Notes to the next cup.

.

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.

Object behavior, perception and communication explorations are strange attractors of interest to business, policy and academia. As consumers we ‘vote’ with our wallets, clicks, time and attention. People expect things to be easy to use, cost little or nothing, maximize personal freedom, be customizable, safe and secure, and to learn about our personal preferences. [Lee et al] According to the literature describing the promise of Ubiquitous Computing artifacts, people expect value from seamless anybody, any service, any place, any time and any device interactions. [Weiser]  It seems as though people expect things to just get better, and to be a breeze, to be almost invisible. Organizations need sustainable returns on their IP holdings, mobilizing them through product, service and systems solutions in the marketplace. How do we create a common vocabulary for mass innovation interactions needed to move toward a system that satisfies all of these concerns?

Products and services are behavior ‘enabling and mapping’ technologies, the identification and recording of behaviors on an object level will be critical to mass innovation. Products and spaces too can be a platform for enabling the recording of user annotations and innovations. Labs will spill out in into the streets, into objects, and into your hands, boasting a growing evolving upgradeable ‘experiential literacy.’ Revealing new insights into the climate of intent, motivation, and experience that contribute to the meanings an object may be associated with. A future Google result for “Sketching User Experiences” may return – “Did you mean: Users sketching experiences?”

Can objects become collectively or individually authored by their users? The relationships between object and the individual/group experience produce a stream of information in regard to the conceptual, emotional and functional role of the object.  Through time the information may show shifts and transitions of a given objects roles in relation to changes in what it means to people. This information is an invaluable and currently under observed resource that can aid in the design of the next instantiation of a given object. Designing in, through and from the human processes that negotiates meaning through experience is key to sustained relevance. Better inspiring and facilitating the habits that accompany new meanings around objects as they manifest. A great deal of strategic value for organizations, institutions and individuals lies in cracking this dilemma, and in creating the things and interfaces that operate not just for many people, but also because of them. An infrastructure that is an interface to infrastructure. New revenue strategies and more important, pervasive co-prosperity lie dormant in the interplay of the social negotiation of ‘what could be’ and ‘what comes to be.’

‘Non-destructive Annotation’, historically used in design and architecture where one would employ vellum in drafting to make suggestions, is beginning to migrate to digital media through startups such as Cozimo, that offer the sharing, discussion and annotation of digital files. Vellum was traditionally the tangible ‘comment medium’ beyond text. One could draw alternatives, suggest changes, write words, measures and dimensions ect. Cozimo offers a direct write onto digital video and image files, as a workflow friendly way to converse around digital works, as conversations become more remote and asynchronous. One side effect we are beginning to see as hard things gain increasingly soft qualities; the surface and motion of things are beginning to become interface. I can navigate a game or control my Roomba vacuum cleaner with the accelerometer within my laptop. I can translate complex real world actions into in-game behavior with a Wiimote. The iPhone’s ‘screen sprawl’ has almost engulfed the entirety of the device, and Apple’s patents suggest that it eventually will. Ambient Devices boasts objects that are screen, streaming real world data by way of color saturation and gradient change. Objects indeed are becoming screen, and screen is becoming interactive interface. If we push this to the limit of  “objects as interface’ they become a ripe vessel for explicit tangible annotation, where people can voice what they might like to see and feel stemming from their interpretations and personal experiences. People sketching, scrubbing and manipulating, and speaking through tweaking in the context of use, produces a wealth of variants that add up to thousands or millions of nuanced ‘perfect’ products, a ‘mass innovation.’

The majority of people might allow objects to accrue metadata, cultivating its ‘aboutness’, as opposed to annotation. The use of products can become a direct interface to manufacturing processes, as objects implicitly harvest suggestions through their journeys in human habiture. What we may see is the collision of user driven ambient and explicit annotations and designs, with the emerging fabrication processes that are engulfing the production of everyday things. Normal things. A product line of enabled objects can become a networked innovation lab that innovates from within the experience and interactions of a population of prosuming-performers. There is opportunity in harnessing the narrative of edge competencies diverse and driven individuals are expressing. The convergence of hardware as software, new forms of experience sampling, user annotation and design, manufacturing as service, combined with the behavior of remix cultures create ripe conditions for new classes of user-generated content built around read/write matter.

