Digital parlance #75

• Cellular humanities: “the cellular humanities are precisely about that to which we are not paying attention: the ubiquity of these small computers that more and more people have, as well as a cluster of mentalities, behaviors, and attitudes that develop along with the machines. They’re about how the social fabric is changing around us rapidly, and where we feel these changes the most.” (Source: Public books).

• "Munchausen-by.internet”: a term describing the pattern of behavior in factitious disorder imposed on self, wherein those affected feign illnesses in online venues (Source: The Guardian)

• Travailler d'arrache clavier: French neologism expressing the fact of working hard on one's computer, as if you were damaging the keyboard. (Source: David Aymonin)

• Prospiracy: the spreading of real information using the tone and style of conspiracy theories combining “the lure of forbidden knowledge & the highly shareable nature of conspiratorial thinking for good…” (Source: emolink)

• Bougietech: “Mennonite engineering solutions for convenient low tech living; off grid, unbanked, and unbothered.” (Source: Noah Raford, NFG)

(Reposted from Lagniappe #75)

Atlas of Contemporary Networks

The other day, looking for a book in my (messy) shelves, I found this Atlas of Contemporary Networks that Marco Ferrari send me a while back. A publication from the MA Communication Design programme at IUAV Venice, it was designed during Graphic Design Lab led by Marco Ferrari and Ivor Williams. A random spread from it below :

Why blogging this? It’s a great example of how graphic designers can illustrate qualitative phenomena (as opposed to quant diagrams) as information visualization

"Write a fake first page, two ways"

On her blog Sara Hendren gives this very sound advice for PhD students:

“Write a fake first page, two ways. I studied with a prolific historian who, at the outset of a new book project, would write a fake first page. You tell yourself: I don’t know what this book is really about, but if I did know, it would be about these [claims, central arguments, big-idea contributions]. The fake first page is made of fictions! But they’re useful. They scope the territory. They narrow the reading and research you’ll do, which will otherwise be truly endless. A fake first page gets the project running. And that first form is for the academic portion of the work, the thesis paper.

But you should also write a fake first page that is the introduction talk for your thesis presentation, assuming that there will be very smart but wholly uninformed attendees there. This fake page will be how you’d welcome folks to your idea, and it forces you to distill the heart of your work in plain language. Both kinds of pages matter. Your self-understanding of the work will grow dimensional and sharper when you cultivate these two languages. And if you won’t have that outside observer at your thesis presentation, take up that much-recommended mental model offered by writers for a long time: Think of being on a long train ride with a friendly stranger at your side, both of you gazing out the window.* What would you tell this companion about your work? Where would you start, and how would you make it the most vivid version of itself?”

Why blogging this? Fascinating recommendation, makes me think of our design fiction approach at the laboratory. Treating a writing project (or any project) like this can be quite relevant and offer and interesting perspective to move things forward. Good tactic.

Digital parlance #74

• Algo-friend: a friend met via a recommendation algorithm, from de Facebook to Tinder or LinkedIn. The term undoubtedly go beyond the notion of online contacts, and the sometimes simplistic accusations of "faux-friendship" about them.

• LMGTFY: acronym for Let me google that for you (Source ce tweet).

• Datenhunger: a German neologism describing the appetite for acquiring, and potentially processing and analysing, data. For example: “Googles Datenhunger ist offenkundig” (Google's hunger for data is obvious).

• Sleeper PC: an incredibly fast computer disguised as ancient 90s era beige box. It will most likely look old on the outside but be brand new on the inside, with the latest processor, RAM and GPU built into a basic shell (Source: Urban Dictionary).

• “Bisou” (used on the francophone Twittersphere): a French term that means “kiss”, used as an Antiphrasis: "Unless it is addressed directly to you, its meaning at the end of the message varies between ‘f… you' and ‘f… off’ (Source: this tweet, see also the whole thread).

Vocabulary of display

Found in “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” by Andrew ‘bunnie’ Wang (2016)

Why blogging this? The vocabulary described here correspond to multiple nuances that we often neglect/forget when using our digital devices.

