Weekly INCITE

New Weekly INCITE blog

2005-11-15T19:10:00.000Z

Hi everyone

We have moved.

Weekly INCITE has switched to Word Press.

Our new address is http://studioincite.com/blog/

We hope to see you there.

Self-Portrait 1995, Chuck Close

2005-11-15T18:37:00.000Z

Self-Portrait 1995, Chuck Close
Originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

The aforementioned Chuck Close. Reproduction does this piece NO favo(u)rs, as it is composed of hundreds of small pixels, each of which is itself an abstract painting.

Happy Birthday Kat! (Nov. 9th, 2005)

2005-11-08T06:33:00.000Z

Happy Birthday Kat!
Originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

November 9th, 2005

"What is Science Studies" at Franke Institute, Univ of Chicago

2005-11-05T16:16:00.000Z

[And can I say? The Franke Institute puts on some great shows, but can we have some web presence please? A few links? A modest website mayhaps?]

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11

11:45 a.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Franke Institute for the Humanities, 1100 East 57th Street, JRL S-118

Conference: What is Science Studies?
E-mail enquiries to: johns@uchicago.edu or jtresch@uchicago.edu

11:45-12:30
Buffet lunch

12:30-2:00
THE EMERGENCE OF SCIENCE STUDIES AS A DISCIPLINE:
historical formation/ internal institutional histories/ STS's emergence from other fields

Karin Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago
Robert Brain, University of British Columbia
Emily Martin, New York University

2:15-3:45
SCIENCE STUDIES AND ITS BOUNDARIES:
border relations with neighboring disciplines/ STS seen from the outside

Ken Alder, Northwestern University
Katherine Hayles, University of California at Los Angeles
John Carson, University of Michigan

4:00-5:15
Round table
TELEOLOGIES OF SCIENCE STUDIES:
what's at stake?/ political and ethical responsibilities/ relation to the public and to science/ consequences of institutionalization

Trevor Pinch, Cornell University
Thomas Gieryn, Indiana University
Adrian Johns, University of Chicago
Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University

Foucault on Wireless Networks (for Kat)

2005-11-02T14:11:00.000Z

To Kat, who is thinking about wireless networks, a thought, to be treated carelessly:

I don't know your feelings about Foucault—I'm thinking here mainly of the Foucault of the Disciplines, esp. Discipline and Punish. Here, he's describing a historical mode of power, carried within and propagated by particular disciplines (e.g. psychiatry, psychology, criminology, pedagogy, etc.) and directed at the individual and the individual's body as the mobile point of contact between power and society. This target of disciplinarity, the individual, is key, and is what got me thinking about wireless networks, which also seem to focus on the individual (I'm not sure what modes of generality, or grouping, wireless networks engender. Are they networks or societies or communities or populations?).

So, a facet of disciplinary power is that it is very careful about the way it distributes and organises bodies in space. The classroom, with its ordered grid, is one of F's favorite examples. But also: the prison, the military march, the hospital, the factory—and I'd add, now: the office cubicle and (my point here) wired and wireless networks, all seem to me to be methods—architectural or social or institutional or technological—for arranging and administering (disciplining) bodies in space (there are different methods for ordering bodies in time, e.g. course schedules).

And so I'm thinking about computer networks as spatially-ordering disciplinary tactics in this way (although maybe not always only disciplinary). And once you start thinking in that direction, then the shift from wired to wireless networks starts to look interesting for the ways in which it re-orders bodies. Perhaps still governed by disciplinarity, perhaps not. That would be something to be investigated: but the question/method remains: how do re-configured networks re-configure bodies in space, in relation to other bodies and to buildings and to things and etc., and what are the effects of this re-configuration, what consequences does it have for the operations of (what Foucault always calls, vaguely, but importantly) power? Put that way, it will probably sound a lot like questions you're already asking. To which I'd say (if you're at all captured by this approach), if you're not familiar with it, take a look at some Foucault. Maybe start with Disc and Punish, and then move to the stuff on biopower, which he formulated as a new mode of power, differently organized than disciplinarity, organized around populations rather than bodies/individuals, concerned with regulation rather than discipline, but often collusive and co-extensive with disciplinarity. Both modes seem to operate in our current world, and perhaps both are relevant to wireless networks. Or maybe wireless networks are a kind of pivot. This would be the question.

There must be someone who has written on this. I don't know who.

kris

Martin Sønderlev Christensen checking in, check it out!

2005-10-27T09:23:00.000Z

Hi INCITE aassociates and casual blogreaders. Encouraged by kat I thought I might shortly introduce myself as I have the privilege, not only to have access to this blog, but also currently to be associated with the INCITE group for a couple of months - October and November that is.

I normally reside in Copenhagen, where I’m currently doing the final stages of my PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen, so my visit at Surrey and INCITE is mainly one of getting away on my own for writing, and to see how research is done outside the configuration of my “normal” environment, which on a private note includes wife and two kids.

I should note here that I’m not a sociologist by training or by heart, my background is in Nordic literature and film/media studies – though I have while doing my master degree and within my PhD mainly concerned myself with what “goes on” between people and technology within late modernity from a cultural critic perspective. Including here the macro sociological thinking of Giddens, Beck, Lash and the lot of them. So while I haven’t had the micro-level empirical encounters as I find so prominent within INCITE, and that I have come to acknowledge that I would have liked to do, I do share the critical approach to technology positioned largely in Philosophy of Technology - mainly Andrew Feenbeerg, Don Ihde which in its (post)phenomenological outset has many threads to the works of Latour and Harraway – so the link is there I sense to core INCITE curriculum.

As for my project, it revolves around the concept of affect, which I approach as a central notion that has come to define what people do with and through technology and to some extend also what technology it self has become, an augmentation of our affect, our “outer” body rather than our effective rational one.

Affect is here understood not as a merely emotion, though it does point to the fact that people (formerly known as users) increasingly create, share and coordinate their experiences of everyday life through mobile and social computing. I therefore look at the ubiquitous mobile phones, digital photography sharing, blogs and subtract a number of characteristics from the use of these technologies allowing me to form a “genre” depiction denoted “Personal Affective Media Technologies” and I subdivide my study into three main parts of enquiry:

Firstly, what I call “Affective mediation”, how people connect to other people through technology? Covering mediated communication within social and cultural realm. Secondly "affective attachment", how do people connect to technology? Concerning the design of theses technologies - the interaction and the aesthetics of the genre. And Thirdly “affective augmentation” how do technology connect to people? Enabling me to reform a framework for seeing human technology relations as affect.

Affect here is rather a social and cultural phenomenon that allows us to critically talk about ways that people are enabled or imposed towards new ways of using technology – and to discuss the cultural implications as well as the aesthetical forms that follows from affective technological forms of life, to refrain Scott Lash. As it might be apparent from this the project is way to broad (and someway in between too ambitious and too naïve). Yet I feel it only covers half of the interesting and problematic issues I find in that critically important field where people and technology relations emerge and evolve.

Well that’s pretty much it. Only a few acknowledgement and your free to continue into the blogosphere. I would like to use the opportunity to thank all of INCITE particularly Nina and Katrina for being so open minded and helpful to bring me to UK and into the group, providing me ample space to work, knowing that I might be working from a different tradition and in different ways – it speaks highly for their academic openness and personal kindness. Also to Kris, Gerard, Steve and not least Sandeep for pleasant meetings. Now, it seems like I’m saying goodbye when this was suppose to be hallo.
Well, I’ll be around for another month before head home, so there are still time for more interaction, and if you, dear blogreader, have caught interest in my work OR find it deeply disturbing, you are most welcome to contact me on mach_at_itu.dk.

all the best,

Martin

Via Chicago

2005-10-26T15:36:00.000Z

Hello INCITE and Friends of....

Chicago is great. Wish you were here. Autumn turns to Winter.

I carry your sociological sophistication with me, which I embrace and do not renounce, but find myself slightly...what?...relieved to be working with novels and films again—the sort of texts in comparison to which interview transcripts feel very stern to me (I always fear that I won't live up; that I didn't have the capacity to fully honour an interviewee's input). These kinds of texts, in contrast, feel permissive, somehow more promiscuous; which is to say, I feel more promiscuous around them, and promiscuity is good. My first paper is due next week, however, and I wonder if I'll remember how to do it (I'm working with a 19th c. American suffragist "composite" novel called The Sturdy Oak, placed in conversation with a book which I recommend to you all, Jodi Dean's Publicity's Secret).

yours faithfully,
kris

hello from sandeep

2005-10-25T14:44:00.000Z

Hello everyone. I am blogging for the very first time. Kat has already mentioned that i have joined as a PhD student in sociology this october and am all bits and bones in these first few weeks. I have a background in film, specializing in animation. I have previously researched two different story-telling traditions in India. In this PhD i will be doing a sociological investigation of story-telling in India, looking at translation of concepts between traditions, rural and urban and focus my concerns on the youth in urban India. Or that is vaguely what it sounds like in my head now. A few sociology books have landed on my desk, the wind has picked up the sails and i might be slowly moving. Sandeep.

October update

2005-10-19T14:15:00.000Z

A new school year brings new faces to INCITE. Sandeep joins us as a PhD student from the RCA. He brings oodles of fascinating skills from his background in animation, both in terms of time intensive model and film work and hand drawn computer experience. I will leave it to him to introduce his proposed study into story telling in India soon on the blog. We also have Martin Sønderlev Christensen who is visiting us for two months from Cophenhagen. I hope he too will use the blog to share his current studies and plans for his time in London.

- kat

AoIR 2005 - Internet generations conference

2005-10-18T22:37:00.000Z

the bean, originally uploaded by INCITE.

I have just returned from a week in Chicago, where I attended and presented a paper at AoIR 6.0 [the Association of Internet researchers]. Its theme this year was Internet Generations, which like most conference themes was deliberately broad and encouraging of all manner of papers. There were, as usual, an abundance of quantitative researchers who embrace the challenge of documenting who, how many, where and how often people use the internet, blogs and technological tools in numeric form. Whilst I find some of their theories, debates and kaleidoscopic diagrams interesting there is still a significant gulf between their concerns and mine. As Kris noted in his thoughts on AoIR 2004, there is sometimes surprisingly little common ground between papers of similar topics, such as blogging. This is not a complaint. It is actually very useful in contextualising my own work. For instance I was placed in a session called Visuals: Photoblogs and Visual Communication, in which the papers could not have contrasted more. They were not at all what I expected to enage with. One explored photoblogging as a new computerization movement whilst the other looked at socio-communicative orientation of student use of blogs. Both talked in terms of text and numbers and presented ideas in large scale graphs whilst I told stories and used images to describe my work. I am still chewing over how to make sense of these differences in terms of how I see my work and how to frame it in similar circumstances in the future.

I gave a paper about my bus research in which I looked at ways of seeing and researching with and through a blog; how the blog influences the research process and how my research influences the development of the blog. I talked about my experience of using a blog to gather, analyse and present data, about story telling (mine and other peoples via the 73 story blog), about managing multi-facted roles (how to cope with simultaneously being technical, a designer, blogger and researcher) and dealing with the transparency of an online process (how the act of blogging reveals the messy, awkward and ill-fitting fragments of research that are often cleaned and smoothed out in more formal research accounts).

It was an exhausting three and a half days, but I found the conference very useful in terms of how my area of research is being framed by different disciplines. It provided a supportive environment for networking and I found myself in much discussion after and around talks which was as valuable as the talks themselves (and sometimes more due to their brevity). Of particular interest to me was Lilia Efimova's paper on Not Documenting, Doing: Blogging as Research, Sonia Livingstone's keynote Youthful Experts? A Critical Appraisal of Children and Young People's Emerging Internet Literacy, and in terms of my Phd research, Alison Powell's The Politics of Visibilty; Wireless Internet Signals and Control of Urban Space.

Oh, and chicago was incredible. I was there just long enough to start planning ways and means to return.

- kat

Photos Leave Home podcast

2005-09-13T18:14:00.000Z

A recording of Kris's excellent seminar Photos Leave Home is now available on the INCITE podcast. The seminar is divided into 2 files, so be sure to download both parts. Copy and paste the following link into your RSS reader or podcatching software:

http://profiles.blipmedia.org/INCITE/podcast.xml

Enjoy!

