Design Engaged 2005

Three days of conversation, urban exploration and brainstorming in Berlin, November 2005, the second Design Engaged. Adam Greenfield opened on energy decline and the coming implications for design, Anne Galloway on the parliament of things, Joshua Kaufman on the politics of artefacts, Fabio Sergio on whether interaction design has any material at all.

Design Engaged 2005, organised by Andrew Otwell for a second year. Raw notes from three days of sessions, preserved as written at the time. Speakers included Adam Greenfield, Matt Ward, Joshua Kaufman, Anne Galloway, Michelle Chang, Thomas Vander Wal, Louise Klinker, Malcolm McCullough, Fabio Sergio, Stefan Smagula, Chris Heathcote, Jyri Engeström and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, Matt Webb, Nurri Kim, Jack Schulze, Régine Debatty, Liz Goodman, Eric Rodenbeck with Michal Migurski (Stamen), Molly Wright Steenson, John Poisson and Ben Cerveny.

Intro by Andrew Otwell

Restorative feeling of getting together
The architecture of participation
Experience design is participation design

Adam Greenfield

Ethical and social implications of ubicomp
Has been reading far afield: Out of Gas, Dark Age Ahead, Collapse
Growth and decline
Models of growth:
1. Health of economy is based on growth
2. Continuous growth: technological singularity, going off the charts
3. Cancer
Decline: cyclical decline, populations, rise and fall of the Nile
But sometimes it’s not cyclical: the global production of oil
Growth and terminal decline: global oil production. Industrial civilisation becomes very hard to maintain.
There is a contingency that designers probably ought to be thinking about
An implication: things get intensely local
Things: power sources, reclamation, working and forging; textiles, dyes, colourings; materials; methods, practices and standards; knowledge, resident in the minds and things around us; deployment of finished items
Value: e.g. copper may be worth more locally as a metal to be worked, than as wiring in an inert grid
A new suite of design gestures
Lose:
Our near-instantaneous Google+Wikipedia
Apple-Z (undo)
Flexibility and unquestioned connectivity (the social, fluid, soft meeting space)
Digital visualisation and rapid prototyping
Petrochemical or dependent-derived material properties
Precision fabrication
Low material costs
The global community
Will become important:
Libraries
Workshops
Adaptive re-use
Modularity, interoperability
Mash-up ethos
Sense of possibility and play
Reclamation of old industrialisation
Re-densification: new urban centres
Urban core may be untenable: building higher than 6 floors may be difficult
J.H. Kunstler: The Long Emergency

Matt Ward

Has design lost its way?
Design is always ideological, influenced by specific worldviews, responds to cultural context. Design is a product (of the society it originates from).
It’s also world-shaping, future-oriented: not yet, soon to be, one day, wouldn’t it be cool if. Imagination and production. Cannot claim autonomy from social change.
Utopia, outopia: no place. Eutopia: good place
The desire to be somewhere different, not about this place, not now, free of the problems of this world
No problem to link utopianism with the act of designing
Many see design as a key to changing the world. Corbusier.
Design is also linked to control and power
Archigram: a move away from conservatism. Anti-utopianism, learning from the mistakes of their forefathers.
In between the space of freedom and control: metamorphosis
Utopia of difference: terroristic meta-narratives (Tom Moylan)
Superstudio: allows for different uses and actions to define the architecture of the studio. A critique of the modernists.
Critical utopia: asks questions, asks towards change, towards critical design
Problem with critical design: forgets to question the position that the designer has
Locative media: a lot of technology removes us from everyday life, we need to remember the dogshit and the chewing gum
Malcolm McCullough: the avant-garde is now 2 minutes
Digital design: change in space and place; information acts within the production of space

Joshua Kaufman

Book: The Whale and the Reactor (a search for limits in an age of high technology), Langdon Winner
Social consequences of design from a historical perspective
Artefacts have political properties: invention, design or arrangement of artefact becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a community. Some articles are inherently political (weaponry).
Political design can be found in architecture and urban planning
Robert Moses’s low overpasses: discouraged lower-class travel
Baron Haussmann’s thoroughfares: large roads and parks
Concrete buildings and plazas at universities, to discourage demonstrations
Cyrus McCormick II’s moulding machines
How design choices affect the relative distribution of power
Fabio Sergio: the relationship between artefact and culture is complex. You can put the baby out into the world, but can’t take responsibility for all its actions.

