We Rep Ideas

Notes to the next cup.

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People tinker, they build, remix, they repurpose, reverse and perverse engineer.  They crack open the housing. Look under the hood. They view the source. We have always made things, and have been defined by what we make and how it was made. Today the ‘refresh rate’ of the majority of physical objects is in line with the just-in-time business processes responsible for the economic dance that synchronizes and coordinates time, resources, design, engineering, manufacturing and distribution. Emerging manufacturing technologies suggest that much of what we will produce materially in the future will be printed by mix of industrial and domestic multi-material fabricators and recyclers. Widespread adoption of these processes shortens lead times, speeding up manufacturing processes and thus the “flow of objects”. Begging a new question around why should something come to be? Is hyper-disposability and reproduction of the same matter a sustainable idea?   How might “just in time objects”, or a service-like time-share in a “pattern of matter” change expectations and experiences?

Just as the web moved from static websites to “feeds and flows” objects too are moving from static things to service driven production by newly minted ‘manufacturing- as-service’ practices. We may begin to see ‘things’ as instantiations of responsive and relational system of services, feeds and flows. As objects become considered information, they become more and more malleable, subject to change, edits, mixes and blends. Simultaneously giving birth to a new breed of unconventional value propositions and business opportunities. Could what Google did for information, be done with matter? Today’s adaptive and flexible digital manufacturing technologies and production processes lend themselves to the kind of ‘experience data’ varieties, and flow of designs stemming from an interplay of experience sampling infrastructure, user-annotation and user-guided design. Objects can become passports to experience and feedback, a platform for citizen consultants to sketch dream products and interactions. Foraging a direct interface between people and organizations.
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A new generation of mobile augmented reality games are gracing handhelds. Above is the first adult only one of its kind from Japan. For more on this check out ARToolkit. Rape aesthetic aside, I can see this influencing new forms of casual retail games revolving around “live packaging.”

Google Candy: Information Society Information economy Experience economy Network Society Global Village Technopoles Technocracy The Digital City Semantic Place Semantic Web Relational Spaces Responsive Architecture Cybertecture Ubicomp Ambient Intelligence Metaverses MMORPGs Computational Perception                   The Singularity Automedia ‘Everyware’ Robotic-user-interface Utility Fog Spimes Blogjects Blobjects Physical Avatars Fablab Object-Hyperlinking Blooks          Things That Think Dynamic Physical Rendering Fabjects Arphids Semacode Device Art Biots Claytronics ‘Networth’ Ambient Devices            Molecular Manufacturing Mobile Commerce Foglets from-bit-to-it

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The infusion of computation and communications into everyday life has synthesized global economy, nation states, organizations, cities, neighborhoods, architecture, down to lowly everyday objects into informatic and computational terms, in ‘soft’ terms.  In the writings of Jacobs, Castells, Latour, Gershenfeld, Mitchell, Kurzweil, and Hayles we see that this theme has evolved from science fiction techno fetish, to focused interdisciplinary academic study, to commercial pursuit. From dream, to meme, to theme.

Anew vocabulary is enabling us to discuss and negotiate these concepts that reveal a new territory between the world of bits and the world of atoms. The neologisms and statistically improbable phases in the tag cloud above offer a glimpse of how traditional concepts are being renovated as we move from architecture to responsive and relational space, or from objects to fabjects. Objects are a material language that enables us to externalize ideologies, values, beliefs and manage time and behavior. In this vein, they could be considered a way of preserving and codifying habit or ritual, a tangible system of knowledge management and well as a medium of personal and collective exploration. Similarly, language, as seen above, allows us to sketch and prototype abstract thoughts and ideas through words. Something is happening, and it is clearly being reflected linguistically, artistically, academically, and commercially. Objects are becoming as malleable as software, code and language itself.

Dr. J. Storrs Hall of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing expands this notion further in his talk ‘Nanotechnology: As Hardware Becomes Software’

‘Designing a microprocessor has more in common with programming than it does with designing a steam engine. Similar tools—specification languages, simulators, rule checkers, profilers—and a similar level of complexity dominate over the distinction between matter and bits as the output.’

“Someday soon, we could download hardware from the Net just like we download software today.” predicts James C. Ellenbogen of Mitre Corp., a Pentagon-funded research center. Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author and futurist, suggests that things are becoming more informational than material; for increasingly they begin as information and end as information. Physical object-hood, it seems, is a mere phase state in the evolutionary streams the informational concept lifecycle. The softness of data and information, its potential and applications are more valuable than hard objects, or so suggests the emerging consensus.