Digital parlance #73

• Staatstrojaner: literally “State Trojan Horse”, employed to refer to malware/spyware used by intelligence agencies in Germany (such Militärgeheimdienst or Verfassungsschutz) to track computers of people under suspicion. (Source: netzpolitik et Techtrash). See also Bundestrojaner in Switzerland or Germany for an earlier version.

• Quantifauxcation" describes situations in which a number is, in effect, made up, and then is given credence merely because it is quantitative. Quantifauxcation seems to be more persuasive the more complex and contrived the process of making up the number: numbers derived from survey data, from statistical formulae, and from computer models comprise large classes.

• Bloatware : Unwanted software included on a new computer or mobile device by the manufacturer (whose usefulness is reduced because of the excessive disk space and memory it require). Also refers to the process whereby successive versions of a computer program become perceptibly slower, use more memory, disk space or processing power, or have higher hardware requirements than the previous version. Sometimes translated by “logiciel mémorivore”, “obésiciel” or “inflagiciel” in French (Source: Office québecois de la langue française).

• Meitu-ify: a verb that designate the modification of one’s facial appearance before sharing it online, a term proposed by Cai Wensheng, Meitu’s chairman, that he also see as a "way of being polite" like you'd tell a friend if her shirt was missing a button, or her pants were unzipped, as he told The New Yorker” (Source: NYR).

• Reply guy: a neologism that described how certain male users of social networking sites tend to reply, no matter what, to almost all the messages shared by women. An annoying practice since the replies often ranges from gaslighting to trolling or mansplaining (Source: Mashable). See also “the nine types of Reply Guy” here.

Digital parlance #72

• Zipai: literally ‘self-shot’, is the Chinese word for ‘selfie’, and it indicates both the action and the product of taking a picture of oneself. (Source: Gabriele de Seta and Michelle Proksell)

• Zoom town: geographical places that are booming as remote work takes off because (or not) of the Covid situation (Source: NPR).

• To bookshop: to respond to someone on social networking sites with a bookshopdotorg link to your book on that same subject. (Source: Joanne McNeil).

• Acedia: an old emotion named by the Greeks that correspond to being bored, listless, afraid and uncertain, supposedly common these days (Source: The Conversation)

• Couple monomail: a French expression that designates couples that share the same electronic mail address, as if they were just one person (Source: overheard in a café in Geneva).

Technology in Rural China

“Smart city, smart city, y en a que pour les city, et le rural ça compte pas ?” (“Smart city, smart city, it’s always just about cities, what about rural areas? don’t they count?”). That’s a quote from a old farmer I met in one of my alpine field trips. Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang, recently published by FSG Originals × Logic is exactly about this sort of question. Based on a series of stories – one might say ethnographic vignette – about the use of Blockchain, machine learning, drones, massive open online course or 4G/5G in rural China, the author confronts the “metronormativity” of such technologies.

“metronormativity – a portmanteau of ‘metropolitan’ and ‘normative’, coined by the theorist and scholar Jack Halberstam (…) it’s the normative, standard idea that somehow rural culture and rural people are backward, conservative and intolerant, and that the only way to live with freedom is to live the countryside for highly connected urban oases. Metronormativity fuels the notion that the internet, technology and media literacy will somehow ‘save’ or ‘educate’ rural people, either by allowing them to experience the broader world, offering new livelihoods, or reducing misinformation.”

Why blogging this? The detailed descriptions of Wang’s foray into various usages of technologies related to food and agriculture highlights the social, cultural and political dimensions of a digitized rural world. An interesting overview of how the technologies we hear about here and there can be situated in the context of the Chinese countryside, Blockchain Chicken Farm offers a nuanced account of the opportunities, limits, and frictions caused by these new uses of the “digital”. As a former software engineer, Wang is not naive about technologies and although various limits are described, the tone isn’t anti-technologies. The perspective about China are also quite relevant and I found interesting to look at the complexity of the Chinese countryside and smaller cities from the author’s perspective. Overall, the main objective – to offer a counterpoint to the metronormativity of digital technologies – is accomplished.

