Week notes: Representation & Simulation
Making Things People Want > Making People Want Things
** Representation & Simulation (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//78447481/0/smitheryRepresentation-amp-Simulation/)
By john v willshire on Nov 10, 2014 07:40 pm I started reading The Death of Drawing; Architecture in the Age of Simulation (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0415834961/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=0415834961&linkCode=as2&tag=smitinnowork-21&linkId=7LTD4WAG2K6E7KO2) by David Ross Scheer today on a plane. I’m only a fifth of the way in, but already I’m hooked. It’s about how as the practice of drawing disappears from architecture, replaced by BIM (Building Information Modeling), a way of pulling together lots and lots of data to describe how it might interact, and therefore how a building should be designed. Scheer describes this as “representation” (drawing) versus “simulation” (BIM systems).
For Scheer, representations are loose, free. One drawing is one possible version of reality, but no more. A selection of drawings begins to build up a picture, but still, the viewer is left to fill in the gaps. Representations here allow space for creativity, not just of the drawer, but of all who look upon the drawings. We fill all the gaps in between the glimpses of reality we see.
Simulations, on the other hand, are “an artificial environment that creates an artificial experience that is felt to be reality”. They want the viewer to believe that they are real, because if they don’t, then they have failed in their task of simulation. Which means in turn there’s less space for creativity, for interpretation of meaning. If the simulation is not real, then the task is not to solve the problems, but to find a better simulation.
Scheer starts to ask some very interesting questions early on about Architecture (“When designs are evaluated in simulations, will the buildings themselves become simulations of the simulations? If architecture loses the idea of representation, how will buildings acquire meaning?“), and of course it’ll be fascinating to see where he goes in answer the three core questions he’s asking (my interpretations – i) What does it mean for the profession of an Architect? ii) What will become the nature of creativity in Architecture? iii) What role will Architecture play in culture in this world?).
For me, broadly thinking about the roles of representations and simulations in other spheres becomes really interesting. What if advertising agencies created ‘representations’, and media agencies ‘simulations’? How does data-driven product design fit in? What does it not leave space for? Where in organisations would we benefit from more representations, and less simulations? And how do we recognise what is representation, and what is simulation? More soon.
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** Interview with Beth Kolko (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//78424542/0/smitheryInterview-with-Beth-Kolko/)
By john v willshire on Nov 10, 2014 11:22 am As part of the preparation for running the third lab of the Stirling Crucible (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.stir.ac.uk/crucible/) at the University of Stirling, I spoke to Beth Kolko (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/https://twitter.com/bkolko) , Professor of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington, about an Experiment called Hackademia (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.hackademia.com/) , which is “an attempt to infect academic pursuits with a hacker ethos and challenge non-experts to see themselves as potentially significant contributors to innovative technologies.”
It’s not just great as an example of creating new conditions for learning in an academic setting, but also offers some great inspiration for other types of organisation where there’s a need to break down the barriers of ‘expertise’. Here’s what Beth said:
Beth_Kolko_web_bw_pic
Hackademia (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.hackademia.com/) had two starting points. The first was my own personal journey as an academic who stumbled into hacker communities around 2005/06, the early days of the maker community. I did that work solely as a non-professional activity, it was what I did in my off-hours. I would think “wow, this is really interesting, it’s an alternative research community”. It was like a third place, not academic or corporate, with its own emergent social and organisational practices.
Part of my interest was that people didn’t have formal expertise or credentials. My PHD is from an English department, but I’m a professor in an Engineering department; this means that all of my technical knowledge has been gained through informal means. Essentially, I studied the internet before it had pictures, and as the technology changed I kept up.
So I was an academic within hacker communities, really interested in how non-experts were gaining technical expertise. It is uncommon for someone at my stage of career to be a novice learner. There was something quite magical about that.
The second piece of the genesis of Hackademia was an undergraduate student I was working with, who was changing her major from social work to our department in Engineering. She said she’d never really thought of herself as someone who’d major in a technological discipline, and then we started talking about gender and technical fields. I said to her “well, I don’t know what makes women, or anyone, who is non-technical feel that they can enter a technical field… but let’s figure it out”.
I advertised for a group of students as an independent study, something they could take and get extra credit for it. You didn’t have to have a technical background to apply. We bought a first generation Makerbot, and I said “We’re going to build it. I don’t know how to do this, but you guys are going to have to figure it out, and you’re going to keep track of how you learn. You will be your own object of study”.
Metrix-3-9-10-0232
(Hackademia class of Winter 2010 – with honorary member Bre Pettis (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.brepettis.com/) )
So that was the first ten weeks, and I did it again, and again, and again. Every quarter for the first two years, keeping track of the failures and the successes… there were many more project/experiment failures than successes, but the programme has been very successful.
