The Role of Research and Prototyping in Design (2)

Here, Tim Brown of IDEO talks about the importance of research and prototyping in Design. He discusses the importance of thinking big and moving beyond the creation of consumable objects to thinking about processes, change and innovation. The video is the second installment of my series on research in the arts and design.

21st Century Student

I will call him Anthony. He arrived in Vancouver with a trunk full of DVD's. He uses SMS and a variety of social networking tools to communicate with friends and family. He uses a small video camera to record his everyday life and edits the output on a laptop and then uploads the material onto the Web. He is adept at video games, though they are not an obsession. Cell phones are expensive, but he finds the money. This sounds familiar; an entire generation working creatively with Facebook and Vimeo and Youtube and Flckr. He loves old movies, hence the DVD's. He knows more about films from the 1970's and 1980's than most film historians. He can quote dialogue from many films and reference specific shots with ease. He uses his expertise in editing to comment on the world and would prefer to show you a short video response to events than just talk about them.

Cultural analysts tend to examine Anthony's activities and use of technology as phenomena, as moving targets which change all the time, just as they saw pop music in the 1960's as a momentary phase or like their early comments on personal computers which did not generally anticipate their present ubiquity.

However, what Anthony is doing is building and creating a new language that combines many of the features of conventional languages but is more of a hybrid of many different modes of expression. Just as we don't really talk about language as a phenomenon, (because it is inherent to everything that we do) we can't deal with this explosion of new languages as if they are simply a phase or a cultural anomaly.

What if this is the new form and shape of writing? What if all of these fragments, verbal, non-verbal, images and sounds are inherent to an entire generation and is their mode of expression?

Language, verbal and written is at the core of what humans do everyday. But, language has always been very supple, capable of incorporating not only new words, but also new modalities of expression. Music for example became a formalized notational system through the adaptation and incorporation of some of the principles of language. Films use narrative, but then move beyond conventional language structure into a hybrid of voice, speech, sounds and images.

As long as Anthony's incorporation of technology and new forms of expression is viewed as a phenomenon it is unlikely that we will understand the degree to which he is changing the fundamental notions of communications to which we have become accustomed over the last century.

Anthony however has many problems with writing. He is uncomfortable with words on a page. He wants to use graphics and other media to make his points. He is more comfortable with the fragment, with the poetic than he is with the whole sentence. He is prepared to communicate, but only on his own terms.

It is my own feeling that the ubiquity of computers and digital technologies means that all cultural phenomena are now available for use by Anthony and his generation and they are producing a new framework of communications within which writing is only a piece and not the whole.

Some may view this as a disaster. I see Anthony as a harbinger of the future. He will not take traditional composition classes to learn how to write. Instead, he will communicate with the tools that he finds comfortable to use and he will persist in making himself heard or read. But, reading will not only be text-based. Text on a page is as much design as it is media. The elliptical nature of the verbal will have to be accommodated within the traditions of writing, but writing and even grammar will have to change.

I have been talking about a new world of writing that our culture is experimenting with in which conventional notions of texts, literacy and coherence are being replaced with multiples, many media used as much for experience as expression. Within this world, a camera, or mobile phone becomes a vehicle for writing. It is not enough to say that this means the end of literacy as we know it. It simply means that language is evolving to meet the needs of far more complex expectations around communications. So, the use of a short form like Twitter hints at the importance of the poetic. And the poetic is more connected to Rap music than it is to conventional notions of discursive exchange. In other words, bursts of communications, fragments and sounds combined with images constitute more than just another phase of cultural activity. They are at the heart of something far richer, a phantasmagoria of intersecting modes of communications that in part or in sum lead to connectivity and interaction.

The Transformation of Culture (2)

In my previous post, I talked about the new world of writing that our culture is experimenting with in which conventional notions of texts, literacy and coherence are being replaced with multiples, many media used as much for experience as expression. Within this world, a camera, or mobile phone becomes a vehicle for writing. It is not enough to say that this means the end of literacy as we know it. It simply means that language is evolving to meet the needs of far more complex expectations around communications. So, the use of a short form like Twitter hints at the importance of the poetic. And the poetic is more connected to Rap music than it is to conventional notions of discursive exchange. In other words, bursts of communications, fragments and sounds combined with images constitute more than just another phase of cultural activity. They are at the heart of something far richer, a phantasmagoria of intersecting modes of communications that in part or in sum lead to connectivity and interaction.

Wires to the Sky

In 1938, Orson Welles altered radio forever. Welles produced and acted in one of the most famous broadcasts in the history of the medium War of the Worlds. Radio was a relatively new technology although by 1936 over ninety-eight percent of the British population and over sixty percent of Americans had radios in their homes. Welles played a trick on his audience. He used the authority of a newscaster to fabricate a first-person account of the landing of invaders from Mars on earth.

In 1965, the filmmaker, Peter Watkins did the same thing with his film The War Game. Although it was supposed to be shown on BBC television, the film never made it to air. There were fears that it would overwhelm viewers and frighten them. Watkins used many of the same techniques that Welles had developed for radio except the topic this time was a nuclear holocaust and its aftermath shot in cinema-vérité style. In both instances, the outcry was enormous. The primary effect of these productions was to foreground the impact of media on our culture, identity and sense of history. In Welles’s case, the police actually came to the studio to try to stop the broadcast.

