MY LIBRARY

This description and idea is taken from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
It is probably worth to have a look at this book.

Another interesting concept arise during the discussion is the idea of READER or TRANSLATOR, or MAP between the two world, real and informational.

http://www.aec.at/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp?iProjectID=9073

locative media arts

Review by John F. Barber
Digital Technology and Culture, Washington State University Vancouver

jfbarber@eaze.net

The notion of an immersive, virtual-reality space within vast computer networks evolves from speculative and theoretical work ranging from Vannevar Bush to Marshall McLuhan to Verner Vinge to William Gibson to Neal Stephenson to Jay David Bolter. This computer mediated-space, cyberspace as Gibson named and others have theorized it, possesses a topographical quality capable of fostering and sustaining interaction among those who use the medium in order to communicate in various ways. Massive multi-player online games and virtual reality interactive worlds are testament to the belief that real things can and do happen in these environments. Cyberspace, the place behind the computer screen, the space between networked computers, has always been considered a separate space, a place one visited via computer-mediated communication. But, as more and more communication contexts have gone online–working, banking, dating, checking the weather or news, and, indeed, socializing–users have begun to interact with network technology as much more than a computational device.

In fact, as Mark Nunes argues in his book, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life, computer networks and computer-mediated communication now penetrate the spaces of everyday life, outside of cyberspace, at fundamental levels to form a “networked social space, articulated through a zone of interaction marked by a human-computer interface” (xvi). As Nunes argues, this interface travels with us, rather than we to it, through wireless laptops and web-enabled cellular telephony. As a result, a private and personalized zone of interaction with global networks takes a significant part in the production of social space(s) that define and determine our lives.

Nunes bases his own theorization on the work of Henri Lefebvre whose work on analyzing space required an understanding of any social space as a dynamic process involving material forms, conceptual structures, and lived practice. Recapping Lefebvre, Nunes argues that cyberspaces of everyday life are not things, devoid of characteristics or significance, but rather social processes defined by the necessity for dynamic analysis. For example, Nunes asks of the cyberspaces of everyday life, are we engaged in the production of new spaces and social relations, or merely simulating social structures in hyperreality? How does our experience of the public and private, the local and global change in a network-created social space? What is the significance of outsourcing and online education in the production of this social space?

Nunes says answers must come from an analysis of the context of everyday life. The focal point is no longer where we go and what we do with regard to computer-mediated communication, but rather how we respond to and interact with the social spaces created for us by networked-technology. Furthermore, he argues that these spaces do not coordinate into an overall system, but rather “interpenetrate each other, producing spaces in conflict” (xxvi).

From this theoretical base, Nunes examines, in a chapter titled “Virtual Worlds and Situated Spaces,” how web sites enact spaces of control for users and in doing so participate in a history of conceiving the world as a comprehensive, comprehendible whole. In contrast, one can identify web sites that situate everyday life as aberrant or highly situated accounts that alter perceived relations between the “global” and “local” in networked societies. In another chapter, “Student Bodies,” Nunes addresses corporeality and everyday spaces enacted through computer-mediated communication in the university, through both distance education and computer-aided instruction, to better understand online learning as an event involving bodily and discursive dispositions.

In his afterword, “Digital Dis-strophe,” Nunes focuses on how the relation between networked and everyday life spaces were affected by the bursting of the “Internet bubble” in March 2000 and the toppling of the World Trade Center in September 2001. He argues that the networked structures of computer-mediated communication have become more dominant in the production of social space and that, as distributed networks become a more common feature of everyday life, so does distributed control. For example, implementation of the Patriot Act and its emphasis on surveillance and control brings into question the role of virtual space and its role in the offline world.

In the end, Nunes provides an interesting and compelling critical framework for understanding how networked technology takes part in the production of social space. As networks pass more and more unnoticed into and through daily life and culture, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life emphasizes the mapping of theory onto lived practice, the lived embodiment of culture, foregrounding that cyberspace is no longer a place we go with network technology, but how we live with that same technology as it permeates our daily lives.

Reviewed by Alise Piebalga
University of Plymouth

alise.piebalga@plymouth.ac.uk

Re Views: Artists and Public Space is a collection of articles and essays written by arts professionals in response to 10 successful, public art commissions by a visual arts commissioning agency, Artpoint. The 10 works selected illustrate a highly diverse and varied understanding of an artistic intervention within a public space from architectural contributions and research to a more conventional public installation.

