Looking, Walking, Being

“The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in.”
- Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking’s a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That’s
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

~ Denise Levertov

"“In reinventing the world of intense, unreproducible, local knowledge, seemingly by a denial or evasion of current reality, fantasists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves. They are trying to restore the sense — to regain the knowledge — that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life.

The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives and therefore offers hope.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, Cheek by Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters

Quotes like this remind me of Le Guin’s anthropological approach to storytelling. Hope, for me, has always been most easily grasped through cultural diversity. Somewhere, sometime, there have been people who lived differently–and it worked."

"I’m interested in words as materials for making, and in the written word as an artefact or thing that has been made. I’m also interested in why words (or the written word as distinguished from books) are generally not considered part of “Maker culture.”

Barry’s point was that Maker culture is specifically concerned with hardware, and since I think this definition is generally accepted then words-as-materials have no place there. If Making is about problem-solving, then creative writing has no place there either."

"So, does this mean that if the primary goal of (creative) writing is expression, the only way it can be incorporated into Maker culture is to use words explicitly for problem-solving, or the production of (cultural) solutions? How, exactly, does that differ from aesthetic goals–and especially if we do not distinguish between aesthetics and ethics?"

[Follow-up post here: http://www.designculturelab.org/2012/03/01/more-thoughts-on-writing-and-making/ ]

"I’m most struck by the possibility that a story’s capacity to affect a reader depends on how successfully a writer can bring people, places and things to life. And what I take from Hemingway here is that this requires a writer to blur the line between fact and fiction, to write truly without writing the Truth.

In any case, I want my writing to inhabit, and evoke, this space–and moving in this direction is, I think, the key to merging researcher and writer to create good ethnographic fiction."

"Original and world-changing design was long considered the product of solitary geniuses, masters and heroes, but recent research has argued that cultural innovation is often the result of everyday actions by ordinary people. This course critically and creatively examines the dynamic and collaborative networks that characterise professional and amateur design today, and prepares students to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead."

[Course aims, course content, course assignments (4 of them) follow, all worth reading]

To get started, students are required to complete the following task (adapted from The Exercise Book) for the first tutorial:

1) Go for a walk with a notebook and pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

2) Compose one written page with three sections. Start the first section with “I see…”, the second section with “I remember…” and the third section with “I imagine…”."

"The article is about sophisticated computerized environments affording complex interactivity to pets and animals. Agricultural engineering, primate cognition studies, pet-tracking systems and telemetric sensor devices worn by leopards, birds or elephants are standard examples of such animal-computer interactions. The author highlight that although these examples are fairly common, this line of research has never really entered mainstream HCI/Computer science, leaving the “animal perspective” left aside in such body of work: “For some reason, animal-computer interaction (ACI) is, quite literally, the elephant in the room of user- computer interaction research“."<br />
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[See also: http://www.designculturelab.org/2011/07/28/a-new-era-of-animal-centred-computer-interaction-research-and-design/ ]

"Led by Dr Anne Galloway, the Design Culture Lab supports collaborative and multidisciplinary research into the material, visual and discursive aspects of technology.<br />
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By working to understand objects, images and ideas in specific social and cultural contexts, we provide university, industry, government and public stakeholders with critical and creative insights into the production and consumption of both historical and emerging technologies.<br />
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We’re based in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, but we’re at home with anyone interested in the stuff of everyday life.<br />
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We’re available to speak with your organisation about our research and we’re always interested in meeting potential collaborators and postgraduate students to help us think, do and make interesting things.<br />
<br />
Please contact Anne Galloway for more information."

"Urban computing research may fruitfully be grounded in the daily practices of the present and not lead by architectural and technological fantasies of the metropolis of tomorrow.<br />
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Urban computing research requires a fundamental cross disciplinary focus. A broader understanding of urban computing includes alternative perspectives and values to the discourse and to the design process.<br />
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The understanding of urban computing and its implications must move beyond real vs virtual conceptual binaries. In daily life digital technology and “real” spaces can not be seen as separate domains.<br />
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Urban computing belongs in the broader context of digital technology in everyday life. It should be understood in relation to both domestic practices and general network culture.<br />
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Urban computing research should take the messiness of everyday life as its central theme. Computing and digital networks will never become the seamless and orderly utopia envisioned in traditional ubicomp research."

"Design scholars Anne Galloway & Matt Ward state that "various online lists of pervasive computing & locative media projects draw out breadth of current classification schema: everything from mobile games, place-based storytelling, spatial annotation & networked performances to device-specific applications."

"Interesting how “literature” looks backwards but not forwards."

"As I've said many times, who and what get excluded from design visions are just as interesting and important as what and who are included. Western philosophers have long held that a society can be judged by how it treats its weakest or least fortunate members (in other words, who we ignore or abandon) and contemporary notions of cultural citizenship rely precisely on how well we interact with people who are different from us."

"We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements and collect information about the spaces through which we pass, can also make it easier for people to keep track of the places and things that matter most to them. From geo-visualisations and mapping mash-ups, to the mobile geospatial web and location-based services, people’s relationships to places (and each other) are changing."

"The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging 1, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design."

"Part of this involves the creative corruption of information - along the lines of bricolage or remixing - as well as the selective and wholesale deletion of information."

"at UbiComp, surrounded by examples of ubiquitous & merciless memory, I again wondered about differences between dementia (as forced forgetfulness), nostalgia (as voluntary forgetfulness) and hope (as necessary forgetfulness)."

"Now, the idea that design can play a productive role in managing complexity is hardly new, but I do see a lot of potential in designing and using objects (things) to engage publics around particular issues, or matters of concern."

"point to where we have in past made or become something else—also remind us we can do so again in future. If we treat them not as irregularities to be hidden but as indicators of our abilities to intervene in the world, seams and scars offer us glimpse