People had to learn the vocabulary of a new area. We had a room, and we had tools, and at the end of each quarter the room would be a mess. So what I would do is start each new cohort and say “we’re going to clean up, and we’re going to put things away”. It gave everyone the chance to learn the names of things, as we labelled the shelves and the bins that they would go in.
Instead of giving people the vocabulary on a list, it was a functional activity; they were creating the space that they were going to work in so that they would have ownership of that space. The conversation around the activity emerges to introduce vocabulary, which is really important; if you don’t even know the name of something, you can’t go and look it up online.
There was then a series of activities that were designed for success, but also to make people curious. I would always start people out with making an LED blink, by writing a few lines of Arduino code. Then you learn about copying; you can copy other peoples’ code, then refine it yourself. Usually there would be people who knew how to do that, and they would show people who didn’t know how to do it, which showed co-operative learning. Then they moved on to gradually more sophisticated tasks, then they’d finally do their own task.
I’d make them go off-campus, and see what was available in the real world, activities that took them outside their momentary learning community. Everything we did also leveraged online resources. I didn’t teach them anything; I wanted them to get into the habit of navigating the knowledge universe.
We created some data collection sheets, and started a blog about the technical aspects, they wrote reflective autoethnographies of their learning process; we produced a lot of documents. We then did exit interviews at the end of each quarter, with retrospectives of peoples’ experiences. Eventually, we’d put on our academic hats and analyse the data available to us (the autoethnographies, individual journals, and a bunch of other artefacts) and extracted six dimensions of technical learning, around which the Hackademia curriculum is built:
Identity, Motivation, Self-efficacy, Social Capital, Material Technical Practice, and Conception.
They’re built on top of what we know about informal science learning, but tweaked for engineers.
In the university community, we value expertise, and that is the death knell of innovation. If you really want interdisciplinary, transformative inquiry, professors like myself who are ‘experts’ have to learn to talk to people who have different expertise, and overlap these vocabularies and come to some sort of shared understanding.
———————-
Thanks to Beth for kindly taking the time to share the Hackdemia experiences with me. You can read more on the Hackademia blog (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.hackademia.com/blog/) over here, or read the full Hackademia paper (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/depts.washington.edu/tatlab/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/PDC2012HackademiaFinal-libre.pdf) that Beth and the team produced for the Participatory Design 2012 conference (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/pdc2012.org/) .
http://feeds.feedblitz.com//28/78424542/smithery http://feeds.feedblitz.com//30/78424542/smithery http://feeds.feedblitz.com//29/78424542/smithery,http%3a%2f%2fsmithery.co%2fwordpress%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2014%2f11%2fBeth_Kolko_web_bw_pic-600x400.png http://feeds.feedblitz.com//24/78424542/smithery http://feeds.feedblitz.com//19/78424542/smithery http://feeds.feedblitz.com//20/78424542/smithery http://smithery.co/making/interview-with-beth-kolko/#comments http://smithery.co/making/interview-with-beth-kolko/feed/
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** Interview with Nell Haynes (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//78421170/0/smitheryInterview-with-Nell-Haynes/)
By john v willshire on Nov 10, 2014 10:13 am As part of the preparation for running the third lab of the Stirling Crucible (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.stir.ac.uk/crucible/) at the University of Stirling, I spoke to Dr Nell Haynes (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/https://twitter.com/doctoraluchador) , one of the team who’s working on the Global Social Media Impact Study (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media) , about their approach to recording and sharing the project as they go. It’s very interesting specifically in terms of open academic research projects, but also more broadly in terms of how open working might apply to other types of organisation too. Here’s what Nell said…
nell haynes profile
It’s certainly the intention that this project is more open and visible; we’ve been doing the blog for about two years, which gets a fair number of hits, but there’s only really one post that got ‘picked up’. The idea is that it’s not just for an academic audience, or for an english-speaking audience, but it’s a global project that everybody should be able to learn from it.
We’re currently all writing a book about each field site [the locations around the world where each of the team is researching], but the idea is that they’re quite short and accessible; the ultimate goal is to have everything translated into eight languages (possibly more), everything open access, a final website with videos, photographs and all of the documents, and whatever else we come up with along the way.
My previous work had nothing to do with social media or technology, but I do think that in an anthropologically foundational way, social media is important to humanity, so it’s easy to get excited about those aspects of the project.
I finished my PHD in 2013, having started the research for that in 2011, and one of my Professors has had a blog for years and years, for as long as blogging has existed really. But she’s the one who encouraged me to blog, to put field notes, to put random thoughts on that. I’m not sure I’m the most effective blogger, but I’ve at least been trying it for a while. I think it’s helpful to the process for me because if I even just write a little description of what I did that day, I can go back in and slip that into the project later as it’s already in language that’s accessible. And if I need to make it sound more academic-y, then I can stick stuff in there. I try to make my writing interesting, rather than theoretically dense.
