We Rep Ideas

Its been a while since Ive posted anything, Started an exciting new job, traveled a bit, and I’m back. Since I have been away, I’ve been writing a lot, and would like to get some things out as I move into new material. This ones called Hard Things Soft Qualities.

It has 5 parts:

1. Beyond Form and Movement
2. Meaning and Things
3. Hard Things Soft Qualities
4. Human Theater Object Audience
5. Mass Innovation: Interface is Infrastructure

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As I looked around the room I found it difficult to imagine a purpose that could bring together such a motley crew of professionals; here were behavioral scientists; psychologists; sociologists; engineers; industrial, interface and experience designers; human-computer interaction researchers and tangible computing wizards gathered in the iconic setting of Eindhoven’s Ovoluon to discuss the future of how objects will communicate with us and with each other. Seductive demos and massive projection screens revealed a parade of impressive pong playing robots, shape shifting latex boxes, and Japanese kinematic vending machines. The work looked like engineering and smelled like art. Speakers championed prototyping and sketching, showed smashable alarm clocks and empathetic cell phones.

This kind of rare but not isolated event is becoming more frequent as multiple disciplines and professions begin to recognize the steps needed to create and care for tomorrow’s objects. Welcome to DeSForM, the second annual conference on the  Design & Semantics of Form and Movement, a wunderkammer of strange things and larval theory exploring the virgin frontier of “dynamic object semantics.”

The purpose of this gathering, I learn, is to facilitate a dialogue between complementary schools of thought around object behavior. If an objects moves, changes shape, texture or color, what does it mean? A very intriguing and pre-timely subject in light of recent developments and conversations around ubiquitous computing, the real world web, the Internet of Things, “spimes” and ambient intelligence or whatever techfasionista title is hot right now. To “develop design semantics in a scientific and systematic way… focusing on the meanings conveyed by the products and how they behave” puts emphasis on the side of object expression, where there seems to be an equally fertile opportunity to explore object perception and observation. Right? Wheres the dialogue?

BEYOND FORM AND MOVEMENT

If objects have evolved new ways to ‘speak’, they are also acquiring, new ways to ‘listen’. More important is the roles these technologies will fill in their maturity. What might they sense, and how might they act upon their sensations in meaningful ways? How might this augment our senses, our physicality, reach and location.

In retrospect, DesFoRM could be considered a emergent signal of the blurring of the borders between software and hardware, wherby the nature of the object becomes a form of networked media. In this realm, objects also become textual, code; their layered semantics to be continually re-determined and evolved through time as behavior and custom becomes codified material objects. The ITU’s Digital Life report, and the Internet of Things report, record and foresee an increase in the pace and forms of innovation brought about by better systems of networked communication and access to authorship through the internet. Authorship, as an idea has expanded far beyond literature and the Internet, and now encompasses almost all vestiges of human creation as anyone can sit down and read/write reality, beginning with text and image, ending as matter, place, interaction and experience. Taken together, the following ideas proposed in this paper forms a system capable of offering a new form of innovation supportive of human behavior and technology that may come to comprise the emerging internet of things. Julian Bleecker of Near Future Labs recently stated in his Manufacturing paper for Share 2008,

“These are distinct kinds of digital objects that mix physical space, digital technology and design …. The weak signals suggest kinds of design-art-technology that are growing tired of the screen.” [Bleecker]

When objects shape-shift and change their properties to communicate something they become both screen and interface. The question here is, who will have the authority to deeply program these channels, to tinker, and how is this new form of ” hard content” created? Can we evade the illusion of empowerment and engage ‘object behavior’ in a manner that interfaces with, records and enhances, deep individual and collective narratives in everyday living? First and foremost this conference inspired me to start thinking about the kind of future infrastructure of material culture that could holistically address presence and the human experience, the production of meaning, computational perception and expression, and emerging manufacturing processes. Such an infrastructure could create a ‘new dialogue’ between people, artifacts and places. The purpose of this paper is to aggregate promising methods, models, processes, technologies and theories that form a new way of creating and thinking about our ‘stuff’ in a future were the lines between – will, desire, object use and manufacturing – begin to blur.