- Gerard

Nina + One Well Dressed Rum

2005-09-12T16:47:00.000Z

Ridiculous
Originally uploaded by Kris Cohen.

Don't be fooled by the perspective. It's neither a pocket-sized Nina nor a Nina-sized rum.

Thanks to Kate Orton-Johnson for the absurdity.

Ethnography and Video

2005-09-09T10:45:00.000Z

Hi! This is my first ever blog!

Thanks for having me down to the afternoon at Incite. The discussion with the BBC about the role of ethnography as a tool for business and also its use in education engaged me. Its advantage over market research in business must be an issue that has been debated often and obviously us 'researchers' see the clear benefits. I want to mention more about the use of video when carrying out field work for clients. Having currently spent four months at PDD I’ve been heavily involved in camera work, logging, editing and clip making of field work footage. The qualitative research done here is often contextual interviews and observational research and less 'true' academic style ethnography due to time restrictions and budgets. Filming field work and just handing over the footage to a client is no use at all. At PDD a structure is put in place around video work. After filiming the tapes are then captured into a software called Convera. This software allows you to make notes alongside relevant frames of the footage. Once a whole film has been logged with supporting text it’s easy to find themes and interesting points to refer back to. The technique supports field notes effectively and can make analysis easier as all footage has been covered. Convera is also a good archiving system, storing all video data and allowing a designer or engineer for example to do a word search and find relevant video, even footage taken two years ago.

Once an analysis has been formed key areas in the video footage can be quickly allocated due to previous logging then extracted and edited to make data rich clips. Several clips can help to build up a case nicely. Showing these clips in a client presentation not only supports the analysis but also allows the client to enter into the context in a more sensory way. It’s a type of visual proof of the work done. Using selective film adds a more ‘real life’ presence to a presentation and captivates the audience. It certainly brings alive a dull PowerPoint!

Although time consuming and quite costly I do believe video can be an important tool in qualitative field work especially when you are trying to present certain points and themes in your fieldwork in an engaging manner.

Tamsin Smith
tamsin@ukcreative.co.uk

an INCITE afternoon

2005-09-06T07:22:00.000Z

INCITE is hosting an afternoon of talks, discussion, food and farewells tomorrow. Starting with Kris's seminar about his ESRC study - Photo's Leave Home - departmental staff, special guests from PDD, BBC and the RCA, INCITE researchers and other students will then descend upon the INCITE room to talk projects, ideas and other nerdy technological things over nibbles.

This is Kris's last official task prior to leaving the UK to start his PhD in the Art History Department at the University of Chicago. He has been with INCITE for over three years as a Research Fellow, teaching, researching and generally particpating in the Department, and for the last year he has run his own ESRC research grant. So the afternoon will wrap up with farewell drinks, presents and general emotional outpourings. His enthusiasm for ideas, responsiveness to other people's projects, supportive presence and more (including his uncanny ability to talk theory whilst running up hills) - will be widely missed. We are all very sad to see him go.

Here is an overview of his seminar.

"Photos Leave Home"
I'm at the end of a one-year ESRC study of personal (aka snapshot, aka amateur) photography and its newly massive presence on the internet. The questions I was asking were less about why anyone would want to put their personal photographs online in the first place (although I have a little bit to say about the popularity and prevalence‹the apparent irresistability‹of that particular question) and more about the effects that this efflorescence of (a certain kind of) photography might be having on our ideas about what photography is and does. I'm in the process of writing a series of three papers, one of which addresses popular reactions to this ourpouring of heretofore sequestered (or privatised) photography, one of which addresses itself to the previous sociological literature on photography, and the last of which discusses these phenomena within a history and theory of images. Here, I'll be primarily focused on the second of these papers, which considers photographs as *public* rather than social entities.

More about his project can be found on his blog.

- kat

Colour After Klein

2005-08-29T16:02:00.000Z

INCITE and friends of INCITE: I'd like to draw your attention to the Barbican Gallery's Colour After Klein show, and especially to the pieces by Sophie Calle and (most especially) Anri Sala, both of which usefully and thoughtfully employ interviews in the creation and presentation of the work.

I'll say more...tomorrow...or sometime.

Anri Sala: I'd never heard of her, but, wow. Her piece Lakkat is as sublimely non-representational (anti- and un-familiar) as a Luc Ferrari composition, while every bit as richly expository as a Susan Sontag essay.

-kris

Low-fi: new works by international artists using networked media

2005-08-08T09:02:00.000Z

We over at low-fi, in collaboration with Stills (Edinburgh) and the 6 commissioned artists, have launched our show: Low-fi: new works by international artists using networked media. Not one for entirely gratuitous self-aggrandisement, I'd (Kris would) think the works in the show would be interesting, relevant or useful to INCITE simpaticos. Dealing as they do with networks and addressing questions like: how to materialise them and to what ends, what are they, how are they tendentiously revealed and/or dissembled, what are our options for interacting with them, in what ways do we value them and what ways do we lack for doing so (anew). Have a wee look:

6 August – 02 October 2005
Open daily 11am – 6pm

Stills, 23 Cockburn St, Edinburgh, EH1 1BP

Mauricio Arango (Colombia/US) www.low-fi.org.uk/vanishingpoint
Cavan Convery (UK) www.low-fi.org.uk/verticalscroll
James Coupe (UK) www.difference-engine.net
Radarboy (South Africa/Japan) www.radarboy.com/zoo
Kate Rich (UK) www.feraltrade.org/courier/
UK Museum of Ordure (UK) www.museum-ordure.org.uk/Audio_Library

Low-fi commissions exist to support the production of new artworks that use networked technologies. Although these artworks thrive on the internet, in this exhibition the artists use sound, projection and other methods to inhabit the physical space of the gallery. They work in tangible, engaging and sensory ways to convey ideas about our relationships with the media, technology and digital and commercial networks.

Among the works, Kate Rich forges new routes of import while Mauricio Arango's map of the world reveals how international news media is creating new cartography. James Coupe's sound installation dispenses wisdom gathered from metaphysical travels on the net, while the UK Museum of Ordure invite you to add to their gradually degrading sound files.
Throughout the exhibition, the works react and grow in response to visitors' input - unroll familiar contemporary technologies as one would ancient scrolls in Cavan Convery's Vertical Scroll and take responsibility for the maintenance of radarboy's Big Five Digital Zoo.

Low-fi is an artist collective focused on net art, mediation and distribution systems. www.low-fi.org.uk

IVSA conference, dublin

2005-08-06T08:49:00.000Z

park-bench, originally uploaded by INCITE.

I have just spent two days at the IVSA - International Visual Sociology Association - conference held at Trinity College in Dublin. The theme this year - Re-viewing Bodies: Embodiment, Process and Change. It was a smallish conference, contained in three rooms in the Arts building in the College, which meant there was a good chance to meet, talk to and regularly run into people whose projects, writings and images provide much inspiration for my current wrangling with concepts of visual representation in the context of sociological methods, analysis and presentation. Highlights for me included;

- meeting, talking and eating with David Gauntlett- known for his many web projects via Theory.org.uk - Theory Action figures, Trading Cards, A drawing a day, Lego theorists. Unfortunately his paper (about work that encourages people to make their own visuals) and my flight coincided on Thursday afternoon. But we found other time to talk about, amongst other things, the making of sociological objects and I discovered that even though I often slip a little origami into my bus work, he somehow gets to play ‘seriously’ with lego. very cool.

-Elizabeth Chaplin’s paper posed a challenge to the ways in which images are embedded in sociological theory. She introduced, through the books of W.G Sebald, the idea of the caption-less image, and argued that the released image derives new meaning from surrounding text, engaging in different forms of dialogue when it is unrestrained. Discussion about this idea emerged in other panels during the conference, some people openly challenged by it, others interested in pushing it further still. I interpreted it in the context of electronic rather than traditional publishing. In calling for the embedding of the image in text, the layout and design become much more important – something I became acutely aware of when working on my site and blog.

- Dona Schwarz presented her In the Kitchen photo project, now in its third year, which documents the mundane, everyday and wonderfully ordinary activities that occur in her kitchen.

Caroline Knowles and Doug Harper presented in tandem, words and images, voices and interpretations, delicately interwoven in the presentation and in the research about how we 'do' race and ethnicity in post colonial landscapes.

- Beckie Coleman and Monica Moreno of Goldsmiths (who were part of the recent INCITE design/sociology collaboration experiment) also gave papers. Beckie presented images assembled by girls in her studies about bodies and media images. And Monica powerfully argued against showing images of bodies of Mexican women in her analysis of practices of racism.

I presented a paper -Visible bodies, Invisible technology: the making and shaping wifi in the city - which explored how the body, physical place and digital space are configured in visual representations of wifi zones. It is the first paper I have given that relates to my new studies - the first to move away from more familiar bus territory - so it involved a reasonably anxious build up (thank you to both Kris and Nina for listening to me drivel on about it up till the day before) and an adrenalin/relief high to finally give it and receive supportive feedback from the audience.

-kat

on kris and day to day data

2005-07-25T18:15:00.000Z

Last Thursday Nina and I had the opportunity to see the exhibition that Kris has been involved with - Day to Day Data. You can read his specially commissioned essay here which cleverly entangles the individual works, considering their processes, interpretations and concerns, with his current research into publics, everyday data and representation.

The show presents and dicusses the imaginative, intriguing and compelling compulsion to catalogue, classify and map in all manner of forms everyday data so often disregarded or overseen in our daily lives. The very unique and often humorous taxonomy reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges's description of an encyclopedia in which animals are divided into: (1) those that belong to the Emperor, (2) embalmed ones, (3) those that are trained, (4) suckling pigs, (5) mermaids, (6) fabulous ones, (7) stray dogs, (8) those included in the present classification, (9) those that tremble as if they were mad, (10) innumerable ones, (11) those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (12) others, (13) those that have just broken a flower vase, (14) those that from a long way off look like flies.

The exhibition features the work of twenty artists – some specially commissioned for the gallery, some for the stunning publication and others only available online. If you can’t get to Nottingham to see the show before July 20th, then be sure to catch it in September in Portsmouth or when it comes to London in March 2006.

-kat

On Sound

2005-07-22T05:28:00.000Z

link for Gerard

The Nina Dispatches

2005-07-11T15:41:00.000Z

posted by purse lip square jaw

silent reflections

2005-06-28T13:12:00.000Z

I’ve been reading Haunted Weather: Music, Silence and Memory by David Toop these last couple of days (thanks for the tip off Kris!). It’s really got me thinking about silence not as the absence as noise, but as something altogether different. It’s not an absence at all, since true silence is impossible, at least within our atmosphere. In seeking to achieve silence we only succeed in revealing more and more levels of noise, uncovering the sounds which underlie our everyday. The hum of a refrigerator, the far off bark of a dog, those sounds which go unperceived, or a least remain unnoticed. Any soundscape can therefore be seen as a complexly layered palimpsest. Peel away one of these layers and it reveals another layer of sound, our perception like a pyramid, focusing only on the point of forgrounded sounds, whilst less and less attention is paid the closer to the base (bass) of that pyramid we go.

Social silence, noisy silence, deafening silence. Whilst music fills the air (and the ear) with noise, in doing so it often reduces the listener to silence. Does music cover silence or does it uncover silence?

The opposite of noise isn’t silence, the opposite of noise is listening.

- Gerard

herzog & de meuron models

2005-06-25T13:14:00.000Z

Mobile(72a), originally uploaded by INCITE.

inscriptions, maps, models and mess

2005-06-25T12:28:00.000Z

In my study of wifi networks (in particular how wifi is made political, public, social and a site of resistance and power) I have been undertaking a critique of how representations and in particular inscriptions are used in sociological research. The concept of inscriptions, the devices that produce them and the practices in which they are embedded form a framework for much sociological analysis of representations in science and technology and I have been keen to see how I might learn from these approaches. From early ethnographic studies in the scientific laboratory (Latour and Woolgar 1979) to later research focused on scientists and the entire laboratory itself (Latour 1983, Lynch 1985, Law 1986, Knorr Cetina 1999) to technological design and innovation studies (Callon 1986, Cockburn and Ormrod 1993, Bijker 1997) and even the visual culture of engineers (Henderson 1999), despite their methodological differences, all share an interest in how scientific fact or technological artefacts are socially constructed. In general they deal with the various ways machines or the configuration of artefacts produce an inscription, how it travels along a defined process, enrols actors along the way and is ultimately used to persuade others within and beyond the walls of the laboratory or office. People do ‘jobs’ with inscriptions so irrespective of their content they present a juncture for the study of the complex network of actions, practices and interactions.