The ‘softening’ of ‘things’, which have newfound structural and representational variability, now have a kind of flexability and dynamism that matches in pace the ‘everyday’ genesis and processing of human conventions within social systems of meanings and means. Sometimes the means are not always available for new goals to be met. In a sense these ‘soft things’ signify exploration for the eventual standardization of ‘fluid means’ for ‘openly determinable results’ that may potentially re-symbolize our understanding of object-hood. This is not an arbitrary assertion intending to commit ontological anarchy, but a descriptive account of real world developments in how material culture and context is produced, engaged with, and understood.

How might our habits and rituals change, be amplified or obsolesced?
In what ways might this new species of things reflect our values, facilitate in new ways the realization of our goals, motivations, desires?

A fellow colleague once shared with me a life changing moment he had in his first year of university. He reveled in the idea that humans had built our environment – that it was all considered in its own way, shaped. Spoons, cups, shirts, sidewalks, buildings – all made by people. In times when we see our hardware increasingly behave like software, we will undoubtedly ask “What informs the morphology and genesis of things?” Who “programmed” this? What shaped this? Why is this like this? Will the forms that constitute our objects reflect the kind flexibility that evolving languages exhibit, or will they inherit traditional qualities of proprietary material goods? Can the ‘negotiation of things” begin to resemble a collective conversation?

O’Rielly’s Web 2.0 ‘meme map’ communicates some regularities of next generation software that may prove useful and relevant sampling of characteristics.  The Web 2.0 core competencies for the purposes of this paper are, Services not packaged software, Architecture of participation, Remixable data source and data transformations, software above the level of a single device, and harnessing collective intelligence. Concepts that relate to these qualities are hackability, right to remix, perpetual beta, and ‘software gets better the more people use it.’ The result is the strategic positioning of the ‘web-as-platform’ for emergence and innovation. As object functions and forms become more soft and sensory, we may see the control of their variations and functions become transformable as object use becomes a sketching and programming platform. Examples of such software are Google , Youtube, Amazon and Facebook. In the near future the examples of organizations that produce hard goods like P&G, IKEA and General Electric may begin to populate this list, Philips the creator of Shapeways already has.

The emergent nature of human negotiation of meaning differs greatly in control and interests from the practices of existing business processes surrounding the production of commercial products. Yet, working models exist and successes have been had in the unique business models of web2.0 software-as-service start-ups that fuse qualities of each of these contrasting practices. These models are becoming more and more relevant as objects adopt increasingly “soft” qualities [Hall, Ellenbogen, Sterling]. New models that can create value through in-context, user experience based design sketching of real world objects will become important in years to come. Especially as ‘millennials’ grow to expect their hardware to be as responsive and malleable as their childhood software. These users have no qualms about privacy, and wouldn’t be surprising if simple object use flipped into a form of use performance that pays for the object itself.

stillborn-furniture

What dilemmas can we foresee at the outset when developing a system that acquires and communicates meaning through gesture, movement and morphology? By asking questions we invite ourselves into an exploration into theories of meaning, along with the relationships people inherit and build around objects and spaces through experience. Quite a networked onion really.

The notion forwarded by the conference organizers, that we can design semantics alone, in a ‘systematic and scientific way’, ignores the emergent, natural relationships that occur in the dynamic between human experience and the material world where meaning is cultivated.

“The symbol is not the sign that veils something everybody knows. Such is not its significance: on the contrary, it represents an attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs entirely to the domain of the unknown or something that is yet to be. Imagination reveals to us, in the form of a more or less striking analogy, what is in the process of becoming. If we reduce this by analysis to something else universally known, we destroy the authentic value of the symbol; but to attribute hermeneutic significance to it conforms to its value and its meaning.” (Jung, 1953)

If meaning resides, and is latent in, possible relationships we may form, then the dominant emphasis on the artifact is insufficient. Rather, our attention belongs to the relationships and experiential processes that exist ‘in-between’. We need to move away from the notion of considering our objects and spaces as absolute reified things, instead seeing them as tools that afford potential roles and relationships. This step transforms the criteria by which we create, use and understand our objects. Such an outlook on our material world opens ‘things’ up to further interpretation and negotiation of ‘what they can be’, which is as malleable and dynamic as our intentions, desires and goals.

