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November 25, 2002
Doors Day 2 Notes
Notes on Day 2 of the Doors of Perception conference.
DAY 2 NOTES
Schmidt/Nygard (k10k.net)
Wow what a boring talk. Nothing here other than an intro to K10k. Why not talk about Moodstats more? When they did, barely talked about issues relevant to the conference.
Bruce Sterling
“look at the underside first” –- Viridian approach.
Nice phrase “an intense attention to physical details and the passage of time.”
“Dashboards” panel with Sterling and k10k guys.
[I should have slept in this morning. This was just terrifically boring.]
Felice Frankel (Artist-in-residence MIT, science photographer)
Science imaging specialist
Starts with a John Berger quote : “To look is an act of choice” [and choosing is to stop a flow, or pick a moment out of one. Fixity, not flow is really the important thing. Designing is choosing one way from many.]
Talks about visually representing complex ideas – need designs to extract complex ideas for the public [an essentially educational outlook here]. Wants to make science accessible.
[but when pressed, seems to think she’s doing this in the absence of any choices other than visual: no moral choice as to what’s shown, etc.]
the “point of view in an abstract idea is crucial.”
Marco Susani
“The Auras of Aural Knowledge”
Melville: true places are on no maps
Trying to map places (formations of people in space) that are invisible: the flows of communication and people.
Flows of communication tend to build clusters in communities [should say, build communities in groups], a vocabulary develops, a set of patterns can be seen
He investigated existing mental models that connect infinite possibilities and map out systems that are essentially infinite: yoga diagrams freeze forms and patterns out of infinite body complexity, and give namesto those forms [naming, choosing, fixing are really the crucial design tasks in dealing with flows. The better choice is the better design.]
Mandalas, other metaphysical diagrams provide inspiration. Susani tried to apply this to wireless social communications, specifically local communities, far communities, and local and far information.
Not so much that computing is ubiquitous, but that behavior and social connections are
There are different shapes to social interaction @ different scales: 2 people make “the womb” shape. More make “the daisy” shape.
There are asymmetric (transmission) shapes [basically one-to-many] and symmetric (exchange) shapes [ one-to-one]
Some groups are held together by one key link, which may not be a “leader”, that defines the social space: “head of the tribe/the crest”
Then communities themselves start to have relationships: small groups can arrange in a “networked star”
Word-of-mouth/forwarding of information has a shape: “the sausage” or “the pearl” if information accretes annotations as it’s forwarded.
“viral spread” – a social space that spreads like “flames”
“the sunflower” – a temporary, high-density, social space
There are 12 Social Spaces that can be categorized (beyond one-to-one and one-to-many). There are different spaces for different scales, different technologies, different needs.
Aural Knowledge – the “auras” of knowledge that define social structures. Auras correspond to different communication needs. Information auras interact. Different auras surround each of us differently.
[are there design patterns that can support different auras? Typologies for these spaces/flows should exist.]
PANEL MORNING DAY 2
Susani: don’t try to use these models too productively to design things – they just help understand behaviors and social transformations
[so what do I use to design if not things that help understand behavior??]
(Then he says) you can use these diagrams to design and structure the phone book of a mobile phone (for example) to support certain “auras”. What kind of interface does the “sausage” need? Seeing the mechanisms is a way to maintain critical judgment.
Philip Tabor
“Psychological Spaces of Architecture”
“Space for half-formed thoughts”
consider designing for answers for which there aren’t questions yet.
“daydream engine”
in imagination, space is constructed by the body – a mental moving through spaces – contributes to a mental haptic model
in imagination, space is a physical substance, like a gas, and is composed of invisible materials
[ this is just like Bergson/Synthetic Cubists in 1913, an identical view of space and of design/creation within it.]
Patricia de Martelaere
“Flow” – Heraclitus at the beginning of Western philosophy (flow is the beginning of western phil.)
the opposite this is the idea of succession of separate moments. Organic flowing reality is uncontrollable and abstract. Understanding is an attempt to freeze time: being vs. becoming
now we’re obsessed by change and the challenge of respecting patterns of changes
[ this is Henri Bergson quoted almost verbatim, with no interesting additions. Kind of plagiarism, really.]
OPEN DOORS PRESENTATIONS
[why does everyone need to recontextualize reality? “We need a new kind of time.” “We need a new form of space.” Calm down!
None of these ideas are simple and powerful, none are elegant. No “smart things with dumb objects.”
Why the repeated fascination to let users design spaces or interfaces? Designers build tools, meta-structures. Are we just responding to a world in which design is now commonplace?
So many of these ideas are old ideas dressed up, or simple ideas made pretentious by jargon. Water! It’s like a network!
Posted by Andrew at November 25, 2002 10:58 AM