The bridge between truth and fiction was crossed many times by Welles and Watkins who deliberately highlighted and took advantage of the weaknesses and the strengths of mass media. Most importantly, both artists used images and sounds to flout the conventions of communication that had quickly become standardized within the broadcast and film industries. Watkins spent his career exploring a style of self-reflexive documentary that in recent times has been taken up by music videos, television, and Hollywood films. Perhaps the most blatant example of this is The Blair Witch Project, which owes a great deal to Watkins’s film Culloden made in 1964. In both these cases, hand-held cameras were as important as Welles’s voice in overriding the fictional elements of the narrative with the sensation that the story was true.

As both Welles and Watkins understood, there is a wonderful, albeit contradictory fragility in our relations with images and sounds. Our culture is also in the midst of a profound transition as we negotiate our way through the maze of human, social and economic relations that digital technologies are generating. I see this process of transition as an opportunity to reinvigorate our relationship with the tools provided by communications technologies.

Transitional periods like the one we are living through at the moment, allow us to develop new models that will facilitate our understanding of why the invention and development of new technologies continues to be one of the most important activities of Western culture. This, despite the fact that new technologies don't necessarily lead to positive change. The design and use of any new technology is never inevitably bound to the outcomes that were anticipated by its creators, something that the recently deceased author Arthur C. Clarke understood really well.

Why are our identities so bound up with the media technologies that surround us? Ironically, the cultural and social tendency in the discussion of new technologies is to talk about what has been lost. My own approach is to cautiously explore what has been gained.

Instead of seeing the future through dystopic eyes, a future more defined by machines and media than by humans, I want to suggest that the technologies of communication we have created are not just tools or supports for human endeavors. Rather, in tandem with our growth as a civilization, communications-based technologies have always been a part of the ecology of human existence. This is not meant to downplay the legitimate fears that many people have about computers for example, and their possible dominance in the affairs of humans. I do not want to dilute worries about living within simulated spaces and losing contact with reality.

On the other hand, all new technologies have to varying degrees been the means through which Western culture has defined everything from religion to politics to culture. We are very good at building ecological spaces based on images and sounds. The advent of digital media is just one additional phase in a long history of development that has its roots in music, performance and a variety of cultural forms that are dependent on spectators, participation, and presentational technologies.

The Practice of Interdisciplinarity in Design and New Media (Final)

Please refer to the last three entries for the context for this series.

The NewMic collaboration began with two major reference points, Palo Alto and MIT’s Media Lab. Again, this was not unusual. Other projects in Montreal, Melbourne, Dublin and Germany referred to and attempted to reflect the successes of MIT and Xerox. In the beginning the mandate of NewMic was described as follows:

To accomplish its mission, NewMIC is focused on the following objectives:

• Attracting and retaining outstanding faculty and graduate and undergraduate students in new media research and in art and design areas.
• Building excellence in new media innovation.
• Creating more skilled IT staff and industry clusters.
• Developing better industry-university-institute collaboration for the purposes of technology transfer.
• Encouraging the transfer and commercialization of technology through incubation support.
• Attracting more venture capital to the new media industry. (March 2001)

The industrial design component was incorporated into the vision by default under the rubric of New Media. This proved to be an error because so much of New Media is driven by the cross disciplinary relationship among interface design, product design and inclusive design. Ultimately, the goal was to frame the experience of users of New Media within a product-oriented set of research pursuits. Ironically, so many of the lessons that designers have learned over the last two decades, the importance of detailed ethnographic inquiry, the need to think about the relationship between product and user, the flexibility that is necessary to make interfaces work for many diverse constituents, the fact that design is really about people. See a recent speech by Dr. Stefano Marzano, CEO & Chief Creative Director, Philips Design and the knowledge that inclusivity cannot be attained without understanding how people live, was not directly applied to the research in New Media.

The emphasis on innovation, technology transfer and commercialization, although necessary, cannot be accomplished in a context that is entirely oriented towards applied research with short timelines. This is a conundrum because it is completely understandable that industry would want to see some results from their investment, but the essence of collaboration is that it takes time. In fact, one of the crucial lessons of the NewMic experience is that developing designs that are environmentally sensitive and inclusive requires not only that people from different disciplines participate, but that time be given over to the development of shared communities of interest. Interdisciplinarity is as much about a coming together as it is about recognizing differences.

Here are some examples of the discussions that were held on various projects:

Scenario 1:

Setting: World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle
Technology: Wireless devices
1. Two organizers need to stay in constant contact. They need to gain access to information quickly and efficiently.
2. Their wireless devices have to have access to a mapping program that allows them to constantly track each other,
3. They run into unexpected problems including some demonstrators destroying public property, additional police blockades and more passive demonstrators who want to march peacefully but find themselves caught up in the action.

Use:

1. Telephonic
2. Exchange of information
3. Mapping
4. Ability to connect to other organizers
5. Ability to send video images quickly to confirm events
6. Ability to allow other organizers to join their private network
7. Ability to gather in snippets of news broadcasts for additional overviews of the information
8. Instant messaging
9. Use of icons to show location and intention

The distance between the devices determines connectivity and peering relationships are established and can change as circumstances permit. An important feature would have to be the ability to identify hostile as well as friendly “connects.��?

Living Archive:

The living archive becomes an adaptable software component of P2P. As the demonstrations develop, the LA brings all of the data into a series of predetermined categories. Then, using AI, it begins to prioritize the input and change the order to reflect moment-to-moment changes in events.

Components:

1. Memory cells
2. Visible icons for the cells
3. Input tracing
4. Output tracing
5. Cells can be rearranged and edited in much the same way as a series of images
6. As different memory cells are attached to each other, the program maps the history
7. Images and sounds form one of the sources for the cells

The key to a successful communications network will be the ad hoc nature of the usage. There will have to be enough elements to allow for changes on the spot.