Louise O’Reilly, the Artpoint’s director and artist, Edward Allington, have contributed with the two introductory chapters discussing the wider issues surrounding art in public spaces, such as the shifting definition of a public space and the motivation for the artists to venture outside the gallery and their workshops. O’Reilly found that the formation of new, exciting, and productive relationships was a mayor incentive for the artists to work outside the gallery, as the incorporation of different needs and desires leads to creative experimentation. Similarly, new environments can introduce new techniques and materials; for example, Bruce Williams replied that the commission for the Leicester Royal Infirmary in 1994 meant for him “a new Apple Mac and the opportunity to use the medical illustration department as a studio.”

Diplomatic collaboration is at the core of all these projects, whether it is between the artist and the environment, as in the case of the research project conducted by Simon Read of the river Thames Path, or architects, builders, artists, and the council, as in the case of Jacqui Poncelet’s contribution to the New Arts Centre for Didcot.

However, most intriguing is the dialogue these projects develop between the public and the surrounding environment. For example, Louise Short involved schoolchildren in the development of Mothshadowmovie, an installation/movie/performance viewed by the community that helped to develop it. This environmentally orientated work aimed at re-establishing a relationship between the surrounding environment, in this case a local park, and the community. Sasha Ward’s stained glass screen installed for the Chaplaincy Centre at The Great Western Hospital, as noted by Hugh Adams, re-claims a confusing, cold, and potentially disorientating space and introduces an element of quiet contemplation, subsequently ‘humanising’ the environment. Peter Freeman’s Luminous Motion explores the dynamics and movement within public space, providing a memorable landmark and Peter Randall Page’s Ebb and Flow, a granite and water sculpture, directly affected by the surrounding environment, specifically the rise and the fall of the water level of a nearby lock, draws and mesmerises its viewers by its organic nature and form.

In crass contrast there are John Kippin’s evocatively haunting photographs depicting Greenham Common, a former United States airbase in Cold War Pastoral/SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest). These images of stark military structures alienating the landscape like the leftovers of a giant’s picnic seem to comment on the preservation and destruction of the soul of our environment. As the artist himself noted upon a later visit that he still experiences the feeling of “violating a place that has, in turn, itself been violated.”

John Kippin’s work, as well as the nine others discussed in this book, illustrates how diverse public art can be, from photography and sculpture to architectural solutions and research. Similarly, the subject matter and the choice of materials and techniques vary from commission to commission; however, each work shows creative experimentation and innovative approach to the understanding of public space and what it means to be an artist. O’Reilly in the introduction noted in response to Bruce Williams’ work “how much we need and want from artists.” It appears that this beautifully illustrated book is not only an example of 10 successful public commissions but also a source that contributes to the wider discourse about our environment and what is public art.

by Bill Moggridge; foreword by Gillian Crampton-Smith
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006
800 pp., illus. 700 b/w, col., includes DVD and website. Trade, $39.95
ISBN: 0-262-13474-8.

Reviewed by Dene Grigar
Washington State University Vancouver

grigar@vanocouver.wsu.edu

At 800 pages, a DVD, and a companion website, Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions is not a book about interactions we design for computers; rather, it has the feel of a bible about the whole “emerging discipline of interaction design” (Compton-Smith ix), from its definitions to its principles, core skills, questions, architecture, standards, approaches, models, and research methods. In short, for anyone engaged in teaching, researching, designing––or even marketing products for––interactions, this is the book not only to possess but faithfully read.

First, the book models the kind of approach it advocates: It offers a “clear mental model,” “reassuring feedback,” “navigability,” and “consistency” (xvi). The mental model it presents is a series of interviews with 40 of the world’s top designers working in various areas of interaction design with whom Moggridge has spoken with over the years. These interviews are well-edited and contextualized with Moggridge’s metanarrative serving to provide insights about the interviewee that the person her or himself neglects to mention and put into perspective the contributions that the designer has made to the field. Thus, the book avoids the sometimes tedious word-for-word interviews we often encounter.

In each of the 10 chapters three to five designers speak to the author about some aspect of information design. This triangulation allows for multiple viewpoints by the designers themselves and results in an interaction between interviewer and interviewee, and among interviewees, that compels readers to immerse themselves in and even interact with the conversation. The marginalia, for example, that this reviewer produced on the book’s many pages speaks to the way the book invited feedback from the reader. Divided into categories by type or focus of interaction, the book makes it easy for readers to find information despite its massive size. Because each chapter begins with a quote by one of the book’s designers, followed by an introduction to the chapter as well as the interviewee by Moggridge, before moving into the interview with Moggridge’s metanarrative for each of interviewees, readers know what lies ahead, how the information is structured, and how they should proceed for the journey.

