Hans Rosling on poverty

Need to see this movie: Synecdoche, New York

The new movie by Charlie Kaufman, my favorite writer of all time: Synecdoche, New York.

I have a feeling I will be able to relate to this... at least the part about a project becoming so personally important, so complicated, so gigantic... and perhaps it would be 'healthier' to just let it go, to put a cap on it, which you can't do because you love the idea... such is my M.O. But then I wouldn't have it any other way... even if this most recent People & Design project has become enormous. :-)



And Charlie Kaufman on the creative process and more:

A slightly less rosy view of the future?

Our People and Design group has decided to project a future society of 2108 which manages to awaken, to change from a selfish mindset to a cooperative mindset.

But we are at a crucial point in history: are we going to crash and burn, or are we going to kick into action? How would design change in a cooperative society? Indeed, how could a new design paradigm potentially facilitate such a society?

On pessimistic days, I think we're likely to do the former (see the video), but I do believe there's a glimmer of hope.

Paul Hawken: Blessed Unrest

Info-dense design solutions

MoMA has put on a really fascinating exhibition called Design and the Elastic Mind.

My favorite thing so far is the TextArc by W. Bradford Paley. What a visually appealing way of doing structural analysis!


Eureka is another interesting solution for dynamic presentation of information:


The Digg Arc for finding interesting info online:


Mapping the Internet:

Transhumans?

Designing with an understanding of the moral implications

Below are some excerpts I strongly resonated with (and which highlight an emerging need for interdisciplinarity and particularly ethnography within the design process) from a paper published by Microsoft Research Ltd. entitled Being Human: Human-Computer Interaction in the Year 2020 (2008, ed. R. Harper, et al):

Technological dependence interacts with other fundamental human values. For example, it is also the case that the more we depend on technologies to carry out or mediate our everyday activities the more we will need to trust them to do so. How does such blanket trust develop? Will people in the future be able to adapt to situations where access and use of technologies cannot be taken for granted? Is this increasing reliance on technology a healthy state of affairs for society? How does this weigh up with our natural curiosity to understand the facilities we use in order to trust them? One potential downside to all of this is a loss of independence and self-reliance, and a lack of depth and breadth of understanding about how the world works. If we are not careful, undermining these values may make the world of 2020 a much less rewarding world to live in. (41)

In a world where the design and development of new technologies become more decentralised, where new kinds of content and do-ityourself applications become widespread and accessible to all, where will the control and the accountability be? Who will be responsible for making sure there is good design, and that the resulting technologies empower rather than undermine people? (50)

Do we simply let technological advances dictate what it will mean to be human in the age of ubiquitous computing or can HCI as an interdisciplinary community of researchers, practitioners and designers become more proactive in helping to shape society’s new relationships with computer technologies? (54)

Central to the new agenda is recognising what it means to be human in a digital future. We suggest foremost that human values, in all their diversity, be better understood and charted in relation to how they are supported, augmented or constrained by technological developments. In many ways, we are arguing for a strengthening of what has always been important to HCI: a focus on human-centred design, keeping firmly in sight what users – people – need and want
from technology. But beyond this, HCI needs to extend its approach to encompass how human desires, interests and aspirations can be realised and supported through technology. These have to be defined not just at the level of the individual, but also at the social, cultural and ethical level. (55)

Taking into account the scope of human values, therefore, is quite a different undertaking than seeking to attain the design goals of efficiency, effectiveness and utility. Design trade-offs need to be considered not just in terms of time and errors, but in terms of the weighing up of the various moral, personal and social impacts on the various parties who will be affected by the proposed technology. (56)

The bottom line is that computer technologies are not neutral – they are laden with human, cultural and social values. These can be anticipated and designed for, or can emerge and evolve through use and abuse. In a multicultural world, too, we have to acknowledge that there will often be conflicting value systems, where design in one part of the world becomes something quite different in another, and where the meaning and value of a technology are manifest in diverse ways. Future research needs to address a broader, richer concept of what it means to be human in the flux of the transformations taking place. (57)

