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November 26, 2002
Doors Day 3 Notes
Notes on Day 3 of the Doors of Perception conference.
DAY 3 NOTES
Boer
Geography of flows and the geography of places, transnational flows of goods and people and ideas
Local places are smooth and are conditioned by flows [huh?]
Flows rewrite a local context—improvised flows can go around, temporarily over local spaces
Flows redefine the nature of a space, changing the function of a place without changing it physically.
[this is simply “How Building Learn” Places change function over time, people find new uses for them, what’s new here? In this case, “flow” is nothing more than a buzzword overlaid on something simple – migration, immigration, change, age, renovation, etc.]
Malcolm McCullough
Interaction design means “getting us into place” within flows. “Fixity” is the key. [ yes! Science photo lady, others, are making choices about fixed moments/places that make us aware of flows. The design work here is choosing moments of fixity, not designing the flows.] “Flow needs fixity like a river needs riverbanks.”
What’s the difference between Ubicomp and “situated computing”? The importance of fixed places. “Context is the subject matter of design.”
Can pervasive computing reawaken us to what matters most about architecture?
Is there a critique of “naïve functionalism” in interaction design like Aldo Rossi made of architecture in the 1940s?
Computing is now a social infrastructure, which is something architects know a lot about.
JC Herz
“distributed innovation” as a function of massively multiplayer games (game systems that encourage early user-based expansion or even redesign)
The game co-evolves with players and designers.
Designers are “city councilmen” [check Mark Demarest’s KM stuff and “Cities of Text”]
Systems (particularly open-source systems like games) can find the needle in the haystack: that one user who can create a great plug-in or mod [or printer driver, or kernel component, or whatever] [ check “Coase’s Penguin” article here: http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF]
Half-life started as a first-person shooter, you against everything. User mods led it to become a team-oriented game.
Interesting thing about game-based innovation like this is that it turns the usual coding practices on their head: massively forking codebases are ok, lots of non-interoperable mutants [is this really true? It’s only because game modders aren’t really changing the core code, just “scripting” the game in a very sophisticated way. Do “wrong” programming habits appear to be successful in the larger open-source community?]
Modding and custom Sims objects as 21st century folkart.
Online games should how “Object oriented programming for the rest of us” could work.
Banzi (from Interactive Institute Ivrea)
“Agile Computing”
survey of traditional (waterfall) development processes, and of new ways of development: Extreme programming, pair programming, “bottom-up” methods, etc.
Software is present in more places than you think; you should know something about it.
“pervasive computing would benefit the most from agile methods” [ zero evidence given for this statement. Why would it?]
Francesca Nori (curator of digital art in Frankfurt, curator of the “I Love You” Virus exhibition)
Hacker and modding /adaptive cultures aren’t just producing products (or viruses) but also aesthetics.
She addressed some very basic questions about the role of the museum as a cultural preservation society in the digital era: is it a memory archive, or a public content provider [barf], or a filter/curator?
Museums must rethink their roles as distributors of dynamic data. Could they act as a content provider, targeting groups with specialized content? [ Don’t they already?]
[There’s a LOT of very obvious and not very thoughtful stuff here. Hacking can be good! But also bad! Copyrights, established values are changing! Free access is good! But works against centralized knowledge! ]
Natalie Jerimijenko
“status of the spectacle”
participatory design – hacking consumer objects and showing others how to do it too.
Exploit the distribution patterns (in her case of toy manufacturers). Rewrite the brains of computerized consumer objects, then create media events. [This part wasn’t too clear.]
[boy, last time she was a killer speaker, this time just not that interesting.]
Manzini
Addressed issues of sustainable product development and pervasive computing.
Sustainability = regenerating contexts we live in, while learning to live better.
The perception of fear and insecurity flows through networks – changes priorities quickly and extensively.
Conclusion: pervasive computing and networks are actually dangerous and are harming democracy [cool! A dissenting voice!]
The context is simply the ecologies of networks, we need visible, tangible models of the ecology of flows.
Present day concerns: be large, be fast. The risks are that large and fast leads to undiverse [ a microsoft world]
The close, slow networks can be regenerative because the community can feedback for quality.
Wildman/Runcie (Design Council)
DC is an advocate for good design with UK businesses. “Design interventions” to enable shared vocabularies, conversations, maps.
“get a design to think with” – using design at the right time in development.
[Sounds nice. ]
Niel Gershenfeld (ex MIT “Things that Think” program, now at the “Center for Bits and Atoms”)
Some neat aphorisms about pervasive computing: “bugs will have programs”
Some criticism of “emergence” in general: Almost any engineered system breaks down at a billion (a billion users, billion chips, etc.) Emergent ideas don’t scale enough. Deep thinking about emergence doesn’t product working results.
Inspired by A. Gaudi: physical form and infrastructure are the same.
“waves of computational fronts” traveling across a computer surface painted on a table top.
Discusses “personal fabrication” plants that let users not only design stuff, but built it too.
[ Gershenfeld got a lot of “prime directive” cricticism from Thackera: should we really introduce these technologies into rural communities? This despite the strong theme of the conference to “let users do design” and to provide tools, systems, etc. for them.]
OVERALL DAY 3 NOTES
It’s least useful when a Doors theme is simply devolves into a word slapped on top of whatever the speaker happens to be interested in. The questions that preceed each block of speakers in the program often seem totally ignored by them.
Posted by Andrew at November 26, 2002 04:33 PM