Ok. But how does this relate to my work? Well I have been looking at the wifi node maps created by volunteer wifi community groups – in particular Consume.net - and considering the ways in which these representations make wifi political. One aspect (amongst many) that I find interesting is the way in which inscriptions clean up and are cleaned of the messy, complex and largely repetitive design/experiment/information process. For example once Latour and Woolgar (1979) understood the inscription process they saw the laboratory more clearly. No longer was it a messy, complex and complicated site. They started to see individual actions, objects and activities as processes from which inscriptions in the form of texts, charts, graphs and more were created. ‘Thus the observer could even make sense of such obscure activities as a technician grinding the brains of rats, by realising that the eventual end product of such activity might be a highly valued diagram’ (1979: 52). Nice, huh! These inscriptions were then cleaned of the residue of everyday experiments, removed from repetitive painstaking procedures and used as objects of power to influence and persuade others.

This brings me to the actual point of my post - the current Tate Modern exhibition featuring the many sketches and models of architects Herzog & de Meuron. Situated in the Turbine Hall the exhibition reveals ‘the by-products or ‘waste’ produced during the course of the architect’s work’. Whilst many things are still cleaned and thus concealed, such as gender relations and the everyday rhythms of the process, much more of the everyday mess of 'doing architecture' is on show. The exhibition blurb says:

‘Made of an astonishing range of materials, these artefacts tell the story of how ideas take shape and form, through a complex process of experimentation and detour, to evolve a new architectural language for building.’

An abundance of architectural models, design sketches, castings, die cuts, shapes and textures cover a series of tabletops. All sorts of materials are represented; glass, paper, cardboard, fibreglass, plastic, foam, wood in all sorts of configurations from the abstracted idea right through to the scaled model (but not necessarily in a linear fashion). Materials on each table, with a little imagination describe a path through which ideas were formed but there are no climax shots, no images of finished objects. The sheer amount of material (over 1000 models) illustrates how important modelling is in the process of design to architects. And these are only the ones that were deemed of value to keep, unlike these ones spotted by Dan in bins outside the AA, which leads into a whole other post .... but it's an exhibition well worth seeing. It's on till 29th August.

- kat

ZKM exhibition: Making Things Public II

2005-06-12T11:32:00.000Z

Here's my brief response to the exhibition we all went to see last month at ZKM in Karlsruhe - Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy.

First of all it was a pleasure to be introduced to the exhibition by Bruno Latour who briefly explained the flow of ideas, overall structural intent and the ‘phantom public’ piece which I will talk more on later. The exhibition is a gargantuan undertaking; 100 pieces of work from artists, scientists, sociologists, philosophers and historians all tasked with rejuvenating ‘the political in the name of arts and sciences’. Many pieces are collaborative experiments and thus timely to view given our recent collaboration with RCA design students. In fact we had been introduced to one of the pieces on display - Pindices; Demonstrating Matters of Public Concern by Lucy Kimbell (in collaboration with Andrew Barry) - only a week before and I was eager to see this work in context of other representations. I am also currently reading and thinking on how wifi is made political by different groups so was interested in the curators notions of ‘assemblies that are not political in the customary sense and yet assemble a public around things that are controversial and therefore political’. I definitely recommend a viewing of it – it is open till August – and try to allocate at least one full day if not two starting both with a good solid German breakfast.

In my brief review of the exhibition I agree and also don't agree with kris’ call for 'more disputation' (see below).

I too found the show interesting in terms of structure as well as content. The division of four zones and a further 13 sections provides a strong narrative for the many works and a foundation for curatorial decisions. It is a structure that neither leads the viewer in a linear path nor frees them to explore unencumbered. The viewer is caught in a web of simultaneously wanting to experience the exhibition as a whole, engage with the thematic introductory essays and the pieces together as well as appreciate them individually whilst bringing to bear personal interests. And as mentioned there is an awful lot of it to work around and through. Thus the experience can at times feel overwhelming and exhausting. On these accounts and others I agree with the desire for more disputation within and between individual pieces for the purpose of drawing out individual voices.

However is not the concept of democracy a collage of many voices - the good and the bad, the weak and the strong, the interesting and the dull, the confident and the misguided - each having an opportunity to speak in some form at some time? As the curators remind us the exhibition is an 'assembly of assemblies’ and thus a space for representation of many things that may or may not interest us and do not necessarily complete a smooth and neat and always easy to interpret picture of society. Politics resides in a lot of places, not always where you expect to find it.

So perhaps in this way the melee of voices, blurred and occasionally complicated navigation and multi-layers of information works to establish the context for our accepted ruling systems. Perhaps the structure of the exhibition (as well as its contents) presents us with an ‘atmosphere of a democracy’ to make us question a number of things like; Is this how it should be? What is our role as viewers, as participants and as citizens? And how do we decipher, act upon and dispute this kind of information in this context?

It's how I now see (on reflection) the idea of the 'phantom public' piece. Though a little nebulous at first when you are actually in the space, upon gaining time and distance on the experience I have come to see it more clearly. The ‘phantom public’ is a digital artwork that captures a sense of an individual visitors presence via their RFID entrance tag and collates and translates this information into a constantly changing rhythmic collage of light and sound throughout the space.

‘You will leave countless traces during your time in the exhibition; these activate the “phantom public” and this phantom in turn leaves it’s mark in the visitor’s mind. Without ever being completely clear about this, visitors will be both actors in an invisible artwork and a screen for its projections; it is an artwork that aspires to realize a new community.’

It is this idea of influencing the conditions of democracy on a personal individual level inadvertently by unconscious or habitual actions that I find potent and tangible - because so often (especially in this country of non-compulsory voting) there is the assumption that one person alone cannot make a difference.

- kat

A work in progress

2005-06-09T18:48:00.000Z

We are in the process of a design spring clean of the blog - so please bear with us as we lose and try to re-find things that fall off. thanks

- kat

ZKM exhibition: Making Things Public

2005-05-25T08:08:00.000Z

Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy is a show up now at ZKM Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany). It's been curated by Bruno Latour (Sociologist of Science and Technology), Peter Weibel and Steve Dietz (the latter two are both well known curators of contemporary and media arts). Thanks, first off, to Bruno Latour for meeting with us and introducing we INCITErs to the show, despite the 2 hours of tour-guidery he had done in the morning and the train to Paris which was pressuring him from the other side.

The show is enormous. Viewing it taxed all of us, and we had two full days to see it. It's also categorically limitless (which is to say: a-categorical), presenting work which seemed to conceive of itself more comfortably as science, and other pieces which presented themselves as activism, as agit prop, as illustration, even as "art." Of course, the setting (ZKM) and the setting's accoutrements (curation, wall text, accompanying brochure, exhibition book) suggest that we could read all the works as "art." But I don't know. To do so, in the face of such widely varied works, seems to stretch the category "art" so far that it can no longer do any meaningful work. On the other hand, it does neither viewers nor the works on show nor the collective project any favours to declare "this is not Art!". All I'm trying to suggest is that evaluating the works on show, and the collective exhibition, by the terms and standards set by the contemporary art world might not be, in all cases, the most generous or meaningful way to look at it (although it does produce some interesting against-the-grain effects, e.g. the always-fun frisson of really hating some of the works).

So, yes, the show is ambitious. Go see it if you find yourself in Karlsruhe. There are a hundred ways into it and probably more than a hundred ways to exit out the back of it. Let me just notice one aspect, which is probably as much a comment on the curatorial project as it is about anything else. Latour is a sociologist. Weibel and Dietz are curators. This is interesting, although I think it does not exhaust or encompass our ways of seeing the work they've assembled. But there is a relationship that obtains, over the course of the show, between the works and the text. The show is divided into 13 sections (although Latour says there are only 4), each accompanyied by a sizable text which introduces the themes of that section. Although probably better to say: "introduces the argument of that section," because each section is presented as one argument within a larger argument sustained or made by the show itself (that argument, rendered here in freakish, un-helful miniature, is something like: "politics is all about things"). So each section wages a strong argument, then presents (I don't know) 5 to 20 pieces which [X] that argument. But what is the relation here, the X? That is the question I'm raising. For a show that wants to open out our conception of what things are (by deflecting our attention away from questions of *what they are* to questions about *how they are made*), it felt to me that the arguments dictated to the works, and that rarely does a work stand out, or stand aside enough to speak back to the argument, to question it or modify it or relay it. Too often, the works appear as mute illustrations of the argument on hand. This is not just a problem with the text (text, per se, is not to blame). It also has to do with the enormity of the show—the overall design, we could say: there's just so much; rarely can pieces rise above the melee. Although, I think this sense of the works as participating in a melee, or a massively disputed state of affairs, is probably one the curators would (or do) encourage. So maybe this is one of the points the show wants to make about publics and collectivities: that they should be "disupted states of affairs" (indeed, they say exactly this on the web page I've directed you to above). But I don't think so, or, I don't think this quite excuses it. I wanted the works to have their say: their own, distinctive, subjective, situated say. I wanted there to be MORE disputation.

Meaghan Morris talks

2005-05-23T21:43:00.000Z

A little bit more about this, because it's worth it and because I mentioned it here before. Meaghan Morris is the Chair Professor and Head of Department in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. In 2000 (I think I'm remembering that date correctly), she left Australia to take up that post, having been long interested in issues of race, nationalism, and globalisation, and seeing in the move an opportunity to explore what it might mean to do cultural studies (how it might usefully annoy or test the concept of culture) in Asia, in an only-just-post-colonial country, in a linguistically mixed environment, outside of the Anglophile world where cultural studies is so thoroughly (self-)centred. She talked at some length about the politics of publishing and translation, and how these conspire to excuse Anglophile readers from reading non-Anglophile literatures. So, she gives an example, rarely do we (Anglophiles...this is the word she used) engage contemporaneously with, say, Chinese scholars who publish in Chinese. Language and geography seem to stand in the way, if not something like Culture itself (the marketing team for an American publisher might say: "what market is there in the US for contemporary work on China?"). And when we do get or make the chance to so engage, it is often necessarily in translation (Morris expressed her frustration with intellectuals who assume their audiences will be literate in more than one language; for a majority of the world, she says, literacy in a single language is often a significant accomplishment). And in translation tends to mean, although need not mean: several years if not decades later, with all due excuses made in the new introduction for all the ways in which the piece (typically a book, not a stand-alone journal article) fails to address its new local readerships. In this context, Morris then spoke about a journal called Traces, which she has edited and written for, and which appears in simultaneous four-part translation (Korean, Chinese, Japanese and English), every single issue. No mean feat, that. Think about the logistics. So the talk was about what it means to do cultural studies in linguistically mixed environments, with a strong implication being that the world is just such an environment, and yet (in cultural studies and elsewhere) is rarely conceived of and written for as such. Morris' strongest and clearest call to action was for "intellectuals" (she made a point of specifying intellectuals) to actively take up the task of engaging with scholars across the world, not just in the Anglophile world.

[Also: Nervous speakers of the world, take heart. Early in her talk, Morris was relying heavily on her glass of water and finally explained: "This always happens to me, in every single talk I've ever given for my entire life...just at this point in the talk. I must breath now." At which point, she did: just stood there, sipping and breathing. All very endearing.]

INCITE/RCA collaboration

2005-05-11T16:58:00.000Z

With the RCA/INCITE collaboration week over (or at least, ceased), first things first: gratitude! To Katrina Jungnickel and Nina Wakeford and Nina Pope and Lucy Kimbell who conceived and organised and in general possible-ised the whole thing. It was a really good event and worked on all sorts of levels: collaboratively, disciplinarily, non-disciplinarily, anti-disciplinarily...for what it provoked and what it effected.

