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?

Meaning and Functionality

Functionality affords meaning through the use of an object. Meaning is cultivated through experience, not by what the thing is supposed to be. Through the process of doing, understanding and participating with a given form, a sense of meaning is developed. Emerging forms that possess processing and communicative capabilities add a new layer to form. It makes the form variable and responsive. Forms were formerly limited by their physical capabilities, and to the imagination of those who encounter them. However, once they are enabled, and networked, they will have a new breadth of roles, social relationships and possible meanings that are physically bound to place, yet extend and include that which is beyond place borders.

How can these new roles and relationships be felt, visualized and animated through form and motion?

Things enable behaviors, and behaviors find themselves eventually as forms. All of the forms of our built environment are signifiers of behaviors that bind beneficial material and immaterial relationships.

There are levels of meaning that satisfy multiple levels of self, such as our immediate physical, mental and spiritual needs. These levels of meaning can be realized and attained through interfacing with a solitary form. This can be observed in the specialized context of jail, as prisoners draw on a restrictive palette of materials and forms, shaping a wide selection of objects that perform various functions and hold widely different values [Angelo] Through the reshaping of one form, prisoners can satisfy different levels of human needs. The toothbrush can be multiple things at once. At a given time it can be a shiv , a tool for cleaning teeth, or a carved piece of art.

It is our motivations that curate the relationships we engage in to trigger revelations of what things can be, and what meanings those relationships bring. We perceive context and conditions that we are participants within, and we forge our own meanings; in turn we can contribute this meaning in a shared dialogue to negotiate normative ones.

What can we learn from this perceptive ability of people and the potentiality of form?

How can objects be sensitive to our goals? Can they be literate to our actions? How can we better equip them to help us achieve?

Will a language of form and movement inevitably produce a Universal Homogenous dialect, or alternatively will a heterogeneous explosion of dialects evolve?

Can contextual mapping and meaning mapping over time be achieved to form a living document capturing a language unfolding in real time?

Form Collapses Possibility
Forms alone do not collapse possibility, but the essentialist framing of forms that associate a sole meaning to a form neuter ones perception to imagine what the form can do or be. Forms will be a platform of dialogue: they will be simultaneously the substrate of a question or goal, the expression of a possible answer, and a passport to exploration of possibility.

Kevin Kelly of Wired has been developing a blog “Street Use”[Kelly] about how objects are repurposed to fit specific needs of people. The blog exhibits fryer baskets that are made into antennae, and regular pick-up trucks that are re-appropriated as highly reinforced armed assault vehicles in Iraq. These interventions are a testament to not only possibility inherent in forms, but also to the multiple potentials people see in them as a way to facilitate their goals. The idea of forms having multiple meanings can be substantiated by the fact that meaning is emergent. This is why we cannot design semantics in a systematic and scientific way, for they are individually variable, as well as culturally and socially formed. The failure of Esperanto and the success of Creole and Pidgin languages [Diamond] illustrate this vividly.

Have we considered how this inherent human characteristic of emergence can be harnessed, socially and individually through forms that are literate of human intent?

“Real Time Graz”[Ratti] is a project where GPS mapping of cell phone trajectories is used to illustrate the nomadic portrait of people in the city; this information describes in a rather low resolution how people use space. These traces of flow are then used to inform the emerging shape of the city to complement how space is actually used. “The BCN Formula Game” [Hubers] has taken this further by developing software that generates building proposals for Barcelona in real time through modeling software that creates structures in response to flows of people, traffic and commercial activities.

How can our traces influence the language of form and movement to best-fit context and particular actors in real time?

In general, the most valid current definitions of forms, which are the ones most widely and currently understood, are the ones that are commonly applied day to day. How can we allow for these definitions to evolve and be continually negotiated? The Association of Robotic Architecture & the Bureau of Responsive Architecture work together to develop responsive architectures that adapt to changing functions as well as environmental conditions. These architectures have fluid form/function relationships. On an object level Dynamic Textures has developed the idea of a coffee cup made of a thermally sensitive polymer that sprouts spikes on the exterior if the content of the cup exceeds a safe temperature. [Tsu] The future may depend on building upon existing senses and semiotics as they have evolved over time. We can devise new modes of communication through form based on our native capabilities of recognition, understanding and sharing.

It will take time to learn to “read” newly emerging responsive architectures and objects as innately as we respond to natural events. Only after we have interfaced with them on an ongoing basis will we be able to effortlessly understand them. For example, being able to understand the state of the internal social dynamics of a building by observing its shape from down the street, or recognizing the state of the contents of a container by its visual attitude from across the room at a glance. It will take time and communication between people to form a consensus of a shared meaning associated with the expression of animate forms; however, we also need to allow for change, and polysemous meanings in this process.

Can our signs become deeper participants and documenters of this process?