Second, the stories the interviewees and Moggridge tell are highly engaging. A case in point is the interview with Bill Verplank, the designer who helped to establish the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and someone with whom Moggridge has long collaborated. Verplank tells the story about “the history and future of interaction design” (125) in nine pages of insights made manifest in images. Thirteen images illustrate the points the speaker makes about his notion of design, all of which are fascinating insights into his mind and approach. The story of Google also commands attention, particularly in light of last year’s news about its agreement to censor itself in China (See BBC News, January 25, 2006). But this story of the company’s humble beginnings in a friend’s garage to the heady glory days of the “dot.com madness” (479) to its lucrative IPO at $165 a share makes for a fun contemporary rags-to-riches story that has the potential to fuel the myth of the American Dream and tempt the youth of America to embrace nerddom. Nevermind Larry Page and Sergey Brin have just broken their own rules of ethics (see “Google Truths” 481) with the China deal; the idealistic pre-2006 story is a kick.

With 700 images, most of which are in color, the book lives up to expectations of what a book about design should look like. Besides images of the interviewees, Moggridge gives us their doodles, sketches, and art, icons, historical photographs, documentation, demonstrations and the like. At $40 for a hardback this size, chock full of color images, the book is a steal. Adding to its richness are the DVD and the companion website. The former contains the interviewees speaking in the order that the book itself presents; the latter makes available abstracts of each chapter, a brief videoclip of each interview, information about the DVD, reviews of the book, a place to make comments, information about the author, as well as a download site and place to order the book. The two additions complement each other with its presentation and media––such as graphics and music––and the book with their layout and content. Also at the website, MIT Press offers a special “Chapter of the Week” program where readers can download a particular chapter highlighted that week. The day this reviewer visited the site, MIT Press was giving away a pdf of Chapter six, “Services,” along with videoclips of the interviewees.

One area missing among the numerous categories highlighted in the book is designing interactions in art. With chapters focusing on “The Mouse and the Desktop,” “My PC,” “From Desk to the Palm,” “Adopting Technology,” “Play,” “Services,” “The Internet,” “Multisensory and Multimedia,” “Futures and Alternative Nows, and “People and Prototypes,” one would think works of Char Davies, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and others would be mentioned somewhere in its pages–– “Multisensory and Multimedia,” perhaps? With a focus on information design, the book remains fixed on hardware, software, tools, people, and commerce.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell, <pepperell@ntlworld.com>.

The fact that we can now comfortably omit the hyphen between “post” and “human” suggests that the emerging field of posthuman studies is reaching a certain level of maturity, even though it is perhaps only a decade old. It seems to occupy an intellectual space somewhere between science, technology, philosophy and cultural studies and, as with all academic fields, is already displaying signs of internal tension. Perhaps the most divisive issue is the varying levels of emphasis given by different authors to the notion of “embodiment.” There are those who, on the one hand, regard the human body as a passing encumbrance, shortly to be erased by the flow of “pure information” (see Katherine Hayles’ *How We Became Posthuman* for an account of some who take this line). On the other hand there are those, such as myself, who emphasize not only the role of the body in the experience of being, but the presence of the wider environment as well. *Where the Action Is* is a timely interjection in this debate, and one that firmly endorses the latter persuasion: that a more coherent understanding of our interaction (or intersection) with machines will involve consideration of human mental activity as embedded in a wider physical context.

Paul Dourish’s case for “embodied interaction” proceeds from two foundational ideas describing how we interact with technology Ñ “tangible” and “social” computing. Each is an aspect of his general thesis that regards, “the history of interaction as a gradual expansion of the range of human skills and abilities that can be incorporated into interacting with computers” (p. 17). Tangible computing may be more familiar to some as “ubiquitous computing,” that branch of HCI research that seeks to move beyond the desktop metaphor towards more distributed and tactile environments.

Much of the author’s research background and data derives from his time spent working at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, widely acknowledged as the place where the “graphical user interface” was developed but, famously, not exploited. Interestingly, on page 26 an illustration appears of a mid-1970s Xerox personal computer, clumsy but otherwise remarkably similar to the desktop set-ups we have today, except in one respect: the monitor is aligned vertically. Given that the greater number of the documents we work on are in portrait ratio, it seems odd in retrospect that hardware designers and manufacturers have insisted we spend so much time scrolling up and down on horizontally aligned screens. The 1970s Xerox PC may be another example of an unexploited good idea.