So to pull on one of many possible threads: even though the event was established (and usefully so) in a disciplinary framework (sociologists collaborating with interaction designers), one of the things I really like about collaboration is the way it brackets the disciplinarity of disciplines (I fear that I'm going to continue the stretch the grammatical elasticity of that word...bear with me. If you do, I promise to stop short of "Disciplinarity-ness."). Disciplinarity doesn't go away, or very far away, but I rarely feel like the action takes place through or by way of disciplines. When they're called upon, they're called upon quite explicitly, to address some problem that is particularly well suited to a discipline's strengths, rather than silently dictating to our methods and the products of our work, as they can otherwise do. So, for instance, with George Grinsted, my designer (he calls me "his sociologist"), he might ask me how Sociology thinks about copyright or intellectual property vis a vis the sociologist's data, but even this conversation (whatever we do with it) doesn't take place on disciplinary turf. Rather, the discipline is being called up, accessed, then re-shelved. The action then continues to take place elsewhere, in whatever space the collaboration creates for itself, making decisions based on what the project needs and NOT what the discipline needs (although there are definitely times when the needs of a discipline should guide our work). For me, this situation (meaning: this placement, this location) of disciplines plays to Disciplinarity's strengths (e.g. an intellectual history, a deep and broad set of resources for addressing certain kinds of problems) and avoids its weaknesses (e.g. the way it can hem in the products of our work, limit our audiences, hamper our methods).

Collaboration (and I think even collaboration within a discipline, although I have less experience with this and suspect that it is more difficult to set Disciplinarity aside in this case, even while this kind of collaboration probably highlights the productive differences within a discipline)...collaboration does or can set Disciplinarity to the side (always in reach, inevitably embedded in the muscle memory of our individual practices) while establishing a territory for the project at hand. In collaboration or working alone (one never is), this is my ambition for any work I do. Collaboration gets me there a little quicker.

-kris

INCITE/ RCA - day four

2005-05-05T23:20:00.000Z

It's meant to be a week long collaborative experiment yet it has felt neither like a week nor particularly long. Time has taken on a slippery sheen. Hours have disappeared yet days have run on. Piles of paper grow ever larger. Each ripped piece still important for some scribbled reason. Pairs huddle, walk and talk in tandem. We've been eating at desks, in transit and during crits. For me, it seems there have been few moments when I haven't been thinking about, chewing over or worrying about my collaborative challenge. (If this is my response then the sleep research/design team must be really blurring the boundaries!)

Everyone is deeply involved in their projects, so much so that although we glimpse each other occasionally scurrying back from field trips, to and from scanners and photocopiers, with increasingly interesting bundles of diagrams, piles of data and modeling materials there have been few spaces for leisurely inter-group chat. So I imagine everyone is looking forward to tomorrow to see what has been going on around the studio.

Just to recap, the pairs have been working on:

George + Kris - Personal Photography Online & Photoblogs
Joe + Monica - Mexican Women's experience on Racism, Mestizaje & National Identity
Matthew + Beckie - Girls, Bodies & Images
Tamsin and Bas + Jenny and Sue - Women's Sleep
Tom + Vicky - The contemporary construction of Greekness
Jon + me - No.73 bus

Tomorrow is the final day of the collaboration. At 13.00 every pair will present their design solution or research artefact or whatever they are calling it to the group. We are meeting at UniS for the final session which will encompass individual, pair and disciplinary reflections on the project. Now, enough blogging. I need to finish my work.

-kat

INCITE/RCA - day one

2005-05-03T19:20:00.000Z

The other big event which kicked off on Friday afternoon is the RCA/ INCITE collaboration. It's a week long experiment during which interaction design students from RCA Interaction design unit are collaborating with sociologists from INCITE, University of Surrey and Goldsmiths College. It's being run by Nina Wakeford (INCITE) and Lucy Kimbell and Nina Pope (RCA).

The pairings include:

- George Grinsted + Kris Cohen
- Joe Malia + Monica Moreno
- Jon Arden + me
- Matthew Falla + Beckie Coleman
- Tamsin Fulton & Bas Raijmakers + Jenny Hislop & Sue Venn
- Tom Jenkins + Vicky Skiftou

Whilst Friday afternoon provided a valuable overview of sociological and interaction design perspectives and a collaboration experience case study, today marked the real (uncomfortable and exciting) start to the event. Pairs were tasked with negotiating shared interests, complementary skills and theoretical frameworks. After a series of iterative idea generation exercises each pair had to present their working brief to the group. I can only speak for my own experience and I found it an exhausting but very interesting day. I'll be detailing my views, sketches and (no doubt) emotional ups and downs on my bus blog as this is the project from which Jon and I are drawing inspiration. Tomorrow many pairs are in the field for some quick and dirty research before coming back to another group crit at 4pm.

More updates to come.

- kat

INCITE/ INTEL Privacy workshop

2005-05-02T19:03:00.000Z

It's been a busy few weeks leading up to a few big INCITE events.

Last Thursday and (half of) Friday saw the University of Surrey play host to the INCITE and INTEL Privacy workshop. We were lucky to have the pleasure of 15 very smart and fun people talking about and commenting on new research projects. The purpose of the event was to discuss projects and thinking around privacy/technology issues, make use of each other’s knowledge and debate insights generated.

Participants included:

INTEL, PAPR research lab members:
Ken Anderson, Senior Researcher/Design Anthropologist
Michele Chang, Interaction Design Researcher
Sunny Consolvo, Senior Researcher
Scott Mainwaring, Senior Researcher
Wendy March, Interaction Design Researcher

Department of Sociology, University of Surrey:
Kris Cohen, Research Fellow, INCITE
Mary Ebeling, Postgrad student, INCITE
Jo Moran Ellis, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Nicola Green, Lecturer in Sociology
Gerard Oleksik, Postgrad student, INCITE
Nina Wakeford, Reader in Sociology and Director of INCITE
Steve Smith, Postgrad student, INCITE

UK social scientists:
Georgina Born, Reader in Sociology, Anthropology and Music, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge
Daniel Neyland, Senior Research Fellow, Science & Technology, Oxford Said Business School

A literature review of UK and European empirical research around the areas of privacy will shortly be posted on the INCITE website. Mary also documented the event and this too will be available soon.

Thanks to everyone for making it a valuable two days.

-kat

2005-04-15T09:26:00.000Z

What does it mean for user research, for design, for consumer industry generally, for social scientists, and indeed, for "users" themselves, when "users" appear to be collecting data about themselves? For instance, here and here. Both appear to be the products of conventional user research: "what's in your bag" studies are very common. But what I mean by the initial question is this: is this the same kind of data that commercial user research produces? is it "useful" in the same way? The first is an epistemological (or at least, a methodological) question: about the status of these kinds of sites as knowledge. The second is, I'd say, a political question: how are these, or any user research studies used? To what ends?

Companies like this might disagree, but I think that people collecting data on themselves and on their worlds—as in the links above, blogs, Flickr accounts generally, art like this—is fundmentally different. Which is to say, I think they are politically different. But that doesn't mean Flickr sites, for instance, can't and won't be used as user research, or that they shouldn't be; in fact, it is just this openness of ends, the fact that the data collected could be used by anyone for any purposes, which creates the fundamental difference I mention above.

p.s. Since being alerted by Rick to a claim going around that Flickr users who tag their photos with brand names are "brand evangelists" I've been looking at a lot of these "brand images" on Flickr (e.g. look at the Wal-mart tag on Flickr).

If Flickr users are "brand evangelists" then James Agee and Walker Evans were poverty evangelists and Susan Sontag was a torture and AIDS evangelist and Durkheim was a suicide evangelist and Foucault was a prison and madness evangelist and Andrea Dworkin (RIP) was a sex evangelist.

Evangelists have one interest, often dissembled in the appearance of their day to day evangelist practices. This is not what's going on in Flickr, even though some of the individual activities might be described as evangelistic (I'm sure, for instance, that there are a lot of microsoft and red stripe and wal-mart white collar employees who tag photos with their company's brands). For one, this takes no account of the collective activities and effects of Flickr, of all the photos there, all the tags, the groups, and therefore, this account misses the incalcuably diverse effects which Flickr potentialises, the incalcuably diverse interests it potentially serves.

2005-04-14T10:10:00.000Z

The Pavis Centre for Social and Cultural Research invites you to

THE PAVIS LECTURE

"What’s Foreign in Cultural Studies? or,
On English as a Chinese language"

Meaghan Morris

Meaghan Morris is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies and Coordinator of the Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme at Lingnan University, Hong Kong . Her most recent books include New Keywords: a Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (co-ed with Tony Bennett and Lawrence Grossberg) and “Race” Panic and the Memory of Migration (co-ed. with Brett de Bary). She is Senior Editor of Traces: a Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Translation, and in 2004 was elected Chair of the international Association for Cultural Studies.

4.30 pm - 6.00pm

Tuesday 17th May 2005

Berrill Lecture Theatre,

Walton Hall, Milton Keynes

Tea will be served from 4.00pm in the Berrill Tea Bar followed by discussion and a reception

All Welcome, Admission Free

There will be a webcast of the lecture and the relevant link will be added to the Pavis Centre web page in due course. For further information please contact Karen Ho at K.D.Ho [at] open [dot] ac [dot] uk

Directions to the Walton Hall campus can be found at this website address.

Frontseat/Backseat - a workshop

2005-04-06T21:50:00.000Z

On friday I attended a full day seminar called 'Frontseat/Backseat' organised by Mark Perry at Brunel University. He invited an interesting group of researchers at different stages in their careers and projects to discuss data and analytical techniques for projects predicated in and around private and public transport (specifically cars, taxis and buses).

A quick overview of the speakers: Oskar Juhlin, the director of the Mobility Lab at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, talked about the mobile technology design for transport systems, including music sharing, games and inter-vehicle communication systems. Carsten Sorenson from the Information Systems Deptment at the LSE introduced his work on ICT's and the management of knowledge and the work of his two Phd students - Daniele and Sylvia. Daniele Pica is in the final months of his research on contextualizing mobile informatics, the concept of location and the implications for Police organizations. Silvia Elaluf-Calderwood is in the middle of her fieldwork researching the mobile personal and working lives of London Black cab drivers. Eric Laurier presented some preliminary video data from his Habitable cars project at the Institute of Geography in Edinburgh. Allyson Noble from the Napier University in Edinburgh is also interested in buses and is conducting her PhD research on Lothian city routes asking, "What can we know about the local character of the city from the vantage point of the bus?" Finally John Paul Bichard, a digital artist and mad paddler is now associated with Oskar's work in Stockholm. I worked with him during the UTdays.

Interestingly everyone presented their data in some multi-media form. Whilst it was not the focus of the day the challenges of methodological approaches using video, photos, annotated images, drawings etc were raised in nearly every presentation.

-kat

2005-04-05T09:40:00.000Z

My review of The Internet in Everyday Life (eds. Wellman and Haythornthwaite) in Sociological Research Online.

-kris

2005-04-02T14:51:00.000Z

A small personal mobile phone gripe.

Scene 1: My sony ericsson K700i flatlines last weekend. Prior to its sudden demise it corrupted a number of incoming and outgoing texts and then blanked, never to return. An obvious (major) software issue.

Scene 2: I take the dead object to the T-Mobile repair shop on Oxford Street. No I didn't drop it. No it doesn't have liquid damage. It's a software issue. Yes it is under warranty. Yes I have been a customer for five years. Yes they will check it over to determine the problem. No there are no replacement phones available. When will it be fixed? In two hours more will be known and it might be fixed. Pop back in then. But I'm not intending on shopping for two hours. Can they call me? [Fortunately I have an old handset so am still mobile. Others in line were not so lucky.] No they don't do that. You have to come back in to the store.

Scene 3: I cannot return to the shop until two days later. Yes, it was a software issue. No they couldn't fix it. So they sent it to the manufacturer for repair. Can I have a replacement? No. When will it be back? Maybe Wednesday or Thursday next week. Best come in Saturday. It should be back by then. But that is another week. Can you call me? No we don't do that. But you're a phone company that exists to provide a communication service. Can I call you? No. You have to come back into the store.

I asked if they understood the irony of the situation. They said yes.