Ambient Co-creation

BCN FORMULA GAME
“BCN formula is a planning tool in the form of an operational multi-player game, that generates building proposals for Barcelona in real-time. The existing city is modelled as a two-plus-eleven-dimensional grid that processes its internal states like a cellular automat, and can be externally influenced by the users through urban interventions. These interventions change the position of blocks within the eleven urban dimensions of Barcelona defined by ESARQ students. The dimensions are capturing the swarming life, traffic, and commercial activities enfolding in the existing Barcelona grid. The grid influences the movement of a swarming point cloud. As soon the point cloud reaches critical mass, it generates a sculptural structure informed by the multi-dimensional procedural model of the city. ESARQ students provided feedback to the process by interpreting the structures as buildings in urban contexts, which are placed by the point cloud at locations that fit the criteria. Parallel to the existing grid, a seducing city comes to flourish, respecting the old rationalist city grid but refraining from any mimicry. The new parallel city of Barcelona co-exists with the existing one.

Here, city planning is not thought of as a top-down pressure but as a strategy for evolving existing social structures. The workshop participants described the genetic codes of the Barcelona Grid and the Barcelona feeling and atmosphere.  The students were asked to design flowcharts diagramming the city as an input > processing > output device. The students learned how to work with the game development programme Virtools, which was then used to build the multi-player planning game. Playing the planning game produces the data [in realtime], which are used for the design of the buildings from the parallel world. Procedures include intuitive acts.

The resulting structures are blobs, in that they are double-curved, twisted, seemingly irrational and not geometrically derivable structures. Yet such blobs they are only to those who do not know the genetic code and the procedures that generated these highly informed, context-related building structures.”

The example above describes a new anomalous form of co-creation, where interacting individuals and existing infrastructure becomes a stream of entangled and dialogical real-time data and information. This data constitutes a shared vocabulary for further discussion, a shared design material that can be observed, shaped, and expressed in a myriad of ways. In this example the Hyperbody Research group from Deflt TU in the Netherlands are enabling a system whereby users indirectly partake in generative architecture and city planning. The team of researchers may audit, tweak and further develop these plans for viable implementation. The BCN Formula game, through the mediums of location, transaction  and visualization have fashioned a low cognitive sub-activity that generates useful pre-design material for professionals to ingest and design from. BCN is a weak signal that provides an existence proof that we can model, to some degree, products, spaces and experiences as a side effect of living.

Any product in the hands of a person, or any place proximal to people is valuable time that could provide useful information about how products and spaces are used, their unforeseen uses, as well as how they interact with other objects and spaces. Information such as this reveals unknown but existing value, that can be amplified to create more moving, useful and compelling experiences. This is a new evolutionary step from the Focus group or the Supergroup, it is unfocused, indirect creation through the ambient ‘sketchings and suggestions’ of people living life. “Everybody” may not be a designer, but indeed, “Everybody” can partake in “living co-authorship.”

Direct Annotation, Definition and Design
For the point of the industrial era economy was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford; but these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a new kind of society, in which people want to be players, not spectators. This is a huge cultural shift, for in this new economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part.

“We-think” Charles Leadbeater

There is the other side to this argument. People who want to do. People have always modded, hacked and ‘did it themselves’ and we still do. Communities such as make.com, instructibles.com and various DIY cultures in backyards and basements still preserve this resourceful skill. It spans everything from the biotech hobbyist to children who have to make their own toys. Some do it for sport, and some out of necessity.

‘Direct Creation’ is the idea that near future objects will be a medium of digital/tangible sketching, annotation and expression enabling people to customize, re-design, re-specify, re-render and re-print objects. Objects with this capability will enable a flexibility, hackability, and freedom with digital precision that former generations of objects just could not match. The difference between Direct Annotation/Creation and Ambient Co-creation is that Direct Creation is a individual or social act that takes time, attentional and cognitive resources of the user/creator. Time and attention are scarce, so the benifets and rewards of their participation would have to outweigh their investments.

Palcom, a recent European Union funded research project explored the antithesis of Latour’s “black box.” This touches on the difference of knowing how something works and knowing how to work it. Palcom, short for palpable computing supports the autonomy, authorship and access implied by Direct Creation in their statement:

“..notions like inspection, experimentation, translation, and emergent use become important, as people creatively connect and use ‘assemblies’ of palpable pervasive technologies.”

They continue to explain “palpability”:

By ‘palpable’ we mean ‘noticeable’ and ‘understandable’. Palpability is not a property of technology itself, but an effect of people’s engagement with technologies, objects, and environments. For designers of pervasive computing, this means that they cannot design palpability into technologies. But they can design for palpability, to support people in making computing palpable.