“In fact it can be asserted in the history of philosophy that, for example, the are no things, only properties or relations” (Bochenski)

As a cultural construct, the form of an artifact has the potential to both consecrate meaning, and to confound it. In essence, form has no meaning. (Thomas, 2006) Meaning is cultivated through the relationships that arise between the properties of things and the goals of people. (RH +Mc) Form is an invitation, a window to possible experiences which can give rise to a myriad of meanings. Events and actions, following no common rules, clarify temporary instances of meaning in the act of experience. The human production and attribution of meaning to objects and spaces can be seen as an untapped renewable resource. The spectrum of user-forged relationships offers an intangible inventory that can be tangibly expressed through the medium of things.

‘The meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, e.g. in perception, thought and decision-making.’(Block)

Block asserts in this statement that the meaning of any-thing or non-thing is the life it lives in the lives of people. Meanings of things are malleable human constructions. It could be said then, with certainty, that meaning is emergent. An attempt to affix meaning to form neuters ones perception to see what it can do or be. A thing is as much a question, as it is a material solution to a given need or want to achieve something. The loss of this dialogue is essentially what is at stake.

Conventionally forms are inanimate participants in the effort to reify and manage meaning. [Graves-Brown] As they continually become recognizable references for former experiences where meaning was formed and transformed. Here artifacts, interfaces included, have a role in the production, preservation, recall and engagement with meaning. As differing worldviews, values, metal models and motivations evolve, they frame existing structures of meaning in different ways through the creation and socialization of things.

IED Cellphone

The fear is that the semantic tyranny of industrial age design of artifacts will be carried over into a new class of objects that offer a new range of affordances. People, seduced by the surface magic of black box material culture often do not participate in the vision of things, their purpose, their role, and their possibility. [Latour] The stealth danger is deploying technologies and products like a form of non-democratic legislation. Individuals who live in materialist cultures are deeply effected when products, services and technologies come to define patterns of social life and order. In the domain of every day experience, ‘live’ moments become a form of real estate. People then are continually faced with the prescription and ingestion of the prefabricated artificial experiences, presented as social constructions of what is, and what should be, without explicit opportunities or access to contribute in a meaningful way.

How then can we explore and prescribe the criteria of systems that are based on the way in which meaning is produced, perceived, transferred, preserved and obsolesced in situ. Can we design into objects the affordances and techniques to identify what humans attend to, choices they make, what behaviors and habits are being born. By considering the relationship of form to meaning while engaging in a critical and open-minded conversation about people as producers and vessels of meaning, we can assemble a deeper understanding, one that will inform the development of new species of form-as-interface, embedded in, and inseparable from, a dynamic “ecology of means and meaning”.

A successful language of form and movement cannot be designed. What is possible is the design of s platform in which user-based formal design, semantics and functions can emerge through negotiation.

Such a debate about the inherency of meaning in form could potentially overturn how we produce, interact with, and communicate our relationships with form. People continually contribute to objects through use and “misuse”. We may, as user-creators, begin to enrich product, service and environment interactions and make them much more intimately engaged in people’s everyday lives. Form-as-interface, to manufacturing-as-service, may reveal a whole new landscape of habiture that organizations did not know their existing things/products satisfy. Conversely, it may also reveal whole new platforms, product categories and territories that may contribute to the creation of new behaviors, habits and rituals. We may succeed in democratizing authorship of product functionality, beyond a small privileged priesthood of creators.

What are the properties and dynamics of the process of social emergence of meaning? And how then can we design in, from, and through this process?

Through discussing a series of  weak signals we can begin to describe a system of behavior-enabling, experience-driven material production that is both empathetic and inclusive. A second objective is to identify new market opportunities associated with emerging technologies along with processes and models.

INTRODUCTION

How is it that we truly know the world?

What is the true nature of things?

Science tells us that the true nature of things lies beneath the surface. If we look upon a chair and ask, what is that, the common answer would be, but of course – a chair. And who would deny this? It is after all what we have learned.

A chair is not a chair however. Beyond the surface of the chair are a whole series of phenomena that are invisible to the “naked” eye. The chair is actually made up of atoms, tiny particles that are the building blocks for everything. A desk, a chair, even humans are made up of atoms. And atoms themselves are made up of even smaller subatomic particles.

Science and the scientific pursuit have proven this to us through instruments that measure, and through experimentation. The scanning tunneling microscope used for observing atoms, for example, presents us with a reality that is objective and rational. Or so it seems.

But is this really how we know the world?

Knowing seems to be indicative of a deeper visceral engagement with the world. One that is mediated through the senses and understood only after repeated sensory impressions.