Anne Galloway

Design and the parliament of things
Making the work of a social scientist applicable
Philosophy of science
The difference between an assemblage and an assembly
“To assemble is one thing; to represent to the eyes and ears of those assembled what is at stake is another.” Bruno Latour, How to Make Things Public
The difference between objects and things
In design, things are objects: stable and neutral. Even users are objects.
Things: an assembly, to come together
A coming together precisely because we have differences
From Realpolitik to Thingpolitik
“Walking is controlled falling.” Laurie Anderson
Representative democracy: body-politic, unifying difference, stabilising and reducing difference
From representation to re-presentation: all the constituent parts
Re-presenting design: invention and capitalism, speed and mobilisation
Going from an assemblage of different parts to an assembly
Speed and competition, focusing on the novel: ideas and materials and practices are being mobilised, getting rid of the obstacles that will slow it down
This doesn’t help us ‘assemble’. A constant space of speed, not encouraged to slow down and think things through. We don’t have an assembly.
We can’t afford to keep ignoring each other
“Your concerns are not relevant to our task at hand, you are not enabling my efficiency, etc.”
What is it going to take to design in this parliament of things?
We can start by slowing down
“That’s where slowing down comes in, you can create new habits only by slowing down, because new habits also mean new feelings, new interests, new possibilities.” Isabelle Stengers
Matt Ward: voting is a last resort; consensus is reached in different ways
Anne Galloway: not interested in consensus, interested in convergence
Malcolm McCullough: taking into account, not accounting the bottom line. Latour
Matt Ward: strategies and tactics in moving towards slowness? A: get outside, get into the ground.

Michelle Chang

Public by design
Interested in the issue of privacy
Privacy / publicness
Public library
How the library became a microcosm of the city: a number of services and interfaces to the city
Practices: activities
Space
What technologies are public goods? Electricity, wireless, etc.
Which technologies must be individually wrought? Laptops, mobiles
“A public institution must bear the burden of public demands”
Anne Galloway: a public space, or a commons? A convergence.
Use of the internet problematic: an increasing use of “adult terminals” versus “children’s terminals”
The library becomes a sort of pit stop: getting out of the rain or using the toilet

Thomas Vander Wal

Clouds, space and black boxes
Information is found and created, but there is little distinction between the two
Personal info-cloud, local info-cloud, global info-cloud
A clearing house of filters from the flood of information that flows down
Filtering based on trust and value: aggregation
A ‘firewall’ that filters what information we give to people
A ‘smart’ black box
Some people keep all different bits of their personal data stored underneath different usernames, so as not to keep all data aggregated in one place

Louise Klinker

Guilty consciences
Using environmental issues. Using P2P software.
Crimewire
Linking music download to criminal activity, but also tracking music downloads according to the amount of money owed to industry and artists

Malcolm McCullough

Taking into account the notion of civic space: architecture
Closed laptop, notebook…

Fabio Sergio

The skin of objects
No definitions of interaction design!
Where is the material of interaction design?
Joy Mountford: “We are designing the skin of objects”. Fabio reacted strongly against this
Industrial design: from Olivetti cash register to Apple G5
Ben Cerveny: models are the substance of interaction design. The act of creating constraints and systemic understandings.
The visualisation of complexity: making new materials from the mass of information
Conceptual models affecting the physical models
Liz Goodman: what are models? Fundamentals of interaction design are stories.

Stefan Smagula

Open-source media
Project Lightspeed: AT&T, Yahoo and Microsoft
Video
Big players: Apple, IPTV, Yahoo, Google
Bootstrappers: Open Media Network, DTV (BitTorrent & RSS), Open Source Radio
RSS provides metadata and triggers downloads
Matt Jones: Jerry Cornelius, an open-source character, giving away plots and stories

Chris Heathcote

Personalisation
Panasonic gets personalisation
Barcodes on skins
Websites for cover creation
Harajuku store for expensive personal covers
Korea: metal depicting war scenes, cloth
A spectrum of engagement: consume, buy, customise, accessorise, alter, make, design
Find out how, make stuff, sell stuff: Cyworld (half the population of Korea?), Habbo, Myspace, Neopets
Peer production: flips traditional production economics
Physical peer production: toolmakers, manufacturer, designer, aggregator, printer, user
Internet fabrication: electronic, materials
Home fabrication: 3D scanners, milling and printing, 2D printing and cutting
Local fabrication: access to machine shops, equipment
Is physical better than digital?
Is this sustainable?
How do we design for casual craft?
Malcolm McCullough: biggest criticism of Digital Ground is the longevity of the tools, the tools are not consistent or stable enough
Mike Kuniavsky: people don’t like to do something they do for a living in their spare time. This might be a reaction away from digital work environments.
John Poisson: scrapbooking industry is huge in the States, manifesting a collection of pieces. In Target is a whole section for scrapbooking.
Slowness is the point of craft. The process is key.
Anne Galloway: when you work in a sweatshop you don’t knit for relaxation
Liz Goodman: …as long as it’s pink. Modern idea of design is strongly opposed to the Victorian ‘crafted’, fussy environments.