- kat

2005-03-18T11:21:00.000Z

This being my first post I’ll explain whereabouts I am with my current project. I’m in the 3rd year of my PhD investigating the domestic consumption of online music. Approaching the end of my data collection now which has involved time spent in the Music Interactive dept of the BBC, as well as time in online music user groups and a lot of time hanging around record stores inviting people to be interviewed (it’s tough job, but…). Starting to pull some main themes from the research and it’s all getting very interesting, not to mention complicated. Currently trying to get to the bottom of the importance of the format of a piece of music and what impact this has on the listening experience. Does an MP3 file share the same value as a piece of music on CD, tape or vinyl? How do users relate differently to different formats? What affordances do various formats give? Does this influence the meaning that piece of music has for the listener? Questions, questions, questions…

- Gerard

2005-03-15T11:56:00.000Z

I had the opportunity to speak on a panel last night at the RCA entitled Issues in Interaction Design - Me and My Users. It was the first of an evening seminar series chaired by Bas Raijmakers and featured presentations by Bill Gaver (RCA), Roger Coleman (RCA), Martin Bontoft (Ideo), Gill Wildman and Nick Durrant (Plot). Short presentations covered the issues faced by designers and researchers in industry and academia around the questions:
What is the role of the user in the design process?
Can we have complex users with personalities and still talk about products and mass production?
Where is the boundary between the designer and the user?
Discussion with the audience of design students and researchers circled around the variety of methodologies and techniques available, the identity of ‘users’ and ‘non-users’ as well as the meaning and history of the term ‘users’, the value of design in the research process and how failure is often more acceptable in prototyping than in research. The group then headed to the bar, as any good panel should, where the discussion continued. The next two sessions will be about Thinking Through Making and Designer Science.

-kat

2005-03-08T08:33:00.000Z

The INCITE group has been pretty busy over the first few months of the year and I thought it might be a good time to do a quick overview of everyone’s activities.

Firstly Kate is leaving us. She has accepted a permanent lectureship at the University of Edinburgh, in the Graduate School of Social and Political Studies: the central focus is on e-learning and social research methods. It will be very sad to see her go but on the other hand it means we have someone to visit in Scotland.

Kris has almost finished the interviewing section of his year-long ESRC funded research into photoblogs. He has travelled far and wide on and offline (from the Docklands to Oxford to Stoke Newington to East London) in his quest to find out about people’s photo blogging motivations and the social life of images. You can follow his travelling, interviewing, reading and analytical progress on his research blog – Photos Leave Home.

Steve can almost see the end of his PhD. He is currently in the midst of the final write up of his CASE studentship looking at the social construction of digital cameras. To understand this he has investigated advertising stories, retail spaces and practices, interviewed and observed users in their own homes and participated in online communities. The notion of branding permeates his work. Evidence of his visual and textual analysis of everyday experiences of digital photography wallpapers the INCITE studio.

Mary is also in the process of analysing and writing up her PhD work. Her research on the online political cultures of exiles and independent journalists focuses on three models of democratic theory - liberal, Islamic and radical. She is critically addressing current theories on the role new information technologies play in shaping online deliberative democracy and counterpublics.

Gerard is currently deeply engaged in interviewing, transcribing and making sense of his data for his PhD project about online music in the home. He is interested in finding out what happens when music goes virtual and has been working with BBC Music Online.

In amongst the plethora of thesis reviews, writing studentship applications, attending meetings, organising and helping all of us as well as doing her own work, Nina has also started teaching the M.Sc course Innovations in Online Research on Fridays. I just attended the first one and if that is anything to go by it's going to be an intense and exciting course.

I am seven weeks into my PhD. After years of thinking about it I have finally started and it's overwhelming, terrifying and stimulating all at once. I have been attending classes and had the opportunity to guest teach a few undergrad ones too. It's been pretty busy. My interests lie in new tech and urban sociality so I will be looking at the ways in which people create relationships and social networks around and through digital technologies and the influence of urban space in the configuration and maintenance of connections between people. My study will look at what kinds of urban sociality are being enabled by digital technology, how they are constructed (formal and informal interactions and organisations) and where they are located (the role urban space has in particular social networks). I’m planning on continuing the bus blog and starting a new blog about my research (once I come up with a suitable name for it….)

- kat

2005-02-17T17:56:00.000Z

Two pretty exciting INCITE events are coming up.

Firstly in April INCITE, INTEL's People and Practices group and some special guests are getting together to talk, present, debate, workshop and feedback on all things to do with privacy and technology.

Then following on closely in May is an INCITE/Royal College of Art event which will bring together designers and sociologists for an intense week long collaboration. Students from the MA Interaction Design and sociologists from the University of Surrey and Goldsmiths will work together, sharing research findings, methods, skills and experience. The objective of the collaboration is for participants to be exposed to and reflect on different disciplinary ways of working.

More information about the timetable and participants will be posted closer to the event on the INCITE website.

- kat

2005-02-08T10:11:00.000Z

We recently met up to discuss Patti Lather's 1993 article “Fertile Obsession: Validity after Poststructuralism” (in The Sociological Quarterly, 34:4, p. 673-693). Nina suggested that we read it in part, I think, because as social scientists who frequently collaborate with researchers, designers and technologists in business, we commonly run up against especially virulent and calcified forms of validity.

To me, Lather's article seemed dated, from a time when a certain kind of diffident self-reflexivity seemed like it might be adequate to the task of undermining validity and other positivist practices. We talked about how this form of coy irony (e.g. rather than a checklist, Lather gives us a "checklist that mimics checklists") will and does play out very differently for men than for women (it's one thing for a man to claim a kind of power in playful unknowing; another for a woman to do so—especially in confrontation or collaboration with fields which still very much value knowing, and knowing with certainty). Although a self-professed feminist, Lather doesn't account for this. But this too may be a factor of time: in its moment, Lather's poststructuralist language may have, itself, seemed like enough to trouble standing gender codes. But 10 years on, I'm not sure this is true—and it's certainly not true in corporate boardrooms. Relatedly, we talked about how Lather's tactics (like so much Deleuzean or Derridean poststructuralism—and Lather frequently cites both, although seems not to have read much Deleuze or Derrida, but mostly secondary commentators writing about them) seem so thoroughly writerly; in fact, they seem encased in her text and lacking a will to move outward (e.g. Lather's professed interests in a project on people living with HIV/AIDS are entirely methodological, "Who are my 'others?' What binaries structure my argument?"—but what about the people living with HIV/AIDS? Will we learn anything about them...anything useful?).

But there was also some optimism about the possible uses for Lather's idea of "voluptuous validity," for work that is always excessive or "too much." In fact, there may have been much more optimism than I'm representing. I admit to being a pretty grumpy amanuensis.

-kris

2005-01-13T11:05:00.000Z

This Friday, Surrey is hosting the final in Nina Wakeford's and Nicola Green's ESRC funded The Future of Feminist Science and Technology Studies series. The theme is Memory. The groups which tend to collect there are collegial, critical and smart.

-kris

2005-01-13T10:31:00.000Z

While I'm in the fieldwork phase of my ESRC project on personal photography and the internet, I'm going to be posting updates over at www.photosleavehome.blogspot.com, which will be a combined project diary and personal photoblog. Not to imply that what's over there isn't INCITE news, but neither do I want to monopolise this space with my little project.

But for a preview: yesterday in Oxford, at Freud's, I talked to www.fouriertransform.com/365/ about his photos "from around the world." Read more about it here.

-kris

2005-01-10T13:48:00.000Z

A review of the 2004 Korsakow Project; New Frontiers in Documentary masterclass has been posted on the Korsakow website. I was first introduced to this interactive narrative software by Bas of the RCA who is experimenting with it in his PhD. These are some of the experimental uses of the software that were presented at the event;

Bregtje van der Haak - "interactive rendering of a film about the architect Rem Koolhaas’ research on the city of Lagos. Although it is originally shot as a linear film, she reshaped it into an interactive form. She claims that this is actually better for experiencing the real essence of Lagos. It makes you look more closely at the images and you see details better when you have to make choices."

Florian Thalhofer - "interactive multichannel documentary project about a social housing project in Bremen-Nord. He spent a month in Bremen to film and interview the locals and kept an online diary so that people could react to it immediately. So he used the Internet as well as live images as a basis to create an interactive film."

Marijke Jongbloed - "presented her project Love Choice in Cyberspace. This was originally a radiodocumentary about the Internet dating circuit. She co-created a website on which the radiodocumentary can be heard. This also shows how the different old and new media merge within the documentary form."

-kat

2004-12-19T14:48:00.000Z

Three days ago, it was (I was) 100F (38C). Now I'm in Chicago and this morning it is 5F (-15C) with a thin crust of icy snow on the ground. Now that's supermodernity. The seasons reverse.

-kris

2004-12-15T07:49:00.000Z

The airport in Perth. It doesn't feel supermodern to me. A woman cries into a phone to my right. Straight ahead, the rows and rows of cheap booze look maudlin. And already I'm missing the intensity of sun, the intensity of collaboration here in Australia. It all feels kind of sentimental, actually.

-kris

2004-12-10T04:44:00.000Z

My mini-tour of Australia continues. I'm now in Perth, Western Australia, at the CSAA conference at Murdoch University. It's about 35 degrees today, so relatively cool. No clouds. Animals named quokkas. Snake alerts in the campus hallways. Strangeness everywhere. For example, there are papers on sweat, the politics of male body hair, and blogging (but its a cultural studies conference; we expect nothing less strange). Jean, Jane, Melissa and I gave our papers yesterday and our panel went really well. A lot of people especially appreciated the ways in which our papers were engaged with each other, which is gratifying, as we prepared this panel via email for the better part of 9 months. It's a nice model, we think, especially compared to panels which get organised by the conference under general rubrics like "Queer" or "Gender," where the papers are sometimes not only non relevant to one another, but sometimes un-usefully interfere with one another. It made the question session afterwards feel cohesive--productive for us and the audience. We're hoping, as a next stage of work together, to publish our papers as a collection of some sort.

For INCITE's interests, Ben Highmore gave a really nice keynote address this morning on design, where he highlighted the ways in which the designed world acts upon bodies, homes, and cultural practices generally. He took carpet, radio and teapots as case studies, and in historicising their emergence (which has resonances with my paper, w/r/t points of emergence for new technologies), produced interesting observations like, for example: the introduction of carpets to homes contributed to furniture being made which sat closer to the floor (which was now softer and nicer to sit on). He follows this trajectory of analysis in looking at the designed world, tracing the effects of design. Nice work, and historical, which always makes me a bit weak in the knees, especially in relation to new media and technology, where the historical is so ofter preterit.

Another day of conference to go. Then a few days of rest in Perth, and I begin the journey home on the 15th.

-kris

2004-12-08T13:19:00.000Z

INCITE is hosting the event: Postgraduate Research Conference Technologies: Studies and Strategies tomorrow (9 Dec), organised by Kate Orton-Johnson and Steve Smith (both are members of INCITE. Kate has recently been granted her PhD and Steve is currently writing up his thesis.) Targeted at postgraduate students of sociology, cultural anthropology and related disciplines the conference will provide a forum to engage in discussions relating to research in and of online spaces. Here are the timetable and abstracts. We hope to place papers online over the next week or so.

2004-12-02T06:20:00.000Z

Hello from Australia. I gave a talk yesterday at Queensland University of Technology, and met with people from ACID and CIRAC. Lots of interest all around in collaboration and in extra-academic collaborations specifically.

Oh, and Melissa and Jean would like me to remind everyone of how great they are.

I'm in Syndey now with Jane Simon, so I've now met all of the panelists and I'm even more excited about the four of us working together.

-kris

2004-11-26T21:44:00.000Z

Tomorrow I leave for Australia. And I won't really stop leaving until Monday, when I land and exit airports. It's a not-so-modest tour, and most of all, a chance to strengthen working relations and friendships with Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess, and Jane Simon. In Brisbane, I'm visiting and giving a talk to people at Jean's institutional home, Creative Industries Research and Application Centre, at Queensland University of Technology. Then, a brief trip to Sydney for a south hemispheric interlude—in order to see Sydney and to visit with Jane. Then back to Brisbane to attend the Internet Masterclass workshop at the University of Queensland, where Melissa works. And finally, to Perth with the foursome, where we are hosting a panel called "Fields of Uncool: Counter-heroics and Counter-professionalism in Cultural Studies" at the CSAA conference "Everyday Transformations.