Hugh Raffles on ethnography

Found in an interview of Hugh Raffles about his recent work. He starts off with its anxiety towards theoretical branding and moves to his own ethnographic practice:

“I'm always wary of branding and work pretty hard to not be brandable, quotable, transposable, or in any way modular. I want to encourage people to think about questions in expansive and maybe subtle ways. Taking a key word and inserting it as a stand-in for something often means not having to think through a question or phenomenon more carefully. I guess I’m especially worried about what the impulse to branding--and the rewards for branding--do to graduate students. People start to think there's a currency to a particular type of work and they start referencing it because they think it's a shorthand way to demonstrate a fluency and an up-to-dateness. (…) These types of trends tend to have a limited shelf life too, so right now everyone feels they have to jump into this swimming-pool or else they’ll be missing the fun. But I worry about the students who are enjoying splashing around right now and can’t get a job in 5-7 years’ time because the fad has passed and we’re all doing Inter-Galactic Inorganic Ethnography (that’s IGIE). It may not sound like it but this is actually friendly criticism from a fellow traveler who is excited to see the range of work expanding but just concerned by the emergence of new orthodoxies. I worry that the fashionable is a poor sign under which to do intellectual work. (…) It’s important to not be preoccupied with making mistakes and to be willing to take intellectual risks. It’s also important not to feel that you have to declare some theoretical allegiance or belong to a movement. Of course, you can and should build upon prior intellectual work without being trapped in it and it’s important to have a strong genealogical sense of your own and others work. Obviously, though, these questions are different for students and faculty. There are different institutional contexts and constraints at play. Students have to be very savvy about navigating the discipline while retaining their intellectual independence, particularly in such a tight and shifting market. I’m certainly not utopian about it but I’d like us to be better at creating environments in which people can take risks. The graduate education structure of grant-giving, dissertation-writing, etc., tends to enforce a defensive mode of scholarship, and faculty, too, are rarely given the breathing-space and opportunity to explore radically new directions in their work (…) I’m guessing my project will turn out to be more ethnographic than much of the recent work and less concerned to explicitly generate ‘theory"‘“

Why do I blog this? Some interesting thoughts here about “the discipline” and how to make it… more “spontaneous” perhaps and less tied to labels and theoretical labels, while at the same time focusing on descriptions.

Anthropocene and Digital Imaginaries

The Post-Digital seminar at ENS in Paris organized this rather interesting conference in few weeks : Sans ordinateur / Without computer : Anthopocène et imaginaires numériques / Anthropocene and Digital Imaginaries. The call of paper can be found here and here are some excerpts that I find relevant to my own research:

Based on the hypothesis of a collapse of the IT infrastructure, and so, of a post-digital collapse, this symposium aims at suspending the occupation of the world. Given the omnipresence of computers, we want to provoke reflection to imagine what comes after. (…) Under- standing the roots of the mobilization of the world, of which the digital is a part, may mean not reproducing the causes of that which we want to escape in so-called “solutions” to the contemporary ecological crisis. This imaginary, the ambivalent source of the anthropocene, should be described. Our hypothesis is that it is at the crossroads of our science, mythical narratives and images of the world and technology (…) The interventions will aim at analysing the material and ideological impact of digital technologies on our environment and assess their future sustainability. They will also be able to question the use of digital in apocalyptic or innovation stories.

Why do I blog this? Addressing the role, the design and the use of digital technologies in the context of the current environmental crisis is a new interest in my research. Probably not that new considering that I started working on repair practices and the hybridization of low tech and high tech.

Organic informatics

Seen in Italy last week-end, the eco-trend is here. That being said, I’m fascinated by the 100% bamboo thing, made me think of all those artists and designers interested in creating wood-based computers.

Introduction to ethnography & field research at the Angewandte

Context: this month I’ve been invited by Anab Jain to give the introductory workshop to the Design Investigations program at the Angewandt (University of Applied Arts Vienna). This is the brief.

Context

Among the means of framing and inspiring design projects, understanding people and their practices is a fundamental aspect of design projects. Product designers, interaction designers, or architects are often informed by “design ethnography”:

1. concepts from the social sciences (Anthropology, Sociology) that help making sense of the world,

2. “field research” methods that rely on observation, participant observation and interview techniques in order to understand social and cultural context.