We are all producers of meaning; form triggers these meanings or the production of new ones, but holds no inherent meaning itself. Objects or produced forms are codified, commoditized beliefs, intent and behaviors. However, there is a big difference between what an object can do, and what an object is meant to do. Moreover, there is a difference between what an object is supposed to mean and the meaning that people attribute to it. Meaning is myth. The desire to understand, unfold, know and create unique perspectives has been overshadowed by the traditional way of perceiving forms as hyperlinks to a normative known. By diverting philosophical meaning and understanding to that which is static and consumable we destroy whole landscapes of unique expansions on the ‘meaning’ of anything.

Disruptions such as Geocaching, context aware gaming and location based technologies alter the production and perception of meanings in a space as well as the forms within. Context aware games like Pacmanhattan [Bloomberg] transform the streets of New York into a dual virtual physical Pacman playspace. In Japan the game Mogi [Tester] requires players to discover hidden virtual items; these experiential properties transform the perception and the meaning of what that space is. Shifting meaning can be achieved by something as simple as a laptop in a park: the park then becomes a studio. A personal phone transforms whatever space it is in into a bank, a mailbox, a warzone, a voting booth or a gamespace. Meaning is brought to places and objects by people as we encounter them, and the properties of these spaces and objects afford the kind of meaning that may be manufactured.

Platform For Emergence – Users Sketching Experiences
By providing the conditions and tools within objects themselves we can create an open platform for naturally unfolding semantics. If we are to create a language of form and movement, then its core elements should embrace the emergent nature of meaning.

Embracing emergence requires an object to have a recognition and memory of what happens around them, building a history or narrative of change. In addition to expressive capabilities and the ability to build on the past, these forms should have the plasticity to allow transformation in all of its capabilities to adapt to people in the present. A form will be able to observe the world around it, but human participation with it will continually re-define what it is, to re-contextualize the purpose of its form, expanding the experiences it may elicit. These forms should be aware of this process of emergent meaning if they are to be deeper participants of social practice. The forms that comprise our objects and spaces are igniting a new dialogue when they explicitly become a form of media and interface. Building a living framework of consideration, by engaging in an inquiry around the proprieties and impact of such a platform of dialogue will be helpful in determining which capabilities are most necessary.

As we create enabled and communicative forms that comprise our objects and spaces, we will require an equal consideration of both the digital and the physical aspects. The new method should consider relationships that are happening between things and people in spaces. The attention and sensitivity we prescribe to physical representation and expression of associated meaning has to be directly proportional to that which we devote to the sensing, processing, understanding, storing and sharing in the ecology of meaning surrounding it. This language will enable a new spectrum of authoring and expression of meaning. The following are characteristics of expressive forms that should be considered:

• Awareness and Memory
• Expression and Literacy
• Transformation: an element that is pervasive in all the others

Awareness and Memory
We leave traces of ourselves behind as every moment passes. Streams of gestures, wafts of pheromones, a wake of heat, a dynamic gait emanating a chorus of continuous audio. This species of media is the most valuable; it is the unfolding map of ones self. When these individual maps are read on a larger scale it is the Map of Us, it is the combined interactions and behaviors of communities of people that illustrate underpinning motivations, intents, and shared meanings. Objects, equipped with the culmination of several maturing and emerging technologies, including sensing technologies, have the potential to seek the meanings of our traces, and observe their composition and morphology over time. This raises the opportunity for objects to be cartographers of experience, to be moment hunters and stenographers, seekers of the zeitgeist of place.

Our immaterial traces are codified in an array of manifestations. Objects can be seen as traces of beneficial behaviors. Architecture and civic spaces are traces of social formations. As you read this sentence you are encountering traces of thoughts, codified in type. The sensory perception capability of things is directly proportional to its ability to read not only the physical but also the invisible relationships that sculpt our environment. Most of today’s objects and spaces are blind, deaf and mute, however, scores of new capabilities are migrating to the shores and guts of products, and are being woven into the very fabric of architecture. It’s not about the objects or spaces themselves, but of them as images, products of what happens in-between. They will increasingly become a form of socio-cultural barometers that aid in the flows in ways that they have never before.

The shared memory of this network will be as beneficial and as epic as the impact of the World Wide Web. It will be a living documentation of our memetic propagation, and our behavior in the physical environment, and its resulting effect on the shaping of the environment itself.

How can we enable a co-evolution and interplay between our personal traces, and objects and spaces?

How will our “pasts” converse with, and enhance, our present experience?

How will our present physical, situational and emotional context contribute to what is displaying?

Expression And Literacy

Blogs such as Information Aesthetics and We Make Money Not Art [Debatty] successfully showcase emerging practices and developments in object expression including and form and movement showcased from sources as varied as basements, art galleries, and university laboratories. The projects are tagged and tracked to reveal how memes catch on and how methods evolve.