I love to look at toys sometimes as indicators of future features. One of these toys that offers rather unorthodox features of palpability and direct creation is Topobo:

Topobo is a 3D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion. Unique among modeling systems is Topobo’s coincident physical input and output behaviors. By snapping together a combination of Passive (static) and Active (motorized) components, people can quickly assemble dynamic biomorphic forms like animals and skeletons with Topobo, animate those forms by pushing, pulling, and twisting them, and observe the system repeatedly play back those motions. For example, a dog can be constructed and then taught to gesture and walk by twisting its body and legs. The dog will then repeat those movements and walk repeatedly. The same way people can learn about static structures playing with building blocks, they can learn about dynamic structures playing with Topobo.

Simply Topobo is like Lego with gesture memory that you can ‘program through play.’ It is this form of playful programming that could enable many people to engage in design conversations through the object, the very subject of the conversation. As screen and shape deforming materials begin to merge with object skins and surfaces, form and function becomes no longer solely determined by material constraints, form becomes programmable, as does function and service. Form in this case no longer follows function, form follows sponentaity, improvisation, will and desire. Form follows Relationships.

Chances are ‘Thought to Thing’ interfaces will not occur so seamlessly. It will emerge in messy stages and spurts, with many faces. Recently on a trip to Amsterdam I walked into a Puma flagship store to find a novel way of buying a shoe.  What appeared to be a cafeteria cashier’s station with small containers filled with shoe parts, was actually a small factory. The ‘factory’ combined physical pieces of shoes with RFID tags to be scanned, and a digital touch screen where one could modify the scanned pieces and build a new shoe. It could be paid for immediately and delivered to your door in a couple of weeks. This is a rather crude form of direct creation. Long waits. You have to do it in the store; cool, but no go. Stephen Intille describes ‘User based Digital Designs’ in his research paper entitled ‘Eliciting User Preferences Using Image Based Experience Sampling and Reflection.’ Stephen envisions users interacting with images and video from his experience sampling cameras. The images are manipulated with a stylus within an interface on a Palm handheld device. That interface could also include a scanning option where you could generate a 3d model from video or orthographic snapshots, manipulate away, and send to the fabbers. Perhaps near field data transfer where each object has its own mod data ready to be annotated, transformed, paid for and directions to pick-up, or send to home printer. Who knows, any, all or none may emerge.

Intel and Carnegie Mellon are working on a version of what Dr. J Storrs Hall first termed “Utility Fog”, a form of programmable matter. Carnegie Mellon calls it Claytronics, at Intel calls it by a more formal term, Dynamic Physical Rendering.

In the Dynamic Physical Rendering Project, researchers at the Intel Pittsburgh Lablet and Carnegie Mellon University are jointly exploring a new form of smart matter which would be composed of myriad tiny robots acting together for telepresence, teleoperation, material handing/manipulation, locomotion, and distributed sensing. “Ensembles” of thousands to millions of robots would form physical analogs of virtual shapes which human senses would accept as real, eliminating cumbersome virtual reality gear and viewing angle limitations now present for most 3D visualization and telepresence applications. Likewise, such ensembles would act as reconfigurable, general-purpose robots capable of many forms of locomotion and object manipulation.

Dynamic Physical Rendering intends to create a new level of ‘directness’ where designers, engineers or users could push and pull masses of nanobots into new configurations to negotiate a new design, create a button, or a new handle. Objects then would be reduced to a database, play list and replay within a context of new tangible media where soft and hard are phase states of desire. Such an extreme should be a starting point for philosophers, sociologists, designers, future MBAs, psychologists and political scientists willing to grapple with the future of symbols, signs, meaning, power, economy and access. How will we read as well as write into this new medium? What worlds will we render after having them rendered for us for so long?

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

.

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.

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

.

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

.

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.

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”.

THE SENSES ARE PRIMARY MEDIA
The first will explore the senses as primary media in how the whole world is mediated through the senses. And look at the senses as natural communication systems as a way to understand the mechanisms that place and register meaning through experience.

ADVOCACY – A CRITICAL AND REFLEXIVE AWARENESS
In the face of the technologization of human and social capability this trajectory gives voice to the dimensions of analogue human ability. Arguing for the often-neglected abilities of the human senses as a way to challenge the technologization of perception working towards the inclusion of the analogue senses into the dominant discourse.