Beyond the purely ergonomic and functional dimensions, such understanding is thus a fundamental component of current design in order to inspire, constrain, adapt and define the design space in an innovative and original way. Moreover, this understanding aims to overcome the stereotypes of a "user-centered design" that is often not sufficiently concerned with the complexity of individuals' uses and practices, as well as the major role of the surrounding context in the people’s motivations.

Documenting trash, N.Nova, 2011.

Studio brief

In this studio, students will learn how to employ design ethnography in the context of a small project focused on the digital infrastructure of urban everyday life.

Surveillance cameras, routers, traffic sensors, mobile phone towers, WiFi antennas, cables such as copper wire or optical fibers, data centers, server farms... All of these correspond to the tangible underpinnings of the so-called “virtual interactions” people have with their computers and smartphones. The urban environment, more than anywhere else, is filled with such devices and the myriads of services they rely on, ranging from repair phone shops fixing broken screens and bloated operating systems, to maintenance teams changing underground cables.

Networks of New York, Ingrid Burrington.

Although these technological components are fundamental, they are often invisible and unbeknown to most of us. Their existence, often dismissed as banal and purely technical, is, however both fundamental as they shape our social and political interactions.

Interestingly, there has been an increasing interest from designers, artists and social scientists towards them (see references). Based on a series of observation, interviews, and possibly research interventions (participant observation, use of non- working prototypes, probes), students will explore the potential of the digital infrastructure of the urban environment in product/service/interaction design. Can they be repurposed for other more inspiring usages? How can we combine these technical elements in order to build more habitable near-futures? Can one take advantage of existing flaws/limits? Can we protect citizens from their overwhelming presence?

Expected output(s)

Based on both the field explorations and the process of analysing the observations, students will have to submit produce two artefacts:

• Output 1: a document that summarizes the research findings (map? poster? Brief fanzine?)

• Output2: an object that presents their design concept about how to take advantage of the digital infra/network. This may be done through objects, a short film, a performance, a series of drawings or visualizations; it is up to the students to select the most appropriate resolution for their outcomes.

These two artefacts will be presented orally the last day of the workshop.

Readings and references

General inspiration for field research
Perec, G. (2011). Thoughts of Sorts, Notting Hill Editions.
Perec, G. (2010). An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Wakefield Press. Smith, K. (2008). How to be an explorer of the world : portable art life museum. NYC : Penguin Books.

Field research methods in social sciences
Causey, A. (2016). Drawn to See: Drawing as an Ethnographic Method, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sanjek, R. (1990). Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology. Ithaca: Cornell University press.

Weiss, R.S. (1995). Learning From Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies. Simon & Schuster.

Field research methods in design/UX
Dourish, P. (2006). Implications for design, in Proceedings of the conference on Human Factors in computing systems (Montréal, Québec),pp. 541–550, ACM.

Gaver, B., Dunne, T., & Pacenti E. (1999). Cultural Probes. Interactions, 6 (1), 21-29.

Gaver, W. W., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., & Walker, B. (2004). Cultural probes and the value of uncertainty. Interactions, 11 (5), 53-56. Retrieved from http://cms.gold.ac.uk/media/30gaver-etal.probes+uncertainty.interactions04.pdf

Goodman, E., Kuniavsky, M. & Moed, A.(2012). Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research (2nd ed.), Morgan Kaufmann.

Nova, N. (2014). Beyond Design Ethnography. Berlin : SHS Publishing. Available at the following URL.

Portigal, Steve (2013). Interviewing Users: how to uncover compelling insights. San Francisco: Rosenfeld Media.

Digital/network infrastructures in social sciences/design/art

Arnall, T. (2014). Exploring 'Immaterials': Mediating Design's Invisible Materials. International Journal of Design, 8 (2).

Augé, M. (1995). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso.

Burrington, I. (2016). Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure. NYC: Melville House; Ill edition.

Gabrys, J. (2016). Program Earth. Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.