Experience is the mother of all invention.

Reality is not objective and rational. Rather it is a subjective experience dependant on the one doing the perceiving. And it is precisely this dependency that has given birth not only to the apparatus for sensing, but also to that which the senses pick up. There is a certain mutuality or reciprocity to the phenomenal world in the way that acts of expression and perception form mutually co-dependant relationships. If the bee cannot smell the pollen what good is it to the pollen producing plant? Thus, our perceptual ways of knowing are tethered to the world itself, intimately weaved, and not separate from it.

Science and technology however have distanced themselves from these corporeal ways of knowing preferring instead a rational and objective outlook. And has as a result of these extensions created a gap between nature and us. Between the mind, and the body.

Take for example, the term “naked eye” as it is used above. As if the eye that is naked is insufficient without the prosthesis of scientific technology. The assumption itself that the eye is naked to begin with is skewed. These assumptions, that have in essence made their way into a common language suggests a deeply engrained prejudice that displaces the senses from their natural ability to pick up what is given, and instead suggests that the true nature of things somehow lie beneath all appearances. This way of thinking has not only displaced the senses from their inherent right to know, but has distanced us from what I would call proper ways of thinking about the world and our place in it, by privileging a rational techno-scientific outlook over one grounded in the bodies corporeal ways of knowing.

I would like to close that gap and reclaim the rightful place of the Sensus Communis as an intelligent and rational faculty that can, and should inform our forages into technological and scientific pursuits.

Over the past several years I have been deeply engaged with a body of work that advocates for the inclusion of the human senses into a common practice. One that states that the senses are the foundational support for everything we experience and for everything that we create as a result of those experiences. As such, the senses are something we should be paying more attention to, and giving them their due credit.

In consideration of the many facets of multi-sensorial intelligence, this paper will briefly touch on three aspects I think are important in bringing to bear the relevance and significance of a return to the Sensus Communis.

FOOTNOTE: “Sensus Communis”

Aristotle postulated a central faculty capable of uniting all the senses, synthesizing what each sense picked up to form a coherent whole in the mind. He called this the “Sensus Communis”.

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PREAMBLE:

Once upon a time not long ago – when people whore tag jammers and rendered life on the low – when laws were stern and justice stood – and kids were misbehaving like they aught to should – There lived a little toy who was mislead – by another little toy and this is what he said: Me and you kid we’re gonna craft some fame – posting up drama while tagging his name. They hit some spots – fame came with ease – but one couldn’t stop it’s like he has a disease…

-Adapted from Children’s Story By Slick Rick 

The  scenario to follow is a “day in the life of” story about a Graffiti Writer overcoming and subverting what we might call “writers block”: the combined chilling effects of materials prohibition, pervasive surveillance technologies, inaccessible mediums, shrinking spaces for expression (aka habitat destruction) and the inattention of fragmented audiences lost in an over mediated fog of advertising. How does the artist overcome and adapt?

Along with the help of a growing creative insurgency made up of home grown hactivists, moonshiners, code breakers, trackers and map makers; Graffiti Writers do their best to bypass the barriers standing in between them and their pursuits of mediated presence, dialogue and fame. What is the future Graffiti  experience? Where does it take place?

Le Confiture (The Jam) takes place “once upon a time” several decades after the disappearance of graffiti, as we know it today. Technological progress, privatization and public paranoia has forced Graffiti Culture out of its more familiar and tangible surroundings- causing its migration towards freshly augmented realities and virtual worlds that present themselves as blank canvases (Habitats) to express on and speak from. Within this new context, Graffiti lives on.

Unfortunately, many of these augmented realities and virtual spaces apply and enforce the same laws, codes of conduct, and logics that squeezed Graffiti from its original habitats. Within this new paradigm, security, cost of production, bandwidth, connection speeds, traffic volume and membership agreements frequently determine the artist’s potential for self-actualization. Which often finds it-self half rendered and lagging. Further adaptation is required. How does one make their mark within this plural context?

As method to this madness, graffiti artists rely more heavily on soft-tools and semi-autonomous agents, also know as “toy soldiers”. These agents are designed and programmed to help the artist achieve and maintain a plural-all city- digital graffiti presence, now necessary within the complex mixture of overlapping worlds. These agents are, all at once, collaborators, students, and works of art; always evolving in style, sketching themselves out, questioning, collecting, learning from, and commenting on, the landscapes and experiences that surround them. Graffiti writers are their “imaginations”, temporary masters, and mentors guiding their actions, teaching and training them towards achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. What is the nature of this collaborative relationship? What is gained and what is lost? What is the role of imagination in a world of automation?