[pause for breath] I'm very lucky to be going. And excited. I'll report back in 2005, if not along the way.

-kris

2004-11-17T11:13:00.000Z

Thanks to Amanda Windle from Wimbledon School of Art for presenting us with a real lesson in how to engage elegantly with ungodly research messes. She's doing a practice-based PhD (or, in the new argot of the art world: she's doing art "research"), which sounds like an exquisite snarl of theory, practice, text, image and all the ways those categories slip their gears. She's working on visualising personal space, but starting to deal with Artificial Intelligence, Actor Network Theory and some pretty heavyweight philosophy. Can't wait to see where she goes with it.

-kris

2004-11-12T07:54:00.000Z

Two upcoming INCITE events:

1. Monday, 15th Nov.: reading group for John Law's "After Method".

2. Tues, 16th Nov., Amanda Windle, practice-based PhD student from Wimbledon School of Art, will be talking about her work on personal space and Artificial Intelligence/A-Life.

-kris

2004-11-01T20:46:00.000Z

Monument Erected, History Annexed. Last Thurs, I attended my first public unveiling of a statue, and my first event presided over by a royal. In this case, his Royal Highness, the Earl of Wessex. When he pulled the ripcord, we beheld a statue of Alan Turing, cast in bronze. Monumental indeed, but somehow not large enough. It was several heads higher than most people, but would (if The People decided someday that Alan Turing needed to be overthrown) have looked awkwardly underwhelming were someone to try and topple it. Alan Turing never worked at Surrey as an adult, but had spent a part of his childhood in Guildford, the city which hosts the University of Surrey. So, why not? Apparently, the Earl then visited the dance department at Surrey, the royals not being a family to unveil and run.

-kris

2004-10-17T10:39:00.000Z

The politics of powerpoint aesthetics, and visa versa.
-kris

2004-10-12T20:58:00.000Z

I met with two really interesting people today. In addition to stimulating chatter about their work, studio structures and research processes they both demonstrated tools which help them make sense of, manage and creatively archive digital film footage.

Bas Raijmakers is currently finishing an MPhil in Interaction Design at the RCA. We met at Ubicomp where we discovered similar interests in alternative visual ethnographic methods. He talked through his work 'How to use film in design research. Inspiring and informing interaction design through visual media' and introduced me to the Korsakow system, which I have already downloaded and started to play with. The Korsakow system is interactive narrative software designed by Mediamatic Amsterdam and the University of Arts in Berlin (UdK). Bas is using it to explore how it, and other filmic techniques, might build bridges between designers and the people they study. Korsakow is interesting in that clips can be remixed by viewers into a plot of their own design, thus co-creating the meaning of the film with the filmmaker. It does this through a database that links clips with identified key words. Some of Bas's work will be online soon.

I also had the pleasure of meeting up with Paula Neal of PDD, (a product design and innovation company committed to user-centred research). She introduced me to the scope of interdisciplinary creativity that goes on in a huge warehouse space in Shepherds Bush. In particular (if I can narrow it down) I really liked the digital footage archiving system that researchers use to catalogue clips, complete with annotation, for easy searching by anyone for any project. You can imagine the size of their backup system!

Both meetings and tool intro's reinvigorated my creative thinkings about the box of footage, images, sound and interview transcripts I have gathered over the last 15months from my bus research. mmmmmm
- kat

2004-10-11T09:08:00.000Z

I am still at a loss about Saturday’s election results in Australia. More than just miserably reeling from the prospect of another term of Howard, bloated from the success of ‘making history in his fourth term’, but about my fellow Australians who have swallowed the political farce. Who are they? His victory represents an endorsement of all the gut wrenching political rhetoric that doesn’t fit anywhere in my understanding of Australia. It’s made me question what Australia is becoming and what it means to be Australian. I have been calling friends and family and I have been glued to the internet searching for comments, news, opinion to somehow reinforce my own beliefs, my ideals, my values. At this time I have found myself reading lots of aussie blogs (more than my usual favourites) for they offer me a sense of shared community - of personal outrage and disbelief. Being away makes these moments even more acute. According to a Diplomat Survey published Sept 2004, 1 million Australians live outside Australia - 3/4 of them on a permanent or long term basis. That’s an enormous number, which has increased markedly over the last decade (see any links?). It will be interesting (and depressing) to see if this trend continues.

The Menzies Centre for Australian Studies is holding a number of seminars I hope to attend.

14.10.04. The Australian Federal Election. A panel discussion of the Australian election results and the likely consequences.

26.10.04. Anne Summers, AO. Can Women's Equality in Australia be Restored?

27.10.04. Menzies Lecture: Michael L'Estrange (High Commissioner for Australia). The Australia-Britain relationship today: patterns of history, dynamics of change.
-kat

2004-10-10T15:12:00.000Z

RIP Derrida.

-kris

2004-10-08T13:50:00.000Z

This term, I'm going to be teaching on a new degree course here at Surrey: MSc Digital Technologies and Society. It's designed to foster critical thinking within the design and production of digital tech. My course is entitled "Concepts and Theories." I'm going to meet the students in a couple of hours and I'm curious about their backgrounds. My guess is that most of them will have come from computer science, rather than the social sciences. I'm not exactly sure why I think that. I suppose it's easier to imagine a computer scientist deciding they wanted to know something about research, theory, and method AS A PART OF their practice as a computer scientist. It's much harder for me to imagine a theorist (social scientist, cultural stud, etc) wanting to take courses in computer science without imagining that this represents some kind of career change. Probably this says much about my biases, and the tenacity of a view which stupidly divides theory and practice (despite theoretical and practical allegiances to the contrary). Maybe it also says something about disciplinary flows: which disciplines can conceive of themselves AS themselves while taking onboard another discipline's optics and methods; which have a harder time with this kind of expansion.

In The Pirate's Fiancee, Meaghan Morris says this about expansion and engagement across boundaries that seem to divide theory from practice: "...serious engagement with popular culture must eventually accept to take issue with it [popular culture] and in it, as well as about it, and I think this means writing seriously about popular theories as well as (or even rather than) writing 'popular' spin-offs from academic theories." The successful practice of which would go a long way towards undermining our capacity to talk meaningfully about theory as un-practical and practice as un-theoretical.

-kris

2004-10-04T13:21:00.000Z

Lawrence Lessig, of Stanford University Law, launched the UK version of Creative Commons today at UCL. He spoke about the problems of the existing copyright system and the future of creativity and technology.

Creative Commons is a new way for authors, artists, musicians, film makers, programmers and others to make their creative works available to the world. Rather than the usual"(c) All Rights Reserved" approach that limits the use that can be made of works, Creative Commons provides a"(cc) Some Rights Reserved" license. Creative individuals can use the Creative Commons website to automatically generate licenses that fit their exact needs.

Lessig talked about cultural remix which he described as the freedom of creative expression to remix culture without seeking permission. He argued that digital technology has changed the way creative content is created, developed and distributed and so should our understanding of copyright. He does believes in copyright to protect creative content BUT not where it is ambiguous and unnecessarily applied to content without the creators intent. He is for collaborations across the internet, creative co-creation and building on other people's work but he is against lawyers as unnecessary intermediaries.

The licenses are available from November 1. They are made up of three layers; human speak, lawyer speak and machine speak. The first so you as a creative person can understand how it works, the second so the court will support and respect your claim should it resort to that and the third sets up an infrastructure for a searchable database in the future. The UK is the 10th country to take on the Creative Commons model. There are apparently 60 others currently negotiating their own. There are various spin-offs from the original version. Wired magazine will feature a CD of music released under Creative Commons sampling license. There is also a Science project looking to push open access publishing and the BBC Creative Archive is currently building on the CC model. Upon questioning Lessig admitted they started with a culture model before an academic one but hoped through experimentation it would develop. It has me thinking about the changes it suggests - How it might affect the way I blog or read or reference other blogs? How different the UK version will be to others? and more, but later as this post is long enough...
-kat

2004-09-26T11:57:00.000Z

Sometimes the newspapers are very kind to us. Here's an article in the New York Times, Sunday Magazine today, called "Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail." It addresses the question of whether or not blogs are journalism (it runs under the tagline: "Are bloggers ruining political journalism or recharging it?"). This is one of the evaluatory "positions" (so-called after Eve Sedgwick and her new work in Touching Feeling) on blogs that I discussed in my recent AoIR 5.0 talk and which I'll be talking about again in Perth, Australia later this year.

It's no surprise that the article asserts (with blinding self-obviousness, ala Althusser and interpellation) that "successful" blogs are blogs with lots of (quantifiable) readers, which already, in just that inconspicuous, seemingly uncontentious claim, does the major work of defining 1. what a blog is (a vehicle for self-promotion, therefore authorially aligned with an Author), 2. how it works (by seducing readers into acts of consumption), 3. how it succeeds and fails (see above; thereby asserting THAT success and failure are relevent or applicable terms), and 4. how it operates at a cultural level (by disseminating itself like websites or books or newspapers or "regular" journalism, etc.). The rest of the article is colouful detail and repetition of claims.

-kris

2004-09-22T14:30:00.000Z

Nina, Kat and I are all just back from the Association of Internet Researchers Annual Conference (AoIR 5.0). On the eve of the resuscitation of my own work on blogs and personal photography (I take up my new grant on Oct. 1), I tried to see most of the blog papers. Again and again, my reaction was to feel as though the debates and problems being aired in relation to blogs were not my debates and problems. This kind of estrangement happens between disciplines and in that sense, I'm not surprised--nevertheless, I was surprised. Some disciplines are, of course, closer than others: they share methods, theory, favourite authors and important historical points of reference. Others, which one might think to be nearer relations (e.g the disciplines which have taken up blogs), in fact overlap very little. In a sense, that's all fine and this isn't a complaint. After all, the fact that we're all working on blogs guarantees no kind of complementarity. On the other hand, what if I want to create lines of connection with those researchers, e.g. the ones approaching blogs through quantitative methods, or through the framework of "Uses and Gratifications" theory (something I'd not heard anything about until the conference this year, where it turned up as a popular way to link bloggers with their motivations)? I've spent a fair bit of time working closely and collaboratively with disciplines that aren't my own (e.g. design, art), so the problem isn't in that solely. But so far I'm flummoxed on this one. This is a wider gulf than I'm used to encountering. I need to think more about it, look over my notes from the blog talks, and possibly strike up some more detailed conversations.

-kris

newcastle bridge

2004-09-16T06:38:00.000Z

newcastle bridge,
originally uploaded by Damen and Walton.

Another test from flickr. Neat.
-kris

Flickr

2004-09-16T06:33:00.000Z

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

2004-09-08T13:20:00.000Z

I am at the Ubicomp conference in Nottingham. Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate and present at the Urban Frontier workshop run by Eric Paulos and Ken Anderson of Intel PAPR. Although it was a long day, with many many 8mins presentations and question time, it was really interesting to see so many different presentation styles, disciplinary approaches and projects. The workshop featured anthropologists, sociologists, designers, computer scientists, architects, urban planners and artists. Some projects were interesting, some less so, but overall it was very enjoyable. I received some thought provoking questions that will help me frame my work going forward given the Routemaster was officially retired last Friday night. I also had the chance to talk with Dr Janet Abrams, the Director of the Design Institute at the University of Minnesota. She gave a fascinating and deliberately controversial opening keynote presentation this morning - Ubiquity/Urbiquity: the B.U.G. and other Ludic(rous) Pursuits. Amongst other things she challenged the concept of ‘ubiquitous computing’ and the ‘user’ - specifically asking why we need more technology, everywhere, why every encounter has to be mediated by a digital device, why users tend to be flavourless, anonymous and cut from the same cloth and what adding an extra layer to everyday encounters actually delivers. It was a great critical start to the conference given the posters and demonstrations of all the new, innovative and sexy applications and devices had just been set up in the entrance halls.
- kat

2004-08-31T13:53:00.000Z

The No.73 Routemaster bus makes its last run through the city this Friday night.