Jyri Engeström and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen

Social objects, invisible tail and free product codes
A map of relationships, with nodes as individuals
But look at interactions from an ethnographic POV, we see interaction through social objects
Michael Tomasello: children learn about intentional affordances based on understanding the intentional relations to other people
Online these things are links, photos, etc.
Developing novel kinds of interactions through objects
Photos, bookmarks, blogs, products
Tim O’Reilly: Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN. Works for objects that don’t have an ISBN. A basic necessity for anything to become a social object online.
UPC, EPC, ISBN, ASIN for artefacts of mass production
What might be a Last.fm for physical things?
History, present, makers, materials. Making those relations visible: indicating social value.
Using RFID as a personal tool
To-do list:
Recommendation-based markets
Free thing identifiers
Available wireless access
Simple terminal devices

Matt Webb

Forms of address: how we talk to computers, and how we should
URLs and point-and-click are bad
Desktop search and recent items: help a lot
Global URLs: they are portable, excellent
They let you see ideas within their structure, not other ideas
Doug Engelbart: online system
Delicious encodes a certain type of behaviour with more persistence and history
Recent-call lists on mobile phone
Implicature
Using the Ning database is more like a conversation than Spotlight; it makes assumptions around structured data
Patterns of behaviour: “the things I’ve done in the last 30 seconds can be referenced as an object”
Bookmarking a conversation
Mr Messy
“I’m only a first-time user once”
Mike Kuniavsky: predictive shell

Nurri Kim

Tokyo blues: the city as seen through one material
Blue tarpaulin: used in many different ways across different cities
Most extensive use of blue tarps in Japan: anything that is passing into or out of existence
Blue tarps with a modular system: model number is higher with durability
Most popular model number 3000, conforms to the tatami mat size
Aerial photo: everything is being built, or rebuilt, historical renovation
Used as shelter for homeless, mat for picnics, covers for temporary objects, street vendors, covering floors, spreading tarps to indicate zones. Becomes an indoor space: taking off shoes to enter an ‘indoor zone’. Concealing / covering. Stack of things.

Jack Schulze

Screen-based button
Working with manufacturing engineers
Physical buddies
The Invisibles
Desolation Jones
Will Burtin
What we can get away with in domestic manufacture
Phones: manufacture, style/form, self-reinforcement
Manufacture: iterating this relationship towards cheaper, assume this is better
Manufacture: workshops, craft, local, milling, RFP
Style: malice, opportunism, disassembly, individual, cults, play, luxury
Metal: Lens 117, casting metal in wax
Casting phones in metal

Régine Debatty

Artists or designers using RFID technology
RFID was initially frightening
Some consumer-focused uses
RFID sushi: underneath each plate is a tag, conveyor belt. RFID reader scans a stack of plates.
For tracking cows
In toys: a doll that gets sick, each accessory is a tag, inside the toy is a reader
Privacy
Zapped: a machine that lets you know about readers in the space. Gave a cockroach with RFIDs to every participant: release in the nearest Walmart to taint the database.
How artists and designers are using it
A1 lounge: re-materialisation, Prada store
Digital wardrobe: making sure she uses things that people don’t see more than once
RFID habitat: tables in two parts of the world, shows presence
RFID bootleg objects: MP3 player based on a vinyl turntable, using the old covers as interface to MP3s
Deal Me In: cards for poker. Blackjack mat that plugs into the computer: seeing and printing pictures using playing cards, a traditional interface.
Moo-pong
With hidden numbers: traditional fashion objects, by passing these objects through a reader you can play music and play samples
Junkie Helper: medicine linked to a chatroom where people in a chatroom can see your action
Go-Dance: projecting videos in nightclubs, but can DJ using embodied interactions, with RFIDs connected to clothing
Used.co.at
Peripheral needs: Velcro is used to turn appliances in the home on and off. The paper tags can be used to keep track of what’s going on in the home.
Urban Eyes
The Living Room: telling stories with RFID

Liz Goodman

Physical fitness
Ecosystem-enabling
Dance Dance Revolution incorporating fitness into gaming
The ‘pay per play’ model
Arcades are designed to be really fun

Eric Rodenbeck and Michal Migurski (Stamen)