What if the projects, the Objects themselves circulate and share these developments?

What can we learn from heraldry, patina and natural expression, such as a ripening fruit, as a pre-existing historical or natural form of communication?

Communication between objects will, in the beginning, work in chorus to combine sensor capabilities, processing power, storage, expressions, behaviors, and share memories, to understand and render responses to meaning. Our meanings will be derived from our behaviors in context, read by objects, which become a responsive porous vessel, a new form of media. They are becoming dynamic content.

This language of form and movement has been around forever. Throughout the course of a day we may employ about a thousand words, however, we express 30,000 facial expressions, and 5,000 hand and bodily gestures [Danesi]. Most of our communication happens through our visual interpretation of form and movement. We can “read” clouds, water and the landscapes of rock and of flesh. Undoubtedly, if we were to propose a semantic framework for form and movement, we should employ the wealth of experience in our literacy of displayed behavior.

Expressive capabilities are already migrating from screens to the surfaces and movements of objects for public use. Such is the case with Ambient Devices [2], a Massachusetts based startup, pioneered by graduates of the MIT media lab. Their products enable data from the internet to be translated into personally programmed color and movements in forms such as The Orb, which can display stock information, weather or any other information from the Ambient Information Network. The Inflating USB key [Komissarov] alters its size in relation to how much data is stored on it. Email erosion [Ham; Muilenberg] is a more art centric piece that aims to display relationships that are usually invisible. EmailErosion is a project that uses a water-soluble block as a display; incoming emails cause flows of water to alter the form of the block in proportion to the flows of email. Alternatively, the broadband cord project [Weiser; Seely Brown] displays data packet flows in physical space through servos that shake the cord in accordance to Internet activity. These projects are examples of how this language is alive and its evolution underway.

Due to the emergent properties of meaning we cannot design semantics in a systematic and scientific way, for they are individually variable, culturally and socially formed. Instead, we should provide the conditions and tools that create a platform for semantics to unfold naturally, because people already shape form and produce meaning around them continually. If an enhanced dialogue with the environment is to evolve through a language of form and movement, then it will be sensitive and responsive to context and identities of people in the transformative process of meaning making.

How can we begin to bring into motion a platform to allow the public to assist in the creation and evolution of this language?

Enabling characteristics that thrive off of the morphology of meaning, rather than being threatened by it, turns a very difficult problem into an opportunity. This approach includes and complements the ongoing development of forms that communicate. The future of design is not in form or movement, color or texture, but in the temporal curation of relationships within changing landscape of social practice.

Tim O’Reilly said that Web2.0 applications change with use, the more people use them the better they get. This isn’t merely accounting for the threshold of viability that is expressed in how social software thrives off of social activity. People additionally change the software through using it. This happens because web behavior is recorded and responded to by developers engaged in a perpetual beta, and users themselves contribute to API’s and SDK’s adding value and functionality to the scripts.

Products and spaces too are in perpetual beta, however the climate of behavior that surrounds then is currently not recordable outside of labs and basement studios. The Nintendo Wii is a weak signal that points toward such products due to its ability to identify and respond to motion, that however is only one dimension. A stronger signal is Bungie Studios, Halo creator and Microsoft affiliated game laboratory which simultaneously observes many human dimensions to improve the user experience associated with gameplay. It is foreseeable that products will have the capability to house “Bungies” in their shells. Users will one day sketch future experiences, products, services and spaces through their mere interaction with them. A future Google result for Sketching User Experiences may return – Did you mean: Users sketching experiences?

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.

“Can Games Handle Heavy Content?”
In finding the answer(s) to this question, which has defined his research and practice, he sets out to hear stories and enables people to express these stories in forms they never thought they could. The first project is Crosser*, a story about “Carlos Moreno, a clean cut hardworking man looking for a good future.” The game was born south of the US/Mexico border, from IBM “abandonware”, consisting of rejected computers and material, whatever his team could get there hands on. Of interest is the building of this game; where the waste of the “developed world” is transformed by the “underdeveloped world” at a critical junction, the border that separates and binds these two worlds. The team was a juxtaposition of Denver academics and underrepresented youth living near the Mexico-USA border. In Crosser, Rafael has included the process and context of creation as a critical object.

The objective is to cross the US/Mexico border in the face of a blitzkrieg of obstacles. The glitchy lag timed play milieu of a pastiche techno-creation process itself becomes a social, political and cultural comment. Positioning the crosser, an (il)legal alien as the protagonist or hero also adds to the work’s commentary, reversing the zeitgeist belief of crossers being criminal. Rafael, later communicated his discomfort in the one sidedness of the work, and set out to balance the scale.