But just what benefits will these efforts bring us? Will these technologies really help us to know ourselves better, make our lives richer, strengthen our connections to those we care about and bring us closer to the world around us? And what are the appropriate research questions here? How do we design these potentially complex and far-reaching technological systems? As we embrace the emergence of digital footprints in the bigger sense we have described, where this footprint has all sorts of properties, content and possible uses, just what we mean by memory and, further, what aspect of memory we might be interested in designing for, need careful consideration by HCI researchers.... To tackle these new kinds of questions, Stage 1 begins by taking a step back from the initial assumptions which appear to be driving this class of technology and asks what we mean by human memory, and how this relates to fundamental human values. What aspects of memory will make our lives richer? In what situations might we want to remember and why? And even, is it sometimes better and more desirable to forget? (72) ..... There are many other human values that might also be looked at here, including the collection of personal data for the purpose of reflection on the patterns in one’s life; or it might be about honouring and connecting the family to a shared past; and many more besides. The point here is that ‘memory’ means many things when analysed as a multi-faceted concept. And the value of a class of technologies which supports memory is rich and diverse. An initial step is to disentangle what that set of values might be, and to choose which are of most interest. It is therefore at this point largely a conceptual analysis. (73)

It follows that the ‘I’ in HCI – interaction – will need to be understood at many different levels too. First, it will be necessary to think about different ‘sites of interaction’, for example interactions on and in the body; between bodies; between bodies and objects; and at the scale of kiosks, rooms, buildings, streets and public spaces. All of these different levels of interaction offer different physical and social parameters that technologies can potentially change. (76)

HCI needs to move forward from concerns about the production and processing of information toward the design and evaluation of systems that enable human values to be achieved. Doing so requires HCI to shift its epistemological constraints away from their psychological roots towards other approaches, such as the philosophical, where conceptual sensitivity to meaning, purpose, and desire is possible. This suggests adding a fifth stage to HCI’s conventional design/research model: a stage of conceptual analysis where we consider the human values we are trying to support or research. This affects the whole cycle of research and design, including how we understand the user, how we do studies in the field and the laboratory, how we reflect on the values sought in design, how we build prototypes and how we evaluate our designs. Finally, HCI researchers need a larger assembly of skills and know-how if they are to succeed, which has implications for the concepts, frameworks and theories of HCI. (77)

my Brand: brand|brandi

Design Led Products and Services Innovation Workshop

Heewon Kim: How social networks changed everyday life

Paul Dourish: Getting from here to there: ethnography, design, privacy, and location

Lara Srivastava: Communication Technologies and New Forms of Social Interaction

Lee Bryant: Collective Intelligence Inside the Enterprise

Jaewoong Lee: Collective Intelligence and Creativity

Chris Lawer: Co-creation

Sugata Mitra - Outdoctrination: Society, Children, Technology and Self Organisation in Education

Jan Chipchase at LIFT'08

Jan Chipchase at TED

Photographic Anthropology?

This is a quote from Laurent Haug's blog (LIFT lab), a post entitled "free to be a clone":

As diversity is diminishing, we end up with what Rotterdam-based photographer Ari Versluis and stylist Ellie Uyttenbroek have captured in their work Exactitudes (contraction of exact and attitude), “an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity“. These pictures are fascinating, disturbing, eye opening, familiar but strange. They show that we have reached a point where the more different you try to be, the more similar to others you become. What was true in niches a while ago (think punks, tektonik, black turtle-neck creative directors, etc) is now becoming mainstream.

I think that these pictures are the most powerful means of demonstrating this trend, and it is an interesting way to do ethnography.

(Anyway, I think this research is fascinating and I wish I knew about this when I wrote my undergraduate thesis on consumerism/identity-formation/mental health).

Information Visualization in anthro

http://liftlab.com/think/nova/2008/09/03/diagrams-and-visuals-in-anthropology/

(Thanks for this, Sam!)

Synthesizing my investigations into workspace

I found it very difficult to know how to synthesize the information I had amassed regarding workspace without knowing who the audience was. I somewhat panicked and wrote a stream-of-consciousness style piece at first, mostly because I struggled to find a visual means to communicate what had become a rather complex set of data. Essentially I wasn't willing to let go of some of the complexity in order to make it simple enough to turn into a diagram. I could envision it as a 3-dimensional web of information, but basically it resembled a tangled ball of string.

