attention encourages

that heliotropism of
feelings planting
the stones
unplanning
the placid assumptions

[ the current incarnation of the 81-year-old comic strip Nancy is fantastic, and while its first printed collection technically comes out tomorrow, the vagaries of teaming left it here today; in celebration of this and the scientific method we present to you our empirical study of Zhuangzical instances of this sequential art; other recent work in this field includes how to do nothing. ---Ned. ]

 

abstract

 

introduction

 

methods

 

results

 

discussion

 

future work

 

conclusion

 

appendix

nobody no body

the sun, casting its blueprints upon

if the mind's excuse
is rationalization, smoothing
materiality's teeth, if thoughts
rise but to justify, then every fall
is also a daydream of being
caught, every fall
is but a daydream of being held.

perhaps they needn't be accidents,
these scenes where we build
upon observations and affections
to share and grow in the sharing
of each other. they can be
large rituals, small roasts,
winks and asides, introductions,
preparations: "this
is something I love of them
if you see it too I'd love to share."
yes, there must be
care and conversation around
consent and privacy, on letting
those seen
shed the skin of self
both in and out of sight;
such is the nature of care
in this potluck feast of life.

Procrastination is a pursuing

being from is important
but difficult: more a convergence
than a causation, always in re-
consideration and return, caught
on that boundary between self-
and social-perceptions of self.

fromness implies a velocity,
but there are many kinds of velox:
the velocity of arithmetic,
a train at one time in one town found
later in another, though summary
statistics of a journey are no
journey at all;

there can be a hypochondria

thread,
ravel
the already-gone moment
and turn, spin spin superwash
nonsense
to prepare the world for machines'
glow. let artifice speak
on its own terms,
let letting let sleds, slat bedding
into nothing. into nothing.
the man's children think we are –

[ interactive and buttery smooth at cuuuu.atu.red ]

perched squatting

and we, just young enough
to step under the ladder
and over the thorns
putting risk in trust in risk
to die to hope of
life flickering with every
breath rising,

In Christmas 2000, when I was ten and still excited about it, my uncle gave me an atlas for Christmas. I barely glanced at its maps of cities and roads; it was chaptered by continent, and each was introduced with two full facing pages of colorful visualizations. A map of rainfall, a map of temperatures, a map of endangered species, a map of mineral resources, a map of soil types, and probably others I’ve forgotten, though I still remember the page’s layout and vivid color schemes. They were too beautiful, too cool, not to emulate.

So I used them to daydream a new continent, Zealia, (New Zealand plus Australia, what could be better?) placed directly over Sri Lanka (whose rainfall and temperatures looked perfect on the Asia map), with my favorite endangered species and the coolest minerals (gold, lots of uranium, yttrium, other exotic-sounding mineables). This utopian speculation, turning those beautiful analyses into play, is still at the core of how I work and how I teach design.

But the atlas’ choices of what to show, and my following of them, were of course almost parodically colonial, designed for extraction and exoticization. People, such as the miners of those intriguingly-named metals, were never shown, nor languages, though I saved a few Sri Lankan names for cities. Never did I consider that all those endangered species might not have to be endangered to be worth putting on a map. As I learned more about history, power, and privilege, I began to unpack my vivid memories of Zealia, and pull up some roots of its design and my desires. This critical reflexivity, doing the work to find uncomfortable truths and reasons, is also at the core of how I think, work, and teach. When I play with utopias now, I try to do so critically and collaboratively: when I am guided by my hopes, I work also to be guided by the knowledges of people who aren’t shown on the map.  

I’m intrigued by the formation of shared ideas (aka joint-cognitive design concepts) during creative group work. For example: imagine a group of people discussing something they’ve agreed to work on together: it starts out as just a name or label, but as they come together they build it up by talking about their perspectives on what it should be. Then a fascinating thing happens: someone at the table asks another person “what do you think [a particular part of the concept] looks like?” At this point the asker is referencing a shared idea, something that isn’t physically real (though it may be referenced in sketches), but that the asker can imagine, and what’s more knows the person they’re asking the question of can imagine, and further, that that person can see things in this shared reality that the asker cannot.

This kind of conversation has happened in many of the engineering, product design, and teaching teams I’ve been a part of, and it generally isn’t remarked upon. But in my experience it’s during this formation of the shared idea where many of the voices, perspectives, and concerns that are marginalized or less powerful are prevented from shaping the direction of a project. The shared idea, especially as anchored in sketches, CAD, spreadsheets, can serve as a secret language, excluding those who were not given the chance to build bridges from their experience to the shared idea from having a hand in the project’s vision and organization of work. For me, a powerful realization of this came while teaching in Ghana, where when we presented hands-on activities students held back on telling relations between chemistry (which they’d learned in English) and everyday life (in a city that spoke Fanti) until the classroom became a comfortable place for them to switch between the two languages.

My hope for this class is to focus on co-creating those moments and representations of shared ideas in ways that build power at and amplify voices along the margin of who we consider “designers”. This is currently my research for a Mechanical Engineering PhD, but it started when I was working in the engineering industry: I wanted the machinists to be critiquing the modelers’ concepts just as much as the modelers were currently critiquing the machinists’. However, the aerospace research engineering that I started with began to feel a bit too privileged to hold some of my hopes for co-design. As my expertise is in interviewing practitioners about the shared ideas of their work (which are by their nature difficult to put into words) my hope is to work with a community of practitioners to build power and knowledge such that their shared ideas are given more weight in the rooms they bring them to.