We will…
From the Many Eyes: Obama Inauguration Speech Word Tree.
Can we do collaborative data viz? Yes, we can!
(Sorry, joke had to be made).
Latest Entries
The image of the moment
Don’t know where it originally came from, but I got it at Balloon Juice. Please do click to enlarge.
links for 2009-01-20
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"Keywords: urban gardening, civic renewal, integrated design, participatory environments, artificial intelligence, virtual ecosystems, design for public spaces"
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Still more theory:
"Developing a single cross-disciplinary body of theory about designing and designs has been of persistent interest in the field of Design Research over the last 50 or so years. In spite of the obvious benefits and the substantial volume of research undertaken, a coherent body of theory and knowledge has not yet emerged.
It has recently become clear that this failure is closely linked to weaknesses in the philosophical foundations of the field. This paper focuses on identifying and resolving some of these weaknesses. "
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Dense, but perhaps useful.
"This paper focuses on the structure and dynamic of theory in design research. Problems with existing theory are explored, and a new meta-theoretical method is suggested for assisting the critical analysis, comparison and formulation of design theories and concepts. This meta-theoretical method contributes to building a simplifying paradigm of design research by providing a means to clarify the existing state of design theory in the field, to assist with the establishment of coherence and compatibility between concepts in disparate theories, to validate theory and concepts, and to uncover ‘hidden’ aspects of design theories."
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"Sensing is going mobile and people-centric. Sensors for activity recognition and GPS for location are now being shipped in millions of top end mobile phones. This complements other sensors already on mobile phones such as high-quality cameras and microphones. At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking."
links for 2009-01-06
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Looks fantastic:
"Living with Things provides an account of consumption in terms of its centrality to our dwelling practices. Its focus is on the home, particularly on the movement of people and things within and through it in everyday habitation. Here dwelling is seen as an activity, as doing things with and to the things to hand around us. Being 'at home' is achieved through living amongst things, as well as amongst people and other non-human presences, such as pets and gardens. Being at home is achieved through what we do with objects, the things that are acquired and stored, that linger around in our homes, sometimes for decades, and which we may eventually get rid of. These ordinary things make dwelling structures accommodating accommodations; they make them homes. Based primarily on a former coal-mining village in North-east England, this book explores practices of inhabitation, from moving in or being modernised, to the daily accommodation of sleep and children."
To do: concepts of performance in design
In Perform or Else, Jon McKenzie uncovers an uncanny relationship between cultural, organizational, and technological performance. His conclusion–that performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth–is an exhilarating realization of how culture, business, and science have become hyperlinked through globalization.
I never seem to get around to doing the review of the history of performance in design and as a design method.
links for 2009-01-05
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"Ubiquitous computing technologies will have a wide impact on our daily lives in the future. Currently, most debates about social implications of these technologies concentrate on different aspects of privacy and data security. However, the authors of this paper argue that there is more to consider from a social perspective: In particular, the question is raised how people can maintain control in environments that are supposed to be totally automated. Hinting at the possibility that people may be subdued to machines’ autonomous actions we introduce the term “Technology Paternalism”. We elaborate a working definition and illustrate the concept by looking at different examples based on current and future technology. We also dwell on the impacts of ubiquity and control of technology and suggest some approaches to assure a reasonable balance of interests such as a general “right for the last word”."
links for 2009-01-04
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Compostmodern is fertile ground for sustainability. Presented by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design (CFSD), this interdisciplinary conference explores the range of design thinking necessary to create a socially and ecologically responsible society. Designers, manufacturers and business leaders come together to find inspiration, share knowledge and explore real world opportunities for transforming products, industries and lives.
Classification follies part I
When I was an undergrad, I had a summer job updating the database of large donors to a university art museum. I pretty soon realized there was a problem: the database didn’t allow for two people at the same address to have two different last names – ie, it would not allow me to automatically generate printed address labels for Elizabeth Goodman and Mike Kuniavsky. Apparently, the database designers simply had not conceived of a couple in which one partner did not take the last name of an other. As you can imagine, for an art museum with a substantial number of gay and lesbian donors, this was a major donor relations problem. For the first few weeks, I just typed up those “special” envelopes by hand. Painfully. On a twenty-year-old manual typewriter.