To unfold the implications of tangible computing, Dourish presents a number of examples where users collaborate with combinations of computer systems and physical objects that more closely emulate the way we interact with things in the real(ish) world. This, he suggests, is a necessary corrective to the mid-1990s over-enthusiasm for the entirely virtual and digital, represented by thinkers such as Negroponte. Like the ubiquitous computing projects that inspired it, tangible computing seeks to integrate the virtual with the physical in a seamless information-rich process. Such technologies might support a wider range of human interactions than those normally attended to in workplace-driven research. Dourish cites the work of Strong and Gaver (p. 42), whose elevating feather signaled distant acts of affection.

If tangible computing emphasizes the role of the physical apparatus in interaction, then “social computing” draws attention to the sociological, cultural and historical context within which we use technology. The point for Dourish is that “social action is embedded” (p. 96) rather than free-floating and abstracted. The consequence, as far as interactive design is concerned, is that we must take much greater account of the way technologies are used in actual practice Ñ ways that sometimes diverge from or conflict with the prior expectations of designers. To contextualize this part of his argument, Dourish draws on a variety of sociological research programs concerned with human-machine and work-place interaction, in particular the “ethnomethodological” work of Harold Garfinkel and the “situated action” studies of Lucy Suchman. Such research characteristically rejects the formalized, abstracted assumptions made by analysts and systems designers in favor of a more concrete, “action-oriented” evaluation of real practice and behavior. For Dourish the theme of this research is to show a concern with “the mundane aspects of social life, the background of taken-for-granted everyday action” (p. 96).

To further support his ideas, the author attempts to root them in deeper philosophical subsoil. Taking what is, by his own admission, a “whirlwind tour” (p. 124) through a century of phenomenological thought, Dourish whisks us through the ideas of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein to show how they represent a tradition in Western thought concerned with the human agent as situated in, and active within, a pre-organized world of physical demands and possibilities. Accordingly, the mind is firmly embodied in the physical presence of the body (rather than separate from it), just as the body is rooted in the extended domain of the “real world” of objects and events. These references allow Dourish to define his key term, “embodied interaction,” as “the creation, manipulation and sharing of meaning through engaged interaction with artifacts” (p. 126).

The problem of “meaning” then becomes critical to the analysis (as it usually does), in particular, how meaning in HCI is most economically generated and sustained. Drawing again on the philosophical concepts previously discussed and from some examples from research projects at Xerox and MIT, Dourish tries to show how interactive media can illuminate and enrich our understanding of mediated information. A somewhat abstracted discussion of “intentionality,” “ontology” and “intersubjectivity” gives way to what the author suggests is a more practically oriented section on how certain design principles arising from the ideas discussed might be applied to the construction of real systems. However, as Dourish honestly acknowledges, it is no straightforward matter to convert generalist philosophical analyses into prescriptive guides for action. Instead, his solution is to offer a series of principles intended to alert potential designers to aspects of interface construction that are less frequently considered by “traditional” or “disembodied” methods. These principles, to do with evaluating the social and physical context in which interaction occurs, are less a set of specific rules than a more general “stance” to be adopted (p. 172). And although the author states, “Embodiment is about engaged action rather than disembodied cognition; it is about the particular rather than the abstract, practice rather than theory…,” one leaves the book with a sense of unease about what “embodied interaction” looks like, and why it is so different from any “disembodied” system we might imagine. In this sense, the practice-theory divide remains un-bridged.

Other than suggesting (through examples presented) that interface design in complex situations might benefit from greater degrees of user configurability and internal state feedback, the potentially radical repercussions of Dourish’s foundational analysis remain largely unexplored. Questions, for example, about the degrees of separation between humans and machines, about pleasure and frustration, and about the sensual qualities of interactive experience are often implicit, but rarely foregrounded. A more “extensionist” development of the ideas might have moved the debate on further and more quickly by considering the actual consequences of removing the mind-body-world split that has so constrained Western thought.
Notions, for example, of distributed consciousness or of the “extended mind” are now gaining currency and influencing the way we think about the “locality” of human being and action in ways far beyond those suggested by this book.

I would happily commend this book to the non-specialist reader. It is a vigorous and worthy attempt to frame questions of interactive design within a wider and deeper intellectual context. I imagine it will also serve well as a textbook in a number of fields, from information design to the contemporary philosophy of technology. And while I strongly welcome it as further evidence of a shift in ideas away from disembodied abstraction towards embodied action, it also points up the dangers of falling between the practical and philosophical stools, by being unable to sit on both, or securely on neither.