. there is no cutting of the brick. the volume of the positive and negative spaces are emanations of the atomic brick itself. [beautiful.] Stimulus #2: Stewart Brand "A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start." Stimulus #3: Joy, Steve "We are designing the skin of objects" - Joy Mountford, 2003 Fabio has a negative reaction to this. Steve Jobs says that design is how it works, not how it looks. Design is not a veneer. Stimulus #4: Fabio's mother Difficulty in explaining what we do. Is interaction design about behaviour? The space between us and the oven? We design dialogues between things. Stimulus #5 "I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said 'I liked the smell of the paint.'" -- Annie Dillard, 1989 Final question: "What is the material of interaction design?" # Open Source Media: A leaf of grass growing inside the machine? Stefan Smagula # Jyri: "The child comes to see some cultural objects as having [...] intentional affordances" "[Tomasello, 1999: 84-5] [*must* look up this reference] foucault: jyri has a quote about what is allowed to be an object, and because there are rules, naturally some things will be excluded. thinglinks makes you an 8 character alphanumeric code [why? those codes are done usually because they're good for computers. i wonder what other code forms there could be?]