Once I knew that this synthesis might be shown to people at the conference in California this week, I realized that the best way to communicate this message was visual, so I began unraveling the string. I found that the overarching theme regarding workspace was "comfort." This could further be divided into three sub-categories of comfort: physical, psychological, and practical (i.e. the space needed to fit the purpose or imagined use of the space). These three each were further divided in two... but at this point the divisions began to straddle two of the sub-categories. For example, the "look" of the room, a physical concern, overlapped with the room's "atmosphere", a psychological concern. And one higher level further clouded (or joined) the lower-level divisions.

This made for a complicated information visualization exercise. What I ended up finding was that I could do (what I am dubbing) a "flattened 3-dimensional diagram": the layers preserve the complexity of the data and flattening the view allows for an easily communicable visual display.

How the diagram works: It is a multi-layer nested Venn diagram, sort of. The lowest layers are the most important (according to the data), and generally the broadest. For example, "comfort" is the most important theme, so it serves as the foundation, the bottom layer. And I found that people tended to discuss the psychological aspects as most important, then practical, then physical, so the psychological circle is positioned below the other two, and practical is below physical. There were some outliers that if included inside the circle diagram would look strange, so I extracted them - color, privacy, personalization, adaptability, openness, and clutter. These were the most minor points, and would therefore be the highest up in the layers, but I pulled them out and attached them to their main thematic category(-ies) by a pink line. In this way I was able to preserve complexity while being able to present a simple visual explanation of my findings.

I found this to be a surprisingly elegant representation of my findings. I think it looks cool, but it also contains a lot of synthesized information. Smaller details are available for those who want to read further (pulled to the sides), which is quite similar to the navigation design I used when designing the navigation scheme for my MFA thesis project. It seems I'm still not willing to let go of the details.

Anyways, this is the kind of thing I hope to do in the future: helping with the visualization of complex information and/or presenting ethnographic findings in a visual way.

Vizster network design

This would be interesting to adapt for the sharing of ideas (rather than people).

Cool moving web software

http://sawamuland.com/flash/graph.html

Really cool new web browser design by AdaptivePath

I imagine this could be adapted to aid with the complexities of interdisciplinary research and communication. Very cool, indeed!

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Wordles

A fun tool that might be handy for some other uses.

http://wordle.net/

Bookmarks and history web browser design

This is an example of how technology is becoming so smart that we are offloading our own brainpower and responsibility to these tools. This tool is really handy, but it allows you to shut off yet another part of your brain - the part that remembers important websites. I think it's an interesting tool, but I disapprove of making tools like this that we may become dependent on. However, there are elements of this design that I could imagine would be very usefully applied elsewhere.

Bookmarking and History Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Book Response: The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

Having finished this book, I'm hesitant to blog at all (really quite disturbing how much the information we put on/in the Internet is being monitored and used for creating more control and more advanced marketing/advertising tools). Ah, well. I'm blogging this so that I remember it (as, it was argued in the book, is the result of the World Wide Computer: a dumbing down of humanity, using computers to do our thinking and remembering for us).

Most of the book was devoted to describing and highlighting the often invisible changes that technology is having on our world. Very eye-opening.

• the emergence of Internet businesses has accelerated the economic division between the richest and the poorest, since fewer people are needed to run a successful Internet business (like PlenyOfFish.com, run by one man!) and because human labor is being cheapened by the ability of technology to perform tasks for us

There are assembly lines today, but they are without workers... they are managed by computers in a glass cage above, with highly skilled engineers in charge.

Computerization hence puts many American wage-earners in a double bind: it reduces the demand for their jobs even as it expands the supply of workers ready and able to perform them.

• advances in technology have led to "The Great Unbundling" - we are able to pick and choose with advanced selection tools what we read/consume, etc., leading to a greater symbiosis between media and advertising (news stories are selected on the basis of their ability to get individuals to click on advertisements, rather than their substantive quality) and also to greater polarization of beliefs

Not only will the Internet tend to divide people with different views..., it will also tend to magnify the differences.

• humans are becoming controlled by the same forces they had hailed as liberators (i.e. once the Internet was seen as a Utopian equalizer and unifier, not to mention a tool to free individuals)

In using a computer, a person becomes part of the control mechanism. He turns into a component of what the Internet pioneer J.C.R. Linklider, in his seminal 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis," described as a system integrating man and machine into a single, programmable unit.