There is interest building on the bus blog to join it on its last voyage from Victoria to Tottenham and there is speculation as to the volume and types of people who might be there. It'll be an interesting experience in many ways. It's bound to be strange to be on a packed bus at that time of night (it departs Victoria Station at 00:53hrs) with passengers focused on the journey more than the destination. It's definitely going to be surreal, given I fly in that day from the U.S and also troublesome to be left in Tottenham at 01.47 (though I doubt I will get that far). I'll be the one squashed in a corner armed with a camera, notepad, whiskey and chocolate.
I'm looking forward to it.
Want to join me?
-kat

2004-08-25T07:37:00.000Z

Nina and I are off to the 4S & EASST Conference 2004 tonight. We're giving a paper together on Saturday (even though the organisers refused to list my name in the programme), which is the last day of the conference (I hate speaking on the last day). It's called "BIT-work and other new media art practices." Here is the abstract:

This paper will look at the emerging conversations between sociologists and artists using new media. Beginning with a discussion of an early BIT intervention in a feminist technology symposium in San Francisco, the paper introduces the ways in which artists begin to use concepts of ‘the sociological’ in their work. The authors will focus on the more recent work of Thomson and Craighead, and their how their work might constitute an intervention in STS. The paper will challenge STS to think about its own sense of interactivity and agency through collaborations and conversations with new media artists.

-kris

2004-08-23T07:25:00.000Z

Flabbergasting news: I just heard late last week that my research proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) was successful. The proposal was to continue my work on photography online, and specifically on photoblogs. Was and now IS to continue that work. I'll post a small abstract from the proposal subsequently, so we all know what I'm talking about.

My thanks to the ESRC and to all the people who helped me write the proposal, including Nina Wakeford, Nigel Fielding, Vicki Alexander, Christine Hine, and Geoff Cooper.

The work is to start on October 1, 2004 and run for a year.

-kris

2004-08-21T20:01:00.000Z

In describing the framework of my bus fieldwork to an American audience yesterday (Seattle Intel Research lab) I used these comparative stats.

7 million people live in London
Just over a million people enter central London in the morning peak period (7-10am) everyday.
85% by public transport
12% by car
Bus patronage is rising at its fastest rate since the WWII
5.4 million passengers travel by bus every weekday
3 million passengers travel by tube everyday

According to the United States Dept of Transport and Federal Highways
Total number of workers in Seattle is 1.7million
71% of them travel into the city in single occupancy cars
12.8% in carpools
6.2% by public transport (buses and street cars)

And even more comparative data
US – overall only 7.5 % of people use public transport
Why?
Because the national average travel time by car is 24mins versus 47mins by public transportation.
eeek!

These figures were useful in explaining why I was looking at public transport, why the bus is a unique field site for studying the interactions of a broad cross section of urban life and why London is an interesting location for studying the intersection of technology, mobility and place.

Only 13 more days until the No.73 routemaster is taken off the streets....so sad.
-kat

2004-07-29T10:12:00.000Z

Seems like it was another good summer for the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). I gave a seminar there this week (about blogs and criticism: how blogs have been subject to accusations of narcissism and exhibitionism, not unlike how certain other forms of intimacy get policed) to attendees from (almost) all over the world. I also sat on a panel in the evening about collaborations between industry and academia. Which did a lot of things, one of which, for me, was to highlight the poverty of categories and panel titles. The world that the men from Microsoft and Cisco were describing didn't look or act much like the world that I know, and yet we were all ostensibly talking about the same thing. Industry+academic collaborations have many faces; it's meaningless to say that they are a good thing or a bad thing overall; we have to specify our terms. I tried.

Thanks to the OII for inviting me again.

-kris

2004-07-19T04:00:00.000Z

Thinking more on the intradisciplinary (if that works) nature of such projects there is a stumbling block in the form of framework. Whose rules do you play by in order to create an initial critical structure? What tool set, language and reflexive position do you adopt? On one hand blurring disciplinary divides can offer unique and fresh, unbounded research yet locating critical foundations can be difficult. But is this a problem? It's something I struggle with coming from an interconnected yet diverse disciplinary background - Can or should you break or bend the rules before you know them? Does it matter?
-kat

2004-07-18T16:19:00.000Z

My experience at the recent Street Talk; An urban computer happening at Berkeley supports a supposition of taxonomic perplexity. Architects talked like social scientists, developers sounded like artists, designers like researchers and I could even understand what computer scientists were on about. The group of 70 participants and presenters shared a passion and at most times a language for experimental location based applications whilst still being able to provide critiques and challenges from specific perspectives. It felt like it moved beyond interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary collaboration to something far more individually integrated. As if you cannot work in this area without opening yourself to the relevancy of wider disciplinary consideration. There was a call for even more blurring between the urban, social and computer sciences particularly in this area of research. Why? To actually try to improve everyday life rather than just focus on the coolest and newest applications designed for a select tech advanced audience.
-kat

2004-07-17T12:27:00.000Z

I had a nice chat with Robert Peagler the other day, who we're encouraging to move to London. He's a smart fellow with just the kind of deeply unclassifiable job we like to see. Hard to say exactly what he does, but it sounds sometimes like art and sometimes like social science and sometimes like design. Interesting that there is now this itinerant band of intelligent people for whom there is no adequate institutional nomenclature. Have they always been around? Or are their numbers growing?

-kris

2004-07-01T18:36:00.000Z

I probably should have already mentioned that last week we had a good visit with the aforementioned anthropologist, Ken Anderson from Intel. But this has always been a tardy blog. We had an interesting discussion about the history of Ubiquitous Computing, as a field of inquiry/study/design, fueled by an Anne Galloway paper and by Ken's longtime involvement in ubicomp (the 'p' is silent) communities. We also talked for a long time about digital and downloadable music, fueled by Gerard's fast-evolving and increasingly interesting PhD work.

-kris

2004-06-22T05:49:00.000Z

Ken Anderson of Intel's People and Practices Research Lab (PAPR) will be visiting INCITE on Friday this week. There is much talking, reading and eating in planning for the day and I look forward to hearing how it goes as I won't be there for it.

I was recently sent a link to Urban Challenge, a public transport treasure hunt in the city. People race around the city with a sheet of clues and a camera phone and have to take photos as evidence of their results in the correct order. There is about $50,000 for the winners of the many heats scheduled all through the U.S until November. I was disappointed in the lack of any other location based wireless applications but it's a simple system and would still be fun. Given my propensity these days towards public transport, I'd like to see this challenge in action in London.
-kat

2004-06-16T23:00:00.000Z

Steve Kurtz and the Mutability of Things

People are following this story, right?

Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist technoscience both offer ways for thinking about the interdependence of people and things, humans and machines. But who is writing about the mutability, the over-readability of things, the susceptibility of objects like a "mobile DNA extraction laboratory for testing food products for possible transgenic contamination" (http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/05/1682370.php) to be read in whatever way best serves the cause of the war against terror? Lots of people, actually, including STS and technoscience scholars. This strikes me as the same old tactic, named by Foucault inter alia, of controlling the epistemological high ground, controlling the means of interpretation. The very possibility. But then, it can be dangerous to assume familiarity with a tactic of power. Maybe this is something new.

-kris

2004-06-10T14:24:00.000Z

Wireless networks (I've found a new one, in one of my old favourite cafes, way over here in West London) are not in themselves always something to blog about, but they do make me want to blog. But what about? I can't think.

-kris

2004-06-09T16:48:00.000Z

Oh dear, I haven't posted for a while. Anyways, been thinking about London as an artefact of knowledge and knowledge generator recently. Working through my fieldnotes with bloggers I remain intrigued by the way the 'city' and the 'web' figure in their literary culture. In particular, I find the emphasis on witnessing or 'stumbling across' these artefacts, knowing them through having them leave an impression, a rather refreshing and alterntive way of figuring urban knowledge. I think there is something here to work on...
adam

2004-06-09T05:52:00.000Z

What happens when history begins?

To know the answer: 1. click link above, 2. launch the net art locator, 3. choose "Low-fi selection" in the Selector, 4. browse "broken histories".

-kris

2004-06-07T23:36:00.000Z

We launched our new website last week. Specifically, Zoe Tenger and Mary Ebeling did the 11th hour work.

-kris

2004-06-07T23:22:00.000Z

Thanks to the department and to Geoff Cooper, I got some money to attend a conference at Lancaster University called The Interface: questions of agency in ICT and new media art, co-organised by Adrian Mackenzie (Institute for Cultural Research) and Lucy Suchman (Centre for Science Studies/Sociology).

It was a two-day conference with talks by Karen Barad, Maggie Mort, Adrian Mackenzie, Lucy Suchman, Anne Balsamo, Andrew Quick, and new media artists Thomson and Craighead (who recently spoke at an INCITE event) and Heidi Tikka.

It was a good and usefully diverse event. I was especially interested in the relationship between ICT and new media art, which was left largely un-articulated and un-theorised. The social scientists tended to use new media art instrumentally to derive certain points about their chosen topic. The artists (along with Andrew Quick, from Performance Studies at Lancaster) tended to work outward from descriptions of the work (materially and conceptually) to (more) sociological speculations. There is an interesting question here about the relationship between sociology’s art criticism and art’s sociology. How does each employ the other and what do these uses say about the play of sociology outside of sociology and the play of art outside of art?

-kris

2004-06-02T10:18:00.000Z

I'm putting together a panel proposal for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia 2004 conference, Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-First Century Quotidian.

[By the way, everyone's talking about "the everyday" this year. How extraordinary. E.g. this and the latest issue of Cultural Studies, which includes a great piece by Melissa Gregg (see below).]

But which I mention mainly as an excuse to talk about my potential panel-mates and panel proposal co-conspirators, about whom I'm pretty excited. They are: Melissa Gregg, Jane Simon, and Jean Burgess.

-kris

2004-05-26T13:12:00.000Z

This morning I caught the No.73 into the Tottenham Bus garage for an interview session in the caf. 4 hours, 5 interviews, pages of notes, a bbq lunch and a 35p mug of tea later and I am slowly unfolding the experience. It is one of those places where there is simultaneously nothing going on and too much happening. People flow in and out, on and off and inbetween shifts just like passengers on a bus. I spoke with three drivers and two conductors at different caf tables over the din of chatter, tv noise and clinking cutlery and the leftovers of late breakfasts, lunches and early afternoon teas - eggs and beans on toast, bacon sandwiches, chips, rice and meat dishes, I could smell fish cooking and of course countless mugs of tea. They were interviews about technology, mobility and sociality in a convivial space. I should have the results on the website soon.
-kat

2004-05-06T17:38:00.000Z

Blogging folks may want to take a look at Steve Dietz's "Guest List" on Low-Fi (net-art locator). There are several good blog projects there.

Also on the subject of things we do with our phones, the Rx Gallery in San Francisco is curating a show of mobile phone photography. The show is called: MPPS: The Mobile Phone Photography Show. Here's a clip from the invite: "Rx Gallery invites you to participate in a curatorial experiment – a photography show composed entirely of images created with mobile phone cameras. Anyone, anywhere, can send in any image (made with a mobile phone camera), and we will display it."

-kris

2004-05-06T00:48:00.000Z

I am writing this from Vancouver. I have a few extra days to play in this lovely city after the Technoculture event yesterday, which was a great day filled with interesting keynotes by Keith Hampton, Leigh Star and Nina and an eclectic interdisciplinary group of people - all in the beautiful setting of the UBC campus. The organisation and design of the event by Mary Bryson could not have been smoother and the way she orchestrated the working groups is something I am sure will inspire future workshops. She had no doubt spent hours behind the scenes specifically tailoring each group according to personal interests and research, and prepared all of us by sending out relevant weblinks and hard copies of papers. This meant that our group got off to a great start and could undertake the productive task of developing a special publication description and call for papers in our specific area of 'New Media Genres and Spaces'. Overall it was a really productive day, very informative, social and fun. There is a good overview on Richard Smith's Studies in Technology & Society website. He is a Professor in the School of Communications at Simon Fraser University and he mentions both Nina's presentation and my bus work.