Star, Susan Leigh (1999): "The Ethnography of Infrastructure", American Behavioral Scientist 43, pp. 377‐91.

Sherpard, M. (2011). Sentient Cities: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Varnelis, K. (2009). The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Actar.

"Notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying"

Why do I blog this? It's a fascinating quote that I found in the book called "Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet" by Anna Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (eds.) 2017. I somewhat describes nicely what I think I'm interested in.

Sensor fail

September 22, Lausanne (Switzerland). I guess sensor-based soap dispensers have been designed in order to provide a touch-free system that is supposedly more hygienic for its users. However, almost everytime I run across such device, there's a little bit of soap under it. It's the messiness versus elegance that always happen when one think technology would be an easy solution for a simple problem.

Professional repair shop

September 12, 2017, Lyon, France. An afternoon spent in the repair shops near Place du Pont in Lyon. Although the ones catering laymen are on the main streets, I found this one devoted to professionals. The tinted windows interestingly allude to the opacity of the process and, perhaps, the necessity to avoid showing what happens behind.

No electricity for you here

July 30, 2017, Geneva (Switzerland). "People always ask us for this, we just can keep up with that."

Ethnographic experiential futures

Stuart Candy recently blogged about this design framework he and his colleagues use:

"ethnographic futures is more descriptive; looking for what's present but often hidden in people's heads. Experiential futures is more creative; rendering these notional possibilities visible, tangible, immersive and interactive, externalising and concretising representations of them for closer inspection and deeper discussion."

Why do I blog this? Currently looking back at our research process at the Laboratory. This one's kind of close to our interests and approaches.

On Fadell's regrets and techno-determinism

The other day I read this piece on Fast Company – not an usual website I peruse though – that reported on a panel that was organized at the Design Museum in London. The conversation, was between Tony Fadell (founder of Nest, and who participated in the iPod/iPhone design ten years ago), historian of science and technology David Edgerton, STS researcher Judy Wajcman and another entrepreneur, Bethany Koby.

Some quotes I find interesting, reported by the journalist address Fadell's concerns about the digital technologies he helped designing:

"I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world? (...) Did we really bring a nuclear bomb with information that can–like we see with fake news–blow up people’s brains and reprogram them? Or did we bring light to people who never had information, who can now be empowered? (...) And I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens (...) They literally feel like you’re tearing a piece of their person away from them—they get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days."

Why do I blog this? Well, I'm less interested here in the actual comments Fadell makes about the consequences of the technologies he helped designing than the fact that he expresses such concerns.

Also, what is strange here is that I'm pretty sure the two social sciences scholars – Edgerton and Wajcman – certainly explained that such vision might be deterministic and that there's more than a sole piece of technology to blame here. As Wajcman discussed in a piece published by Aeon few years ago, the situation is a bit more subtle. She's not exactly talking about self-absorbing cultures but her comment struck me as important to ponder Fadell's claim.

"Smartphones, of course, extend expectations of perpetual availability. But the fact that we feel the need to respond to email quickly is not due to the speed of data transmission, but because of norms that have built up about appropriate response times (...)  If we feel pressed for time today, it is not because of technology, but because of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set. Digital time is no different – ultimately it needs to be understood as a product of the ways in which humans use, interact with and indeed build technology. If we want technology to bring us a better future, we must contest the imperative of speed and democratise engineering. We must bring more imagination to the field of technological innovation."

Ethology/ethnography documentation

Although the focus on this book I a bit remote from my research interest, "Ornithology" (by Anne Geene & Arjan De Nooy) is one of the most fascinating kind of printed document that arrived on my desk (my kitchen table actually):

"Anne Geene and Arjan de Nooy combine visual tools from the science of birds with the specific characteristics of photography, thereby imparting a fresh look at both. Through their pseudoscientific approach, Geene and De Nooy explore the boundaries between the two disciplines, adding a layer that is usually absent in the representation and science of birds: humour. Their classifications form comical results through creative and associative thinking, and yet they use the scientific method to also create an artistic microcosm that seems far removed from its strictly ornithological counterpart. Together, Geene and De Nooy depart from the “classic” aesthetic of bird representation."