Within this highly mediated theatre known as Dataspace, the Graffiti Writer and his agents are just one in a billion actors fighting for space, bandwidth and attention on a massively multiplayer mixed reality stage; Performing for an always on and lurking audience inhabited by people places and things. Graffiti is the anomaly always acting up to be seen. What does this mean?

Graffiti has  evolved; writers embrace performance, playing more seriously with time-context-medium, and most importantly message. Graffiti shouts out at you; knowing it will be seen, heard, captured, broken apart, re-assembled and transmediated back into- and across other worlds, contexts- spaces and times by the all seeing, all appropriating audience.   

LE CONFITURE is a scenario-based exploration of expression, identity, learning and collaboration within a futuristic and intentionally dystopic – ubiquitous computing landscape otherwise known as Dataspace. The scenario introduces and projects existing political, socio-cultural, technological, and economic signals into a panoptic world inhabited by yet another generation of Graffiti artists and their culture jamming  hacktivist agents. The narrative explores their motives, logics, values and experiences as they struggle to make their mark within a feudal and over saturated attention economy controlled by pervasive and chilling DRM infrastructures, advanced materials prohibition, and networked surveillance. Furthermore, the scenario explores the context of multiple networked identities, master-mentor and actor-author-audience dynamics, and how new forms of digital media literacy might emerge within a transmediated (Plural) landscape where even the subtlest forms of temporary presence and participation can guarantee new and unimagined forms of permanence, fame and legacy.

 Keywords

Graffiti 2.OH!, Remix Culture, Prohibition, Digital Rights, Collaboration, Ubiquitous Computing, Dataspace, Transmediation New-Media, Expression, Virtual Identity, Surveillance, Telepresence, Trespass, Plurality, Asymmetric, Literacy, Attention Economy, Feudalism, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, Mapping, RFID, 

Scenario: Saw-sees

My name is John Hammond and I can do almost anything you can imagine with wood. Ive spent the last thirty years building cabinets in my spare time, and mine are as good as any. Ivory inlays for days.

I’m considered a master.

I’m Xavier Borden, I’m an industrial poet and musician. I make kinetic sculptures that have a dual purpose as instruments. I transform, reform and perform, interact or die.

I’m considered an eccentric.

My friends call me Sady, I take consumer electronics, tools and vintage computers and build violent robots that’ll eat your kitsch installations.

I’m considered an artist

Call me John, Xavier or Sady, I’m a playlist of mastery, but my real name is DeWalt im a model 568X skill saw. Nice to meet you. My tricks, my trades are recallable at any time. Just ask my traces, they’ll shed light on an imagination that lived. The residual imprints of hands, paths, and purposes is my personality.

I’m considered innovation

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Significance:

I began to toy with the idea that objects can house avatars. There are many ways in which people can express themselves and their identity beyond pixel and volume. As objects become more literate of our behaviors they may one day house our gestural traces.

How would one “play an environment” like a conductor of a remote symphony in real-time? – Embodying an instrument, a section, or whole orchestra at any given moment, an expressive variance similar to that of emphasis in speech. My son should be able to bring a play-list of these “contacts” – live or residual- with him everywhere, for use in a wide variety of contexts. Making any wood shop his fathers’ wood shop. The right contextual links and personal inquiry could prompt, or summon residual knowledge, or “live” presence of an individual or mix of individuals which that a given situation requires – providing – in context, information rich, experiential-mash-up-swarms, with read write capability.

I wonder how something like this could change educational models, could El P be in my sequencer? When I buy a paintbrush, could you throw in Rembrandt too? It brings a whole other meaning to buying a pair of “Jordan’s.”

Objects will perform unimagined means and modalities of representation, vessels of personal and group communication. It is foreseeable that things with communications will enable the expression of our various forms of presence. It is likely that social networks will evolve within single and multiple objects. Merely using something is synonymous to pressing record.

These recordings will be entries contributing to the history of an object, a history that can be searched, recalled, annotated and resituated. Object that teach are nothing new. New is how object may provide a platform to direct the hands in a spectrum of meaningful ways, based on other hands. Like a scene from Ghost. Gesture is technique, and technique can be recorded, codified and expressed. Objects may come to teach, translating motions, motivations and intents into tutorials and curricula. There are stories to tell of the roles they’ve played in the lives of people. If only these walls could talk.