La Migra was an addition to, and an alternate component of, Crosser. They are in fact two levels, or dimensions of the same game. LaMigra created a dialogical tension between the works, being a game composed of the perspective of the border police. The purpose of the works is to highlight the relationship and realizations that occur at the intersection of, in the tension between the two games, in the dual nature of the content and its emphasis. Further the graphical treatment, the GUI is sampled from arguably the best games of all time, Frogger and Space Invaders. The appropriation of this form of representation highlights that even lo-fi graphics can communicate heavy issues, as well as, emphasizing through contrast the light nature of purely entertainment driven industrially produced games.

It is intended and anticipated, that through varied game authoring tools and a diverse chorus of creation, the spectrum of stories being told and potentially the nature of conversations about the past present and future that occur within games and play media will expand.

Initial thoughts: 

Relational Representation
I attended a Digital Holography and 3d Visualization pilot course this year. It was a joint collaboration between the Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Toronto. There were two professors, one from the optics engineering department and one from Holography department. They taught the principles of light, as well as the possibilities and affordances of holography as a medium of expression. The students were already split into Artists and Scientists. And this distinction was strengthened through the assignment of alternate deliverables, different materials and expectations. The course was supposed to be a ground in which to synthesize these camps, to learn from each other. However we spoke different languages, had different intents, and different ideas about what was salient.

If you’re an engineer or computer science student at the DU you may find yourself in a life drawing class in the art department, similar to the situation above. In his talk, Rafael emphasized the variety of skills it takes to create games. “You have to be good at creating visual experiences, creating experiential experiences as well as coding.” Rarely do you find polymaths that are fluent in all of these skills, for each one of the above fans out into a series of sub skills and capabilities that take years to develop, and their all taught separately. Not always in the same school.

Game Development as a discipline calls for the convergence of many academic fields, however may serve to do much more than “establish and foster dialogue across these areas” for the purpose of developing games. Areas such Art, Design, Literary Arts, Critical theory, Engineering and Computer Science are all part of the knowledge mosaic that makes for a good game. After experiencing first hand the dilemma of disciplinary difference, I wonder if games have potential to synthesize these alternative thinking models in a space that absorbs, samples and synthesizes jargon, tables, graphs, that describe dynamics and relationships. Games as a medium could serve as an arena to develop and evolve a new system of symbolic representation that can build bridges between alternative systems of disciplinary and cultural symbolic representation. Can games present Opportunities for semantic conflict resolution?

Will there be Regional and individual game representational dialects? And will future games allow for the plasticity to change in relation to peoples representational needs while retaining the deep structures of meaning intended by the game developers?

Action Games?
During the question period at the end of Fajardo evening presentation a fellow from the audience asked, “Where is the action, the real world resolution, in the end it’s just a game?” This question highlights only the infancy of games as critique, not their inability to contribute meaningfully to political or social change. This is an area Rafael expresses he had intended his games to eventually address. But for now its one step at a time, it’s about small victories.

This question did however point toward a perceived limit of games that may be obsolesced in years to come. As technologies become increasingly “human literate” tracking and recording the meaning of position, movement, and various transactions of people in depth I wonder if there is an intrinsic promise in haptic interfaces and locative media. Games have inhabited all forms of media dead or alive. One of the first things we do with new media is play with it, or kill with it, but technology by its very nature is neutral. It is shaped by our desires, our needs and our wants.

Locative technologies could easily record our trajectories through places and our actions in them, in a sense they and others, such as situational awareness and haptics may become a form of contextual and behavioral stenography. They will be a fertile ground in which to deploy location/behavior based passive or explicit multiplayer citizen games. Our data could be easily correlated with goal sets, point systems and envisioned victory conditions. These future games could also be grounds in which to dynamically negotiate rules goals and conditions, social responsibility and accountability and may quantify more readily that which was formerly unrecordable and qualitative. “You can be dead serious in your aims but playful in getting there“

Game Borne Products?
Game borne products are not about merchandising to support game narratives but emergent products born from human interaction and experiences in game. They begin as data, intangible in game behavior or custom which has the potential to be expressed as matter. Games, like 3d CAD and simulation software in the past could be appropriated to negotiate and author future products and services culturally before we chose to appoint energy and resources to their material production. Could we develop Experience and play driven micro production on a mass scale?

Engineering creations are certified mathematically through simulation and modeling, surgeons and pilots are certified through in game hours and examination. Can game-born products and services creations be validated experientially, and be translated into future real world products. Could in game prototyping, social evaluation or “massively authored value creation” be a staple component of near future manufacturing processes? As these interactive media technologies, desktop and just-in-time manufacturing practices mature, the speed at which we may move from concept to percept, or conversation to product shortens.

Fajardo’s next project is critical toys, think webkins meets Jane Jacobs meets Paulo Fiere. But each toy he has created thus far hail from his in-game dialogues, they sample from and are instantiations of the representational models he and his teams negotiated in the making of them.

There is no print button in games.

Yet.