Dumb gestures
Vito Acconci: “our work has to sound exciting over the phone”
Dumb: easy explanations, e.g. Flickr
Meet the audience more than halfway
Dumb is difficult
Map of the Market: Martin Wattenberg
WordCount.org, Babyname Voyager: visualising the way we use language
Vox Delicii
Newsmap
Graffiti Archaeology
Tenbyten.org
Acconci Studio: website based on tags, can build dynamic presentations on the fly
Cabspotting: live taxi visualisation
Molly Wright Steenson: data fetishism, what types of things can be done with this as a tool?
Thomas Vander Wal: difficulty with time on the web, nothing that deals with it well. Everything stuck on a calendar.
David Gelernter: Lifestreams
How can we make this more ugly? Graphic ugliness is equated with truth, if anything is to be taken seriously.
Malcolm McCullough: too much visualisation as wallpaper

Molly Wright Steenson

With re-unification, an entire class of everyday markers was wiped out

John Poisson

Seeking nirvana in design for the tiny
Four mobile truths
The mobile world is in a mess: earliest days of the PC
Intense and competing constraints
How to design for a form factor that is so limited
Implementation is so limited by standards. Onerous restrictions and suffering with dealing with carriers. Onerous business models.
But it’s a tremendous opportunity: billions of potential users
To assuage anxieties over all this: constraints can lead to a level of purity. A mobile app is a bit like a haiku.
A Zen approach to the design and implementation of these things
Refinement towards a very specific set of constraints

Ben Cerveny

Hyperdimensional hopscotch
Ideas put forward around the possibilities of dystopian futures
Structure and architecture loom large in our minds (even though our titles aren’t that any more)
Information structures are starting to play out in the spaces we inhabit: in the construction of the community
In the process of game design: commodification of play. Play creates interfaces in a richer interface than the traditional process of interface design (through play finding the boundaries of the self and the other).
Use of symbolic systems and projection of language onto the world
Game vs play: game is projecting a model into play. Language formalises meaning, games formalise play.
Hopscotch has no real ingredients, apart from a method of making marks and a space (plus an agreement to play the game)
This agreement is where the power is
Consensual modelling capabilities: emergent social properties
People have a growing literacy of what is possible
Chess: a sculpture of behaviour of the pieces
Aware of the tools to make this kind of model
Goal-directed learning: role-playing is more like improvisation. The roles involved are not defined in silos, but interwoven. Multiplications of capabilities. Certain tasks can only be achieved through a sequence of collaborative actions. Cumulative actions.
The techniques of role-play have made it into the workplace
Never-endingness: a distributed conversation about the building of ‘what can happen’. Submitting ideas into a collaborative space.
The hopscotch that we are playing is a directed but temporary structure
The smooth space that we are standing on, that we demarcate with some markings
Building models that have a linkable state
The game we are playing is re-projectable onto different circumstances (in case of dire future possibilities)
Games gone native: in specific environments
Temporary autonomous games (tag). Chalk on sidewalk, but chalk is washed away. Temporary collaborative structures of meaning: playing out actions in that space, the product is meaningful. Focus taxonomy onto a specific process that has traction, but can then discard the rule-set once we have a product.
In-betweening (Aldo van Eyck). Became uncomfortable with the top-down projections of authority (high modernism). Built 700 playgrounds in Amsterdam.
Projecting the possibility of play onto the environment. Filled all of the gaps in Amsterdam with play. A sandbox here, a pole there, etc.
A divergence from the monolithic flows of high modernism
Collaborative making of urban experience
‘We are all here now’ feeling. Take different roles in the game that is more empowering towards our ability to make things in the city.
Bureau of Spatial Organisation
Before we can activate a city (with a platform) we need to begin to compose our personal, fragmented understandings, how things can be represented, things that we can broadcast to each other
These things can be connected to the city, a living model of the city. Building the hopscotch squares from one to the other.
The game model has the flexibility to support the kind of collaborative activity that will support these things
Matt Ward: how to manage the politicisation of artefacts. What are the political consequences of these ideologies, structures, games. A game about the making of the game.
Adam Greenfield: John Zorn’s Cobra, improvisational combat jazz. Disruptor.
Mike Kuniavsky: open-ended, play-based perspective, changing and following rules is very complex, and leads down paths that are very damaging. But sticking to one set of rules might end with a better result.
Collaborative idealism is a constant flow of articulation and re-articulation. Laminar flow and turbulence. Turn up the flow of collaboration and we also get ‘stop and go’ effects.
Game: Flex, so many rule-cards have been played that it’s impossible