Now I have a list of activities to get through before my Sunday flight such as walk around Stanley Park, do the Grouse Grind, visit the Chinatown markets, hire a windsurfer or kayak and discover many more veggie restaurants and cafes...oh the hard life of a researcher.
- kat

2004-04-29T13:05:00.000Z

The Digiplay seminar provided a wonderfully open and discursive space for ideas at their most delicate - the research project in process. There was an eclectic and rich mix of papers about the use of mobile phones in clubs, websites as a form of interactive travel, the methodological challenges of observing people observing animals in zoos, sonic landscapes and the ipod user and my paper on wireless application systems. It was really interesting how each paper almost introduced the next one and so created a really tightly defined seminar. My paper was about my experience as a core member on Urban Tapestries, and the weblog comments from the public trial in December in relation to de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' (1988). I recently blogged about it on the UT blog . It was a great day and I will use many of the ideas for further work in this area.
Now I am just getting ready for the "TechnoCulture Knowledge and Innovation Summit" in Vancouver next week, where (in contrast to other opinion) I aim to be quite well behaved.
-kat

2004-04-23T16:25:00.000Z

Katrina Jungnickel, our own Kat, will be dispersing herself widely and well.

First, here: DigiPlay 2: Mobile Leisure and the Technological Mediascape, where she will be giving a paper entitled Urban Tapestries: Sensing the City and other stories

Then here, in Vancouver, Canada: Virtual(ly) Research: The (re)Mediatization of Culture, where she will be intelligently heckling and sometimes raising her hand to speak in turn and with characteristic blink-twice creativity.

And Nina Wakeford, likewise, who will be at the Vancouver conference, above, and just prior to that, she'll be here:
Banff New Media Institute summit: Simulation and Other Re-enactments: Modeling the Unseen.

I'll be in Banff as well, talking about my collaboration with Ben Coode Adams.

We arrive in pairs; we return with reinforcements. Creepy.

-kris

2004-04-23T16:20:00.000Z

Blogging in the news (when isn't it?); blogging in the Guardian (when isn't it?).

"Blog All About It"

-kris

2004-04-21T15:58:00.000Z

I met Dr. Jennie Carroll yesterday. She is a senior lecturer from The University of Melbourne, Department of Information Systems. She is in Europe doing work on youth and mobiles, which is convenient, as Nina and I are currently writing a paper about photomessaging and 17 year old boys. I'm looking forward to talking with her more extensively. When I caught her out at Surrey yesterday, she had serious meeting fatigue.

-kris

2004-04-21T15:31:00.000Z

Our friends Sean Smith and Nicola Green at RIS:OME put on a good show. Their conference Life of Mobile Data: Mobility and Data Subjectivity last week was great. I speak from first-hand experience of the first day and reliable second-hand accounts of the second.

-kris

2004-04-19T06:41:00.000Z

Jenny, Kate and I got our panel proposal accepted to AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers), which this year is called AoIR Internet Research 5.0: Ubiquity?. Our panel is titled "The Role of the Ordinary in (Online) Research." So we're each, with respect to a particular body of research, looking at research phenomena like boredom, fatigue, ordinariness, the (un)exciting, the (un)interesting, the old, the familiar, and asking what role these play in our work. Kate will draw from her PhD research on online education, Jenny from her work on MOOs (or hypertext novels, one or the other), and I from my work on photomessaging (MMS). Fun (or, (un)fun).

-kris

2004-04-01T07:29:00.000Z

On the theme of star circuits and public talks, Mary Ebeling and I also caught Manuel Castells speaking at City University, where he received an honorary doctorate. I was struck by how impassioned he is about his work. In other respects, it was what you might expect if you know Castells' work: his ideas about networks applied to the topic of universities, addressing the question of what role universities play. He ended by proclaiming that universities are the last remaining place of absolute freedom (!).

-kris

2004-03-22T18:05:00.000Z

Last Thursday we all met at Konditor & Cook in Southwark for coffee and cakes to talk about a chapter of Steve's PhD. Then we went to Goldsmiths for the launch of the new
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process.

"The Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process is an interdisciplinarity research centre. The distinctive approach of the Centre arises from a shared engagement by its members with the study of invention as a social process."

French sociologist Bruno Latour gave a talk on 'A possible Alternative to Social Explanation' to a packed auditorium before we were invited to launch drinks and nibbles.

- Kat

2004-02-18T07:47:00.000Z

For this week's INCITE meeting, we're eagerly awaiting a visit from UK artists Thomson and Craighead. Meanwhile, we're all busily reconstructing certain realities and fabricating interersting reality-based irrealities, as Sian Griffiths from the BBC makes a film about INCITE. Question at large: who at INCITE gives the best face?

-kris

2004-02-13T16:57:00.000Z

I'm back from Australia, back into Winter and back into lots of projects. Yesterday I gave a seminar called Place to Place; Technology, Mobility and the City. It was part of the ongoing Department of Sociology seminar series and I had a chance to talk about my 73urbanjourneys project. It was a very useful exercise in critically analysing the blog as an experimental methodology in a sociological context. I am now narrowing down the most interesting issues in order to start some writing about it.
I had a really interesting day today. I spent the morning with Sian (our BBC producer). We met in Soho aiming to capture footage of wi-fi users. I have only been away a month or so but so much has changed. I used to go to Benugo on Berwick Street for a coffee and wi-fi but it's now an art shop! It seems Gt. Portland Street is now the wifi street. Benugo (£2 on food = 30mins) has relocated there and I found Adam's Eatery a bit further north who uses 'Ready to Surf'. I also had a look at the Park Bench tv project in Bedford Square. The bench has markings on it so you know you are in the right spot, the signal was strong and it was free. If only it was Summer.
- kat

2004-01-27T19:42:00.000Z

We are bad, bad bloggers—just look at the date of that last post! But if we lived in a world where 1 day = 2 weeks of our current time, we'd be medium-prolific bloggers.

Contrary to site activity here, we are all back and working. Kat, however, is still in Australia, but due back soon. Adam and Nina are both around and working hard, though deserving of rest after having successfully hosted an international 2-day conference called Approaching the City: Alternative Urban Studies. Jenny is pushing ahead with her work on reproductive technologies, and sadly-happily, due to be done with her post at INCITE early in February. Mary, Steve, Kate and Gerard appear to be bravely and gracefully leaping the various hurdles of their PhD work. And Sian, from the BBC, has moved onto the second phase of her secondment with INCITE: a position with an interesting London advertising agency (all in a quest to better understand how social science methods might help the BBC in the design of their programming). In more distant radar blips, Nina and I will be speaking again at the Banff New Media Centre in April, at a conference called "Simulation and Other Re-enactments: Modeling the Unseen". So, here's to better blogging.

-kris

2004-01-03T12:21:00.000Z

New Year!

I'm just back from the US and about to transition from my current research fellowship to a three-month period of writing and re-grouping at Surrey under the auspices of recently-won "bridging funds" (thank you Surrey).

Amidst holiday shenanigans, I met with Rick Robinson [this links to an out-of-date bio] for a chat about his new work at the intersection of qualitative and quantitative social research. In charting how he got from E-Lab to his current work, we talked a lot about the evolution of the perceptions and uses of ethnography in applied settings (esp. product design). Many of the changes Rick cites are the result of the extraordinary numbers of people now doing ethnography in the service of design. This means that now, a company who wants to use ethnography to support design has the problem of _choosing_ a good parter rather than _finding_ one. And this often means that market research groups, who have vast experience with "vendor relations" (locating, evaluating and choosing good partners) are increasingly in charge of hiring ethnography, in contrast to the small design groups who were once the seekers of ethnographic partners. In one sense, we are watching what happens when a formerly novel process (the introduction of anthropological and sociological theories to design) becomes routine.

-kris

2003-12-09T21:42:00.000Z

I've always found amazon.com more useful as a database than as a store. But now, with the new feature that allows one to search inside of a book...I have to admit that I'm abashedly unabashedly over the moon about this. Example: tonight I needed the page number for a quote in a Walter Benjamin essay (because, as a member of the union, I'm required to produce one Benjamin reference per article that I write). I had the quote, but bad, short-sighted researcher that I am, I didn't have the page number. So: to amazon dot com, locate the right book, type a unique phrase from the quote I need into the "search inside this book" box, and there it is: the quote, the page number and the entire page itself. I'll not gush more, lest I embarrass us all, but this is a pretty great thing for those of us without bibliographic memories. (Wait, have I posted about this before?)

-kris

2003-11-28T08:41:00.000Z

We have been checking out many of the internet cafes in Adelaide. They provide access via their desktop computers for as little as $2 for 20mins or $5 for an hour including a free coffee. Some places offer ‘Lock-ins’ which includes 6 hours internet access for $13 and is only available at particular times like midnight to 6am on the weekend. We have also found one cafe that is trialling their wireless network so we are using it for free.

We are finding people in cafes to be very very helpful. The other day when Nina and I were having trouble trying to get online with our laptops, we had spread out over the tables and were taking ethernet cables off desktops which meant semi-dismantling the desk units. The manager felt so apologetic for our trouble that he gave us free coffee, called up the service provider and sat on hold for 30mins trying to get through and ask for help. We found this attitude in all the cafes we entered (three so far) and in each despite the fact we were were trying to access the Citilan network. The cafe owners may not understand the wireless network but feel responsible for the use of it in their space. In fact one lovely (but slightly deranged) woman offered to find 'the cord for the wireless computer'. She came back a few minutes later and said it was lost.

So now I am connected it all seems pretty effortless, though I can only sit in the mall until my battery runs out. A few days ago we found a cafe that rearranged their tables to allow us access to a power cable to keep working. So we had power but no internet access. It appears you have to be dedicated to find out how to use the wi-fi system as a visitor to the city. Maybe it is easier as a local but without any signage or iconography anywhere it requires a good half day to sort it out - not a normal tourist activity.

I have been unable to blog the bus for a while but am very excited to see three new bus stories have been added. Have a look.

and one more (bad) joke....what do you call a kangaroo crossed with a sheep?
a woolly jumper.
- kat

2003-11-27T02:28:00.000Z

I am in Adelaide now for the last week and I have had a really interesting experience using wi-fi in the city. Citilan the wireless network is serviced by two providers Airnet and Internode. There has been lots of newspaper coverage and online promotion about it so I had been looking forward to using it. They have hotspots throughout the main city centre and it looks very dense and impressive on online maps.

This all sounds terrific. However accessing the system is not easy. There is no signage in the main city mall which is odd considering it was officially launched in September. The coverage in the main pedestrian mall is sometimes patchy which meant that I could not even sense Citilan at first due to the location of my first seat. I then went into a café and looked online and found the two service providers through the Citilan site. I called one as the online packages seemed expensive for a visitor and spoke to an operator who explained that there were better deals than those listed on the website. I could in fact use my (actually Nina's) credit card to become a member for one month for $11; which includes 50hours of dial up time and wireless internet in the city centre. All very complicated but very interesting as it took us at 3 hours and 3 cafes to work it all out.

I have found that using a laptop in the open has developed my understanding of the environment to know locations to power up, to get the best signal and protection from the weather. Firstly I have gathered enough experience to know the best seats in the Mall for the strongest signal. I have never had four full bars of signal but three means it is a good place to sit. Then I have to choose a seat that is sun protected as the screen can be difficult to read and it's bad for your skin (33degrees lately). There are also variables that make these good locations problematic; the sun moves and the cells experience interference.

Right now I am sitting in a cafe in which I can only see the wi-fi cell if I stand on the balcony and rest my laptop on the railing... not very safe or comfortable. So I have been writing emails and downloading web pages standing up and then sitting down to read them. Nina, Genevieve and I have joked about attaching some kind of bungee cord to the laptop, for safety reasons as well as a way to drop it into wifi signal areas. Given our location, a boomerang laptop could also be interesting.

Speaking of which… what do you call a boomerang that doesn’t come back?
A stick.
-kat

2003-11-27T02:06:00.000Z

I have not blogged for a while as I have been in Australia working with Genevieve Bell (Intel) on a research project about Australian urban life. We have been on the road interviewing families in their homes for 5 weeks now, from Sydney to Newcastle to Merriwa to Canberra to Wagga Wagga to Melbourne and across to Adelaide where I am now. The project is looking at ways in which people use and don’t use technology in their everyday lives. The whole experience has been very interesting. We have driven about 3000kms around and between these cities, which has given us a real experience of everyday Australian life and the importance of the car.
- kat