...the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom - control has existed from the beginning.... What's different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.

• companies like Google, which aim to create artificial intelligence (according to their creators!), are very close to producing systems that will succeed in making humans (and the human mind especially) subservient to the machine

But the most important point for me, and the reason I read the book, had to do with the ways in which technology was changing the very ways we think and act. Carr argues:

• humans are becoming inextricably incorporated into the Internet's computing web, dangerously so, perhaps to the point of becoming unable to function without computers

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy. (Kevin Kelly)

As machines become more and more intelligent... people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off
would amount to suicide. (Theodore Kaczynski)

I see within us all... the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self - evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the 'instantly available'.... As we are emptied of our inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance..., we seem to be turning into pancake people - spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button. (Richard Foreman)

The most revolutionary consequence of the expansion of the Internet's power, scope, and usefulness may not be that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as our minds are trained, link by link, to 'DO THIS with what you find HERE and go THERE with the result.' The artificial intelligence we're creating may turn out to be our own.

• and our technology ends up changing and influencing our worldview

The printed page, the dominant information medium of the past 500 years, molded our thinking through, to quote Neil Postman, 'it's emphasis on logic, sequence, history, exposition, objectivity, detachment, and discipline.' The emphasis of the Internet, our new universal medium, is altogether different. It stresses immediacy, simultaneity, contingency, subjectivity, disposability, and above all, speed. The Net provides no incentive to stop and think deeply about anything, to construct in our memory that 'dense repository' of knowledge that Foreman cherishes.... On the Internet, we seemed impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link.

I think the last quote is, in itself, an argument for the need of ethnography in a world that increasingly demands quick (mostly quantitative) data. And this book has strengthened my resolve to work with designers to re-empower humanity, to sharpen rather than dull our minds. It is clear that going against the forces that are carrying us toward these undesirable fates is not easy, but I think there is potential to use creative design to create systems that improve our abilities to be human, not make us better machines.

Interests for essay

I am interested in exploring how designers might actually be able to improve people’s lives. Traditionally, this “improvement” has been measured by the ways in which a product or system makes things “easier” (less time, less effort, less thinking) for the user. My thinking is that this kind of design is disempowering to humanity. Further, I believe that what we create ends up creating us, and if we keep creating “simple” designs, we are going to become “simpler” people.

With that in mind, I would like to research a company that embraces our fabulous complexity and facilitates complex design and/or interdisciplinarity and/or holism. I would hope there are design researchers out there who are working to help with the design of products and services that do not patronize users, but instead help users be creatively engaged in the world.

I have no idea where to find such a company (does one even exist?), but I imagine my idea will morph slightly when I find a company to research. Possible questions I hope to answer in my essay are:
• How effectively does this company facilitate creative engagement by users?
• How does this company’s fieldwork inform the design of complex systems?
• How does the company’s “mission” influence or inform their fieldwork?
• How does this company’s “mission” fit into a larger historical design trajectory?

What a great quote!

Below I am quoting (from Hemmingson's "Here Come the Navel Gazers") a quote (from Poulos 2008), one that strikes me as profound for us out there ethnography-ing, as well as a deeply accurate assessment of "liberal" bashing in the U.S. at the moment by idiots like Limbaugh and Coulter:

...the 'self-indulgent navel-gazing' charge is a straw man argument, combined with a simple ad hominem attack. It is usually intended to belittle and bully. As such, it may carry emotional weight, but it has no merit. It is a bit like the U.S. conservatives of the Rush Limbaugh/Anne Coulter stripe who throw the word 'liberal' around as though it were unequivocally and naturally a pejorative term. Of course, as I glance back at my 50 years on this planet, I can honestly say that I have met very few 'self-indulgent navel-gazers' (most people, in my experience are, in fact, less than satisfied with their navels), and most of them were people who either smoked too much highoctane weed or who suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. The prognosis was not good, and none of them were writers. If, by this charge, the critics mean that introspection or reflection are bad per se, I have nothing to say other than 'Try it sometime.' But I think what most of them are saying is that we should not 'indulge' our emotional lives because emotions can lead us astray. Indeed, they can. On the other hand, most of the great literature, art, music, writing, poetry, etc. in the history of humanity has tapped into the great and deep energy of pathos to move the human soul to new highs and lows.