To the reader I would like to say, this paper is not intended to blindly evangelize about technology, but to explore how such developments might deeply affect the landscape of social life they are unfolding within.  Reflecting on the origin of the term Technology in this context may serve as a humanizing starting point. ‘Technology’ comes from the Greek word Technologia, or ‘techne’ meaning ‘craft’, and ‘logia’ meaning ‘saying’. In the forward to The Technological Society, Robert Merton defined technique as, “any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result” It is in this vein that I would like to focus on technology in so much as it is an expressive intersection between the personal and collective processes of situated goal-setting and the human refinement of actions to reach said goals. Technology is neutral, but this human process is a dynamic ballet of ever changing intents, values and beliefs. There exists an asymmetry that has come to contribute to the reification of things. People on the most part, are able to express verbally what they would like to craft, yet are unable to craft what they are able to say. The programming languages, engineering knowledge and equipment involved in the creation of today’s objects are not designed to be within the majorities reach in the same way that store shelves are.

Due to the highly relational discourse between material form development, software, interface, this discussion opens up the conversation much more broadly than interaction considerations.  It opens up a series of questions about how people naturally engage with, transform and understand objects. What is potentially the most fruitful, mutually beneficial interface between people and artifacts and the organizations that produce them? Not so much how do we design a language of form and movement.

Most importantly, what are the  what are the opportunities for ‘mass innovation’ in which the object becomes a platform of user sketching, annotation and user-guided creation?
Next: MEANING AND THINGS

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Causes, values, motivations and concentrated actions become destinations as people and places become increasingly findable. How do situated technologies augment the lifecycles of these elements?

Through locative and social technologies what was once qualitative speculation now has the ability to shift into the domain of the measurable and recordable, generating a new species of data around the relationships between individuals, groups and their environment. Organizations such as Microsofts spinoff company Inrix “tracks the behavior of 750,000 vehicles, cell phone users, and others with digital devices to determine how Americans would react to different situations.” vividly illustrates the growing interest and unique opportunity to harness human geospatial data. Experimentation with this form of information makes practices like Suprise Modelling thinkable.

Intrix, being such a novel geographic information retrieval company is a weak signal pointing toward our data traces becoming a new form of communication that creates a social metric, which diversifies the voices authoring geographical data. As urban computing is further embedded in our daily interactions new potentials for informing decisions and revealing choices can be realized. Through our data traces we will be able to co-author custom, space, policy and our material culture in new ways. In the background of this emerging context personal behavior will become personal advocacy. Our implicitly authored data may be used to cast votes, leave gestural and locative commentary. It may become a new voice, and new way to speak.

New dialogues of power occur at the intersection of human behavior, emerging technology, and inherited infrastructures and processes. Locative technologies point toward real-time visualization that offers a new individual and collective vantage, which will undoubtedly inform urban “logistics of perception” deeply effecting social dynamics and personal action. How might near-future “geo-strategic” identity building, expression, and management demand a “re-socialization” between individuals and their environment? How will people adapt?

Locative technologies, situational awareness and mobile haptics are a form of contextual and behavioral stenography. They offer a fertile ground to deploy location and behavior based “passive or explicit multi-player citizen games”. These future games (or “systems”) could also act as a base for dynamically negotiating rules, goals, conditions, and social accountability. We discuss current weak signals in our environment, such as serious games like World Without Oil, and the BCN Formula Game that contain elements that can be recombined and resituated as a robust infrastructure for effective democracy populated with informed citizens engaging in civil participation through new media.

“Social learning/training” based on the affordances of locative technologies and a “re-socialization” around the concepts of city and citizen could be proposed. Consider the environment itself as an agent – that is, the city would be, communicable and mutable rather than only a background. It is possible to reinvent the social space of the street as a much-needed infrastructure of expression and presence to facilitate and realize influential social relations. These emergent systems can be designed as educational frameworks for interacting and understanding converging literacies in the new environment. A new literacy and curricula are a vital to better equip people for emerging contexts that will require augmented political and social mobilization.

The need for a new educational framework is evident. However, the curriculum and implementation is up for debate.

Original Doc: A New Dialogue - Original

A New Dialogue Redux

Introduction
The central concerns of the following text focuses on addressing the cultural meanings attributable to form, and initiate a discursive dialogue with respect to the inherency of meanings which potentially reside within forms themselves.

The former instantiation of this text was written for a conference DeSForM: Design & Semantics of Form and Movement in the Netherlands which purpose is to develop a platform of products that communicate information through a dynamic language of form and movement. The question posed by the organizers was how might we set forth to design this system of symbols in a systematic and scientific manner. The meaning of form is a human production, as it is both malleable and undefined. As a cultural construct, it has the potential to consecrate meaning as well as confound it. New definitions of form semantics can be revealed through the examination of the intersection of human behavior and emerging technological discourse in the present social climes, a language of form and movement cannot be designed, but a platform in which this language can emerge through negotiation can be.