THE SENSES AND SOCIETY
The second focuses on the senses and society, viewing every object as the subjects of perception, as things that mediate our interactions and contribute to the construction and diffusion of a techno-scientific outlook. An outlook and a way of thinking about the world that has affected the very way we see the world and thus, how we perceive it, unquestionably having significant impacts into our social and cultural production.

THE SENSES ARE PRIMARY MEDIA

Our first and best way of engaging with the world is through the senses.

We see, hear, taste, feel, smell and move about in the world – all visceral experiences.

The primary mechanism through which our reality is grounded in the world is through our senses. We know the world through the senses.

When we touch the world, that world equally pushes back. And thus that thing is registered through the sense of touch as a thing, but as a thing that is sensed through my hands as a cup; its weight, the heat of its contents, whether is it full or empty, and not what is just thought to be a cup, or a wall for that matter. Although haptic feedback in definition is limited to that of touch, but extends as a metaphor for lack of a word, and translates into the domains of the other senses.

What is the haptic equivalent for smell, for sight, sound for movement, etc? We push and the world pushes back. With every step I take the ground pushes back equally on my foot, this is a true registering of the world. I do not need a formula or a theorem such as gravity to understand this. I know through repeated sensory experience that it is so. No theorem, explanation, or description can beat that.

The world is out there, whether we are here or not, whether we act out in it or not. Things happen in it all the time.

If the senses mediate the world and the world mediates the senses then when we look out, the world looks back at us, we touch and get touched back, we call out and the world calls back.

Each of our senses provides us with a different way interpreting and comprehending the world. A tree looks a certain way, feels a certain way, sounds a certain way, and each sense is finely tuned to pick up all these things. It is the picture built up by the senses together, the synthesizing act of the Sensus Communis that registers the tree, or rather the experience of the tree, as it is felt, seen, heard.

Can I describe a tree and have you comprehend it if you have never seen, heard or touched a tree ever? Probably not.

As children we learn from our exploratory forages and inquisitive natures through our experiences – through our sensorial experiences. These are grounded in reality by way that is not abstract, it is real, it is felt, it is tasted, it is heard, and thus the senses as primary media are the go-link to the phenomenal world and in turn inform all our ideas thereafter.

Piaget wrote of infants, that the world was essentially a thing to be sucked, indicative of the primacy and intimacy of the senses in discovering and knowing the world, in this case through taste; the mouth and the sense of taste conferrable to the act of living.

Taking the Sensus Communis as the experiential grounding of the world into a reality that we can understand and grasp at deep visceral levels, proposing that the world is not made up of things or objects, but rather of experiences, considering the nature of experience as more real than things. For things only have meaning once we know what they are. And how we know what they are is deeply entrenched in our interactions and experiences with them.

The senses are primary media that are intelligent so to speak, they don’t lie and we are tied to the world, part of it, not separate from it.
As a young adolescent teen I had the unpleasant experience of being told not to trust my own common sense. The setting was a mathematics class where I had told the teacher that the method by which I had come to my conclusions was as a result of my own common sense. The teacher was unimpressed and stated very flatly that my answer was not good enough – that my answer was not really an answer, and that I must use the proper theorem to prove it. What better proof is there than a common sense I thought. My attempts to stand up and argue that my common sense answer made more sense than that of the theorem did little to impress my teacher, in the end earning me only partial marks. Needless to say, that I was upset and depressed about having to forfeit my deeply sensed intuition to some theorem.

What I have realized since then is that what at the time to me was just common sense was actually superior to that of the theorem, simply because the theorem was an abstract representation of the original insight that gave rise to it in the first place.

What I had, and what my teacher missed was that my common sense had a real and tangible quality to it, a reality that had as its basis the phenomenal world, a reality placed and registered through experience.

Instead of capitalizing on these insights I was steered away from the opportunity to expand the horizons of perception, and perceptual ways of knowing.

I was being asked to deny what I felt viscerally, intuitively through the body so to speak and accept an abstracted reality, one step removed from what I could see, hear, touch, taste, and move through.

These are our first ways of knowing the world – the senses inform our world – they are the primary medium through which we touch taste feel the world. They inform our ideas of the world in a visceral manner; they explain the world through deep mechanisms. The rest are ideas about our experiences, one step removed from reality so to speak.

(rough draft 1 – 2 sections to go)

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?

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,