ABSTRACT: How can we bring the stories, myths and pattern languages of Indian Textiles to life for the digital natives of 21st century? Can adapting machine vision algorithms and Augmented Reality libraries be used to animate either historical artifacts or to create new textiles processes and forms based on historical content?

PROOF OF CONCEPT: Using an off the shelf AR Flash program (from squidder.com thanks!), we created this fabric using potato block prints and ink.

I recently ran into Marko Ahtisaari at a wedding in New Delhi. He was asking me and a few friends to engage in some arm chair futurism asking: “What will we know / not know in 3 years time in your field of interest.”

Seeing as I am currently employed at an Art Lab and a Think Tank, and have a long standing interest in an Interaction Design company, all in Bangalore, I thought I would write from the perspective Design, Art & Policy, but in no way do these assessments reflect anything other than my own opinions.

(And the voice is a bit in the style of the group I most often working for a “Haunted Think Tank” in Portland, OR. Even though I am back in India I am still waiting for my soul to catch up with my body half way around the world. Sorry for the US centrism, I should have an India version of this post in about 3 months.)

Here is my 3 Year forecast:

DESIGN: Digital Animism
ART: BioHacking Goes Global
POLICY: From Sustainability Resilience

DESIGN: Digital Animism / Designed Animism / Sentient Landscapes

It’s obvious that locative media is where the web has headed. What may be less obvious (not to Nokia, I know, they’re on top of it is how this may birth, specific local physical places that are magical, mythical, sacred, and just possibly, cared for. On the other hand, contested spaces will really light up your data devices. If you think the inane flame wars on YouTube get out of hand, wait until you see the Little Gods that are conjured by teens (and hopefully) seniors to protect or hex the places they live. This overlay of Digital Animism is an offshoot of what I have been calling EnviroCasting for a while.

I’d be on the look out for geo-enabled eco-SPAM fighter crews that are out busting invasive species with the help of their smart phones, trees that crank-tweet you, and occasional outbursts in your inbox from Wetlands who are sick of the way you are dumping on them. What we won’t know is if this all makes any difference in the planetary carrying capacity game and (perhaps more unexpectedly) if this is the electronic nervous system extension which pushes us over into serious post-human space.

I gave a strange little lecture on this topic last semester at PNCA called: Attack of the Non-Human Actors.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

[I get motion sickness when I see this feedfoward: AR's dark side if we follow business-as-usual ad supported content creation can be found here.]

Its one things to have technological mind children which perpetuate themselves and co-evolve with humans, but when the land gets its voice back and enters into a serious networked co-evolution with the net and starts bossing puny humans around, things could get really interesting. My Reads on this one are STILL HeadMap Manifesto (.pdf) (after all these years), and Malcolm McCullough’s book in progress: Ambient Commons (.pdf), and Brenda Laurel’s “Designed Animism” is worth a read.

Or if you want to see some of my thoughts on the matter you can check out an incomplete collection of snippets at EnviroCasting.net

ART: BioHacking Goes Global

The Genie is out of the bottle. Whether it be the outlaw biology conference or our very own Teenage Gene Poets and BioPunks, there is no turning tide back on open source Biology.

Unless state actors choose to make Synthetic Biology and other forms of home-brew biotech explicitly illegal, it appears that our best defense against Grey Goo and its banal-colored cohort, is as many opensource biologists as we can muster. The molecular IP fights have just begun, and A Free culture Culture is gong to take some heavy lifting.

What we will know in three years time is that BioHacking is not going away. The early art / experiments will look as awful as net.art but will have some charm twenty years after the fact. And the networks of hobbyists, hackers, artists and professionals working side by side will set up a generation of unexpected non-normative interactions.

What we won’t know is how so many people, deploying so much potentially scalable technology with possible non-linear interactions will play out. A bang or a whimper? I say, not to worry, we have always been BioHackers and GeoEngineers (at least since the dawn of agriculture) but the non-state, non-market actors better get some good standards and libraries in place. If we are lucky in three years we will at least have some good maps of how the pre-existing planet hacks (agriculture, energy) are doing in terms of the abundance and distribution of material and information.

POLICY: From Sustainability Resilience

You only know your system is NOT sustainable once it falls apart. Sustainable is an either/or proposition. Until the very second it no longer exists, the system is, presumably “sustainable” because it keeps on chugging along. Or as Buckminster Fuller said “Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. . . . Humanity is in ‘final exam’ as to whether or not it qualifies for continuance in Universe” This is the long game.