Virtual Ethnography?

Had anyone heard of this Second Life community online?

It would be interesting to do an ethnography of "virtual" communities! How strange!!!

Terry Irwin's talk on McDonaldization

I tend to think in similar though more Marxist terms (as a result of my undergraduate exposure to sociology) such as "alienation" and "division of labor" and how these things lead to the "mindlessness" that Terry was talking about. The division of labor creates a society in which there is so much stuff, TOO much stuff, that we are not able to be masters of everything, and in fact we end up masters of very little. For example, I don't have a clue how a microwave works, but I use it every day. I don't know how the pen I use was made. I don't know where my food comes from or how it is grown, yet I know I can buy it at Tesco. I am "alienated" from nearly everything that surrounds me. Terry mentioned that learning to grow one's own food might be an antidote to some of the problems of unsustainable living/design. I think this is because it assuages some of the alienation we have toward the very things we put in our bodies.

What happens when we are alienated?

Firstly, we have none of the pride that comes from doing a job well - a crucial thing, I think! If we all cared deeply about doing our jobs well (i.e. creating for a greater purpose, a greater good), our world would be sustainable, peaceful, etc., in short a more spiritually minded place. But when Adam Smith wrote about the division of labor (The Wealth of Nations), he gave the example of the pin factory in which people who had once supervised the production of the pin from start to finish, an entire pin, were now in charge of specifics of the pin production assembly line: one would create the top, one would create the pointy end, one would glue the two together, one would paint the pins... each person becoming an expert in a very specific task and losing sight of the greater picture, i.e. becoming alienated from products of their labor. This has become one of the main tenets of the Western worldview: divide and conquer. The result is that people have become experts in smaller and smaller fields because it is all that one brain is able to process (because of how complex the world is now, we simply cannot be experts in everything... we would have to know everything there is to know about agriculture, education, industrial production, rocket science, nuclear fission... etc, etc.). And just as this worldview has affected design and production, it has also affected education (something Smith pointed out, too, I believe). We are expected to confine our education to specific, pre-approved disciplines in order to make ourselves marketable in the job world. My feeling is we need interdisciplinary thinking (and education) in order to learn to make sense of our world to counteract the problems brought about by the myopic thinking that the division of labor not only facilitates but requires.

Secondly, this feeling of alienation is, I believe, the root of our pathological need for control. What happens when we are alienated from the things we consume is that we are filled with a sense of fear and thus willingly give up control to those we feel know more than ourselves. So we buy into advertisements (and purchase products) that help us feel more in control. Terry talked a lot about this need for control and how it has allowed unsustainable, myopic design solutions to dominate the marketplace. We seek fast, reliable solutions to the tangible problems we see in the world (or are told by advertisers exist in the world) because we are so afraid of all the things we don't understand.

This is essentially why my work since 2005 has sought an interdisciplinary way of thinking. We need to be masters in the world, not idiot-savants. I think that what McDonaldization has allowed to happen is that it has produced a culture of robots. This is a perfect example of how the technology or systems we produce end up producing us (Terry talked about the Alchemistic principle that the act of bringing forth actually changes us, and this is another way of describing the same phenomenon): the division of labor that brought about factory production and assembly lines has in turn produced fleets of robotic humans (Smith, again, talks about this). One of the things I am interested in exploring is how the computer age has changed the way in which we think. A book I intend to read (I bought it and everything!) is called The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google, and it is about how the very fact that we give up so much responsibility to the computer (it does our spellchecking for us, our taxes, it calculates for us, we communicate with it, it stores our phone numbers and remembers email addresses we use frequently... in short we rely on it to do many of things we formerly had to be experts in ourselves) means that we are now dis-empowered. As comedienne Ellen Degeneres put it: "We have buttons to do everything. I can't remember anything anymore because of the buttons that are remembering things for me!" So what I would like to explore in my Design Ethnography work is how systems design can function to re-empower humanity, rather than to continue to lessen our burden to the point of stupefaction.