In terms of collaboration, when we were still in the field sites, every month we would write a 5,000 word report, and send it out and read everyone else’s. It was helpful to make yourself write something every month but also read other perspectives.
It was good for generating ideas of methodological things, or connections to think about. The man who is working in China talked a lot about Chinese spiritual beliefs, and how that’s connected to morality and social media, and that forced me to think about these things in context of the work I was doing in Chile.
Chinese family watch television on computer
(Photos from the GSMIS Flickr group (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/https://www.flickr.com/groups/social-networking/) )
I was actually the last person on the programme – they applied for a grant for eight people, and then a Chilean University got a separate grant and I started later. They’d had several months of planning here, and had been on field sites for four or five months. So I had to play catch up, but they had already collaboratively made a methodology plan, surveys already. I had to catch up, but I also had a lot of resources that were handed to me to help.
For me, this approach is very different from any other anthropology project I’ve encountered. I think it is a new thing that’s gaining a little bit of traction and respect. I did the US academic system, and as far as I know I’ve never seen anything as collaborative. And certainly there are senior researchers who write blogs in partnership, but usually they go to the same place to do it. In terms of having nine different field sites, I’m not aware of anything else like it.
We have a central blog, a Flickr, a Facebook and a Twitter, technically we have a Pinterest (but I don’t think anyone’s ever done anything with it). But the blog has definitely been the central piece to it, and the website has a lot of descriptions of the project and little bios of everyone working on it, but most of the traffic comes in through the blog. There are certain posts that get a lot of comments, but in generally speaking it’s about one a week.
There have been several people who have said “I’m really interested in the project, is there any way I can help?”. So we have various people translating things into different languages, and some people helping out with some social media stuff. There are some film-makers who’re not academic film makers, and there are some masters students too. It’s either educated professionals or academics, we’ve been fairly visible amongst the academic community. There’s not a lot of interest from the people in the field sites. Part of that is there are only a few posts translated.
Danny Miller (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/https://twitter.com/DannyAnth) wrote a blog post, and in it used the phrase “dead and buried”; I think what he actually said was “for teens, in this small English Town, Facebook may as well be dead and buried”.
The title of the post was then reworded slightly [“Facebook is dead amongst teens]”, and that’s what got picked up. It prompted everyone to go back to the blog post, but not necessarily paying attention to the exact wording of the blog post. [The headline of the post in question was picked up by several national and international news organisations].
It was what prompted us to put a disclaimer on the top of blog, “this is still in process, these are initial insights, not to be taken as forecasts”. We had a lot of discussions in December (2013) after it happened, and a US academic wrote this critique saying that ‘anthropologists shouldn’t be in the business of making predictions’, when actually we weren’t.
So it created some tension there, but we discussed it a lot, and vetted the blogs a little more, and making sure there was nothing scandalous. I don’t think it’s changed what we blog though. There’s been an increasing awareness though about making sure that if we are going to make some sort of bigger claim, we have some more data included.
For me, and the way I blog, it always starts with a story. I just sit down and write it, and whilst I’m writing it. I feel it should be something good, and have a point. I edit it a lot, it tends to be much longer the first time I write it. Part of it is figuring out what your style is, and how you like to write, and not putting too much pressure on yourself.
Readability is important. I have an audience in mind, for the most part; my sister, she’s an artist who lives in Madrid, she’s nothing to do with academia, so I send her things and she’s like “I have no idea what this word means, what do you mean by this sentence…”. She’s my imaginary audience because she’s a really smart person, but not at all in an academic sense, or not at all part of the academy. So if I say something pointless or dumb, she’ll say “don’t say that”.
There’s a tendency to try to fit in; you have to use this particular big word to try to fit in with a crowd of people who’re particularly into a specific topic. It’s almost like a rite of passage, a social norm. You have to perform this academic identity in order to be accepted, or even just feel like you’re part of it. And I think for some people, it becomes a kind of crutch. But at the same time, to be published in prestigious academic journals, you have to play that game.
———————
Thanks to Nell for her generousity of both time and openness. Follow the Global Social Media Impact Study (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/www.ucl.ac.uk/global-social-media) here, and if you’re interested, a good further read on the implications of the reaction to the Facebook post is this piece by Peter Spear, “Qualitative Illiteracy and the One-Eyed Business (http://feeds.feedblitz.com//t/0/0/smithery/https://medium.com/brand-listening/qualitative-illiteracy-and-the-one-eyed-business-8461f5886a76) “.
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