Form Has No Meaning
The capability and meaning of any form can be defined by the limits of people’s ability to imagine what it can be physically or represent spiritually or intangibly. In essence, form has no meaning; it is an invitation, a window to possible relationships which produce a myriad of meanings. Meaning resides, and is latent within us, in the relationships we perceive and cultivate in our minds and through what we negotiate with others.

What can we learn from these characteristics of forms and how can we, as designers, challenge the need for designing explicit meanings?

How can we create a new dialogue between objects and people to harness the emergent properties of meaning within the human experience?

Time Matters. Location matters. Context matters.
Form triggers multiple meanings. A gun locked safely at a hunting lodge has entirely different denotative and connotative associations than the same gun in the hands of a man in a dark alley. The sign itself, the gun and its function, within the context of alternative environments, is pollinated with probable outcomes that are associated with location and situation. Context influences interpretation of the purpose of that form, shaping the message it conveys. It is through the process of negotiating meaning between social actors, place and location, that form evokes multiple meanings, and likewise meanings can inspire multiple forms. Physical properties in differing contexts can trigger landscapes of ulterior meanings around and between people determined by their personally and culturally informed associations. Context again alters the meanings that forms and motions may trigger, influencing their social role at a given time. The introduction of new information and the mutation of old information alters associated meanings because of what is accumulated, paired and lost during the reallocations and migrations of forms in multiple contexts.

How can we enable forms to embrace this continual process of the production of meaning? Is it our objects that adapt, or do we?

Can a form change its mode of expression to fit those who are present?

How can a single meaning be maintained through multiple modes of expression in multiple contexts?

How can these unfolding dialects, migrations and morphologies of the compositionality of meaning over time be documented?

Will context be the dominant hypermedia form? Will it be the request, the curator, the aggregator and synthesizer in relation to ones identity and state, emotional, situational and physical context?

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On the slushiest day of the year, Rafael Fajardo, a young game artist and media professor walks in our Toronto office with a bright green webkins frog. What proceeded was an informal discussion about serious games.

The University of Denver (DU), where Fajardo teaches, has staked a claim in doing “good” for humanity. The digital media studies department prepares graduates “with significant experience in three areas of investigation and aptitude: design, technical, and critical. Trained to establish and foster dialogue across these areas, DMS graduates are prepared to address the entangled, technology-fueled challenges shaping contemporary experience.”

Humane Games
Rafael’s personal interests lie in a concept he calls “Humane Games;” games that are educational through play and through their making. “Socially conscience games”, which serve to articulate and address a variety of perspectives on various social, political and cultural issues. He is also underway working on Humane Games as a concept that has medical and health value. These are games that have physiological advantages, aiding therapeutic practice and patient pain aversion. Humane games are games that are good for people. It is here where the design of games is considered as a component in forming a discipline around the development of games. Game development is described on the DU School of Engineering & Computer Science Game Development Programs website as:

“the academic field focused on the creation of electronic games. The field includes interactive graphics/animation programming, fundamental computer science, game design, studio art, electronic art, narrative storytelling, and critical game studies. The field is concerned with both entertainment and serious games.”

This marks a shift in games as they move from a weaponized nature rooted in a heritage of military simulation and wargaming, to a more holistic and diverse social and cultural expression. An evolution “from sword to plowshare”; from tactical to practical; from kill to chill. In our conversation it was discussed how game developers, by in large, create games for people such as themselves; they are “audience-creators” generally male, young and Anglo. Thus, the industry having been flooded with a spectrum of competitive, action and strategy driven games has come to a level of saturation, and is showing signs of waning in popularity. Rafael in his P4 initiative looks to enable the diversification of voices creating games, and tools to assist in making them mark entry points to relieve saturation and restore integrity to the medium.

Design is all about relationships. Games deal with contexts, decisions and outcomes; they are in effect a medium of fluid and dynamic relationships. Rafael asks in his work, “What are the relationships we wish to curate when designing games?” Could they be a form of editorial media for social and cultural critique and art? To find out he takes the complexity of serious issues and simmers them to an interactive “reduction” that one can engage and embody. Digital Games are a relatively young media, and the concept of games as social critic, action, or as a literary object is even more new. Games like Pax Warrior and Darfur is Dying are cause driven artifacts, suitable and viral pickets in an age of internet ubiquity. Games are also a medium of attention, which is all he asks us to pay.

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