The Art and Science of Everything

Writing about power geometries of time-space compression, geographer Doreen Massey writes:

[D]ifferent social groups, and different individuals, are placed in very distinct ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. [… A]t the end of all the spectra are […] the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faxes and the e-mail, holding the international conference calls, the ones distributing the films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions. These are the groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compression, who can really use it and turn it to advantage, whose power and influence it very definitely increases. […]
But there are also groups who are doing a lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala and the undocumented migrant workers from Michoacán in Mexico, crowding into Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for it across the border into the US to grab a chance of a new life. Here the experience of movement, and indeed of a confusing plurality of cultures, is very different. (Massey, 1991: 149)

One site that might be interesting to study is looking at World of Warcraft “gold farmers” - low paid workers outside the US who play WOW full-time, collecting gold and other artifacts that are then sold to players for in the open market. How do their perceptions of networked time-space differ from their customers? Does this perspective spill over into meanings of other networked artifacts, such as mobile phones?

A certain (99 + 1) dollar portable computer project is supposed to launch soon. I’ve heard some predict only a 50% chance of anything ever happening. But what a fascinating historical event if it does, to go and document the short and long term impacts of the deployment.

Case 1) No uptake whatsover - policy implications
Case 2) Some uptake - x-cultural usability issues?
Case 3) Massive uptake - emergent phenomena to be documented as it happens. Could it be the new skolt lapp parable?

Collaborative Virtual Environments

This project also could have relevance to my design for collective action and critical mass ideas. What constitutes a sense of critical mass? How do features of those being interacted with affect the ability to productively deliberate and unite in cause?

What are the properties of technologies developed to support consensus building and collective action? How can technology provide a sense of critical mass? How are people mobilized to act?

How do these properties vary across cultures?

Ways to start researching this:
- inspirational interviews with people who organize lots of different kinds of emergent efforts
- readings in urban planning / space design, readings in crowd control (What design patterns does Irvine adhere to? Look at this as anti-goal.)
- readings in collective action
- ethnography in places where emergent efforts happen (Google, for example)

Relevance:
- software to support collective action
- software to help people identify and motivate each other to pursue causes they care about
- software for organizations like Google, where hierarchy is super flat and a lot of issues seem to get identified, prioritized, and strategized in an emergent way

The more I think about the idea of household appliances that communicate how much has been done with them and by whom, the more I doubt that it is a viable approach to self-consciousness of gender relations.

A practical starting point I just thought of was doing fieldwork in homes to understand the dynamics of how household labor gets coordinated and allocated. A specific observation from my own life is that people can get out of housework by emphasizing their incompetence. (In my mom’s case, she sometimes emphasizes her importance by emphasizing my incompetence. ) So what’s the problem? Are the tools not usable or learnable? Does knowledge of applicance operations strike a blow to some’s masculinity? Could you make household appliances more like a game to motivate participation?

Overall, what are ways that household appliance design assumes a certain kind of commited, regular user or a user who learns how to use it through socialization rather than experience and experimentation?

What are the elements of collective action? How everyday technologies such as cell phones be designed to support collective action and coordination? What do we get when we look at different cases of collective action, such as:
* flash mobs (which have tried to defy purpose)
* mass protests in south east asia

But Lilly, you find this fascinating, but not enough to actually follow up on and read about. What does that tell you?

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.

From an email I sent someone, again, to hold on to it:
How communication technologies are used and appropriated to uphold, subvert, or make flexible traditionally gendered divisions of labor.

What are examples of this? Required background reading is Ruth Schwartz Cohen’s “More Work for Mother” where she describes how many labor saving devices actually just raised standards of, say, cleanliness and saved labor for the sorts of things that men used to do.

What has the history of these technologies getting developed? What kind of utopian narrative did the designers have in their heads? Where they male?

But how are labor “saving” — or displacing — devices different from communication technologies? Are there ways that technology is making invisible work visible? Or is it simply enabling women to manage more tasks, but still saddling them with kinwork?

From an email I’m writing someone, but I like the phrasing so to keep it:

I have been interested in understanding how everyday interactive technologies, such as email, online communities, IM, privilege certain cultural and psychological styles over others. My longer term goal is to influence designers and builders.

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?