Then the stupidity of the situation hit me – it’s not like there were going to be fewer couples (whether straight or same-sex) with different last names in the coming years. And typing up those envelopes was just as likely to create typos. Why not just redesign the database and the entry forms so that we could avoid any chance of insulting wealthy donors who should never receive incorrectly addressed letters?
It took a week.
Apparently, that’s not how it works in Maryland.
Under the administration of then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), Maryland law enforcement infiltrated law-abiding protest groups and labeled 53 Americans, who had done nothing wrong, as “terrorists” in a state database shared with federal authorities. (It turns out, their law enforcement database didn’t have categories for anti-war activists. Police created “terrorism” categories to make filing easier. How reassuring.)
Every now and again, I’m reminded of the continuing importance of studying how classification systems are made – with Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out the essential guide:
What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include “fainted in a bath,” “frighted,” and “itch”); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification–the scaffolding of information infrastructures.
In the case of my undergrad art museum, the problem easily solved by changing the default settings for address labels. I understand that changing categorization options for a massive government database is harder. I do. But it’s the sheer malignant sloppiness that gets me about the Maryland case.
Either the troopers didn’t believe that there would be no consequences for labelling members of an anti-war group “terrorists,” or – what’s worse – they didn’t think there was a difference. There was no way the database problems could be corrected, because the information infrastructure of the War on Terror both promoted and was created by those types of classification decisions.
In honor of Philip Larkin: The new best latke recipe
Every winter, I reread a few of the poems of notorious curmudgeon, conscientious librarian, and revered poet Philip Larkin , who died on December 2, 1985.
Home Is So Sad, Philip Larkin
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped in the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft.
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Depressing, no? It’s typical Larkin: beautifully written, confrontational, elliptic. It’s the antithesis of holiday cheer.
Anyway, to honor the 23rd anniversary of Larkin’s death, I’m offering something that would probably make Larkin’s stomach turn: a good recipe for latkes! It’s well known that it’s hard to hate life when your stomach is full of fried potatoes.
I like to think that Larkin would actually have enjoyed eating the potato pancakes, but enjoyed them even more as the excuse to write a poem about the familial disillusionment and sordid despair that lies behind the homely smells of salt, oil, and onions. What follows, then, are Larkin Latkes. Delicious, but a little complicated.
Berkeley Center for New Media talk announcement
Design Futures: New Craft – A Marriage of High and Low Tech – Leah Buechley (MIT Media Lab)
Wednesday December 3, 2008 from 6:00pm – 7:30pm
Berkeley Center for New Media Commons
340 Moffitt Library, next to the Free Speech Movement Cafe
Berkeley, California 94720
People knit scarves, build furniture, sew clothing, and solder radios together in their homes and garages. Diverse groups of people–girls and boys, grandparents and college students–lovingly engage in these hands-on low-tech hobbies. In contrast, companies produce high-tech things by high-tech processes, using teams of people and sophisticated machinery to build devices like cell phones, computers, pharmaceutical drugs, and cars. But this clear division between high-tech and low-tech is beginning to blur. A host of new tools is making many of the resources previously available only to companies accessible to individuals, empowering people to design, engineer, and build devices that integrate high and low technology.
This talk will discuss this “new craft”, envisioning a future in which individuals integrate traditional craft, engineering, and web-honed communication skills to build and share information about “high-low tech” devices like temperature sensing scarves, algorithmically generated furniture, and radically customized cell phones. The presentation will discuss burgeoning high-low tech communities, focusing on ways that professional designers and engineers can support and encourage this new creative movement. It will present examples of high-low tech artifacts–including embroidered circuits and paper computers–and examples of tools that empower others to construct high-low tech devices–including the LilyPad Arduino, a construction kit that enables novices to build fabric-based wearable computers.