On the other hand, systems are always being tested by outside influences, and one can assess the degree of a system’s resilience based on past evidence as well as hypotheses and tests. In the face of adversity a resilient systems adapts, but in different ways, that may be beneficial for different human and non-human actors. In the face of adversity an UNsustainable system collapses. It’s a small but meaningful difference.

In three years time I am pretty confident policy makers will have stopped using the Utopian rhetoric of “Sustainability”, and move to the much more scary but real task of making systems at different scales resilient. Resilience implies ongoing changes in status and relevance for different actors that will have to be dealt with, whereas the rhetoric of sustainability is largely devoid of these political implications precisely because it is a binary. Either a system sustains or it doesn’t so everyone is equally effected.

I am interested in the Transition Towns movement but need to find out more about it, and I am glad that the doomers are off spinning their black threads, in order to get the rest of us moving.

In three years time I think we will have a better idea if Orlov, Kunstler and Michael Ruppert should have been written off as cranks long ago, or if we should have started creating resilient cities YESTERDAY.

Well, there it is. Some short term futurecasting. I am excited to look back in 2013 on this blog and see how innaccurate these predictions were.

After writing yesterday’s post on psychology and climate change, I stumbled upon this article from the journal Ecological Economics entitled, “The art of the cognitive war to save the planet”.

The article details the proposition that our adaptive capacity–to respond to environmental feedback–to learn–is structured by the double bind, a concept coined by Gregory Bateson. A double bind is when an individual receives conflicting messages (intransitivity of preferences?) that disallows action on their part because responding to either message means being in conflict with the other.  Wikipedia has a more detailed description here, but Bateson’s articulation of the concept can be found in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (2000, University of Chicago Press).

The author’s argument is that sustainability, or human-environment interactions that respond dynamically to each other, is constrained because beliefs about oneself and the community are increasingly biased towards individual level sustainability for two reasons. First, individual safety is increasingly linked to individual performance. Second, alienation from environmental feedback loops means that an amplification of uncertainty is taking place resulting many more belief ‘nodes’ about systems level relationships.  This amplification results in greater propensity for conflict to develop between an individual’s assessment of the environment/system and their own well-being.

The task they outline is manifold–having many forms and elements.  It means developing a shared cognitive base from which to develop mental models for collective action.  The goal of a shared cognitive base is to help connect system level safety ideals to individual level belief nodes  They argue that to do this requires “simple messages with the potential to shape individual belief systems”.  Excessive information is to be avoided, while everyone should have access to the building blocks of conceptual blends that synthesize complex information.

The authors, Antal and Hukkinen, argue that more direct and influential injunctions should be exchanged to help reframe the context towards systems-individual linkages–not just individual.  Thus an injunction, “Become a vegetarian” becomes the positive injunctive norm, “Become a vegetarian to maintain the status quo” and then makes more sense in terms of promoting sustainable behavior when coupled with a positive injunctive future norm, “Become a vegetarian so our civilization can survive.”  This tactic seems similar to one described in the book Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein, Penguin Books, 2009) where they describe some forms of social nudges based on experiments in judgment and decision making.

Thaler and Sunstein describe how some forms of social nudges unfold. These include:

1. Increasing compliance when one is informed that others are complying–i.e. drawing public attention to what others are doing.
2. Emphasize the positive injunctive norm encourages behavior that helps maintain the commons. (e.g. “Please don’t do this in order to keep it this way.”)
3. Show what the norm actually is, as opposed the the perceived norm.
4. Small encouragements or discouragements can maintain or induce new norms.

The example of the positive injunctive norm seems to be what Antal and Hukkinen are advocating, but with a touch more bite.

Their case lies in creating cognitively accessible links between systems status and individual experience. An example of this might be an electricity brownout linked to CO2 accumulation or perhaps a full blackout each time species diversity is degraded.

Their conclusion that ICT services are needed to help these links form is predictable.  Systems like smart grids, early warning systems, and other membership and signaling tools are appropriate, but the burning question is how to implement them in society where the tools themselves do not reflect the normative values.

One scenario I had after reading this is a case where an electrical power generation company that is responsible for supplying the city creates more direct informational links with its consumers.  Neighborhoods in the city already experience frequent and irregular cuts in supply.  Engineers, particularly in energy, tend to focus on maintaining supply based on certain assumptions.  Sometimes we don’t always know what those assumptions are.  Smart grids have been identified as a solution bridging consumption and supply (albeit from a supply perspective), but what if there was a more jugaad solution?

I am hereby coining