Response to Caesar (2000)

In and Out of Elevators in Japan
Terry Caesar in The Journal of Mundane Behavior, 2000

Caesar argues that while in the Westerners are fairly outgoing in their behavior toward one another out in public though are awkward and reserved in the small space of an elevator, the reverse is nearer true in Japan. In Japan, where customs prohibit effusive friendliness or displays of emotion or opinion (and especially touching), the space of the elevator is considered separate from public space and thus the normal rules of conduct no longer apply. Caesar writes, "In the more restricted space of the elevator, however, questions are often ventured, opinions expressed, or even greetings exchanged that have a more expansive character."

Firstly, this proves that space in itself (e.g. "elevator space") has no inherent prescriptive function for conduct or activities. Instead, the activities that take place "within" these spaces are completely interwoven into existing cultural practices and behavioral scripts. Secondly, it implies that different "rules" apply to "transit space" than to non-transit space, raising the question What is it about transit space that changes our the way we conduct ourselves in such spaces? Caesar proposes that one factor is that these spaces are occupied/engaged in for shorter periods of time, giving them a feeling of being a "break" from normal life and customs, and even a chance to express oneself more freely without being self-conscious, since it will be over soon and people will return to their normal lives. And further, elevators remain one of the few non-monitored spaces in Japan, so it automatically implies a freedom from normal social codes. And thirdly, it shows how people categorize and segregate space, such as "inside space" vs "outside space" in Japan, and dependent upon the ways in which these spaces might be distributed in society, there are varying sensitivities to the distinction between them.

He concludes with this: "But then the study of the mundane, I think, reveals that public space is never limited to what it forbids. Otherwise, none of us would have anything to bring to our relationships there, and social life may as well consist of empty action, going up and down like an elevator, with no inside and nobody to occupy it." The lesson to be taken from this seems to be, again, that space needs to be considered as an ecology within and interconnected with a greater ecology, not as distinct and objective reality in itself.

Crabtree (2000) vs. Watson (1993)

Crabtree seems to be expressing similar sentiments as does Watson in this excerpt quoted in An ethnography of a neighbourhood cafe: informality, table arrangements and background noise:

"What... I am recommending is a new sociology of knowledge which does not seek to operate from 'on high', imputing overarching perspectives to groups, or societies 'as wholes', as the Karls Marx and Mannheim (plus countless others) have done, but a sociology of knowledge which addresses peoples' practices, their typifications/categorisations in action, their activities and interactions, their communicative interactions conceived in the broadest sense."

Review of an article about "space" and ethnography

Remarks on the social organization of space and place
by Andy Crabtree, 2000
Published in the Journal of Mundane Behavior, available at www.mundanebehavior.org

Crabtree’s article gives an ethnographic account of a very mundane activity taking place in a space, that of searching a book in the library. One might think he could have chosen a more gripping subject for his article, but in the end its ordinariness serves to prove his point, i.e. there is much to be learned from the mundane. He argues that the vernacular understanding of the word “space,” or the “ecological view” of space, implies something within which an activity is performed, something “designed to constrain and shape our lives.” Crabtree argues that such an understanding of space causes us to miss the reality of exactly how space is socially organized, and further, how it comes to be recognized as an objective reality, i.e. essentially how space relates to the experienced reality of daily life. His example of two individuals hunting for a library book shows that the space of the library is not simply a place in which the hunting of books is to take place, but rather is fundamental to the design of the space and the ability of these activities to be accomplished. This, he argues, is one area where ethnography would come in handy – to highlight the specific ways in which the interactional components (or “competences”) of the space actually function toward achieving the space’s assumed and generally agreed upon aims by observing people functioning “within” it. Ethnographers can elucidate how it is that people go about performing ordinary, mundane activities in relation to the spaces that are supposed to “contain” them. In other words, we should avoid discussing space as if it were an objective reality, and begin uncovering the ways in which it is instead an experienced phenomenon. But by carefully observing the mundane (precisely because its intricacies go unnoticed), we can understand how it is that specific spaces come to be understood by participants as objective ‘places within which activities occur’ through the actions of people in that space, adding back into the mix what the ecological view stripped from our understanding of space, “namely the ‘primal layer’ of embodied phenomenal elements… through which space and place are produced and recognized as objective structures of an objective world in and as of the practical actions of members.”

My solo show!

"Impossibilities Vanish..."
20/8/08 - 22/8/08
University of Dundee MFA

Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy on Vimeo.