The Art and Science of Everything

People wardriving or walking around with laptop trying to find good wifi signal. They’re trying to perceive space using alternative sensory mechanisms. Today, we have radically diff tech landscape and a broader set of spaces of interest to cscw.

How have place/space been taken up?

How might recent developments reinvigorate those interests?
Layer cake model

space is the geometric, mathematical account of the world — the materiality of the world as it “just is” and space as the socially constructed reality we weave collectively

is there a tendency to also perceive social life as layered on top of protocols, hardware, platforms? But the “abstractions mired in TCPIP are mired in social practice.” That materiality is shaped by social concerns.

Likewise, the materiality of space is shaped by social concerns.

Paul proposes that “place” is concerned with uniqueness, difference, separation, identity. “Space” concerned with connection, movement, uniformity — the thing that is held more stable through transitions. And both are about social action.

Math is not “natural” — it represents choices made about how to represent the world, and those choices often are made in service of some goal that people have. Edward Hutchins: “Not until the mercator projection  did the straight line have a computational purpose.”

Spatial practice

space is itself enacted

strategic practice = focused on centers of power, like material design of buildings which force people into certain relationships. (force is a little strong, no?) structuring spaces certain kind of way

tactical practices = people going around everyday life, interacting with power forms, but also possible sites of resistance, reappropriation

design is a strategic practice, use is a tactical practice

power geometries 

massey: looking at flows of ppl goods, info and capital, have to look at power arrangements

who moves, doesn’t; who decides on flows; who is liberated or imprisoned

who is mobile, how, and why? mobile computing urban space and consumption, a 20 something year old with a predatory attitude towards city has diff mobility than taxi driver for whom mobilikty is a form of labor

technologies of spatiality 

logics of spatial practice

dangers of “virtual” - the emergence of social and cultural practice around creation of new virtual spaces? dourish suggests instead reconfiguration of existing space

collective legibility of space

“ubiq.” and “seamless” infrastructures? hiding in gps blackspots, exploiting network seams in Treasure.

reading people, objects, and events in space and encountering space as peopled

lilly - what if you could encounter a prison or an interrogation room as peopled? potential for collective action despite spatio-temporal isolation

collaboration w jennifer cole and simon terry - investigating sex offenders in san diego. they’re happy to have a record of where they are as a relief from having police hassle them.

why rewrite space rather than creating new concept? dourish wants to connect space and place in cscw with debates in other disciplines. current accounts of tech in human geography are pretty weak.

Implications for Design by Paul Dourish (CHI 2006 paper)

Central points:

• The requirements that ethnography provide an “implications for design” creates a relationship in which knowledge is produced for the benefit of the designers and administrators — those who wish to create some goal state in a system that happens to have people (”users”) in it. Instead, Suchman proposes ethnography as providing an account of the partnership in which producers and consumers co-constitute one another, in part through technological artifacts.
• A key part of ethnography often lost in the way ethnography gets thrown about as a design methodology is the self-consciousness of the observer as a part of the social relations richly described. The observer is not a positivist instrument for transmitting impressions of the observed. (However, a lot of SCOT could be construed as including this subjectivity in non-human observation instruments’ construction as well.)
• Ethnography can have empirical outcomes, which inform others of the simple facts observed, as framed and understood by the observer, but we should not overlook the analytical outcome — those that, when revealed, call into question or qualify assumptions tacit in the design, the specification, the technologist-consumer relationship…

I read this article because I was writing an email to PD and I wanted to make sure I didn’t misuse ethnography and ethnomethodology when I really meant interview. I got more than I bargained for, but that’s good.

The really difficult thing about the stuff I’m interested in is that there is messy middle point between technological determinism (the idea that technologies have an stable and constant “impact” that is determined by it’s form/design/capabilities) and socially constructed and understood technologies.

Yes, technologies reify certain cultural values and afford or privilege certain ways of being over others. But they are also used and hacked in ways that the designers did not expect to allow, but they do. So value sensitive design is not an answer, but flexible and open design at least makes a deliberate move towards greater agnosticism. But flexible and open design might be the analog of political libertarianism, where it privileges those who are already privileged by the system beyond the technology/law.

Brain. Exploding.

Random research idea: One problem at contributes to girls’ not participating in programming kinds of creativity is that they often don’t have access to a social network that provides support and information to help them get started and keep going. While they boys are teaching each other video game cheats and network card installation, the few girls who may be interested are problem being left out. (This is exactly what happened to me, anyways.) What if there was some sort of programming/development environment where, say, one person would script something of interest and then have cool things they could do by getting others to respond with their own interoperable scripts? Maggie builds a MySpace mosaic patch and invites her friend Jen to script her own little piece to add to the mosaic. Jen instantly has one person who knows the environment better than she does, and a social and creative motivation for participating. It’s a pretty handwavy idea, but what if we build viral properties into programming to make it more powerful and more supportive of learning?

I’m geeking out on Square One Research on The Human Eye and Sight. It is the best explanation of perception I’ve seen with frequent explanations of relevance to design — environmmental, software, architecture, and even lighting.

My favorite facts so far:

• The persistence of vision of cones is much longer than that of rods, around 1/20th of a second. This is why flicker is much easier to detect out of the corners of the eye rather than directly in front.

  (Cones are sensitive to different frequencies of light, whereas rods are sensitive to light levels. Rods are concentrated away from the macular, the central focus point of the eye.)

• Comfort and visibility are dependent upon the luminance patterns within the visual field. Comfort is dependent on the variation in luminances in the visual field (luminance ratios)…Clutter can create an overload of the visual system due to excessive luminance ratios.

  Luminance is the amount of light reflected off of an object and into the eye. I hadn’t thought about the discomfort caused by clutter, since my concern over clutter is dominted by the difficulties cluttered design pose for visual search (predictability to help scanning as well as to make it easier to draw attention by breaking the pattern).

• The highest visibility occurs when the object is brighter than the background (white print on black paper).

  How the history of paper, ink, and computer interfaces has flown in the face of perception science. Lament!

• As the level of background luminance increases, the time required to interpret details will decrease. Just as the camera requires a longer exposure time in dim light than in bright light, so does the eye. The eye can distinguish and discriminate details at low luminance levels if given enough time.

  Kinda useless to me, unless I try to design watermarks that only emerge if stared at or some such, but still cool.

All this was prompted by me wanting to review the human eye’s discrimination of detail in terms of degrees, since I interviewed a HCI-cog psych PhD the other day and he geeked too quickly for me to keep up when talking about details. I found that on the Square one page too, under “Visual Acuity,” all the way at the bottom. The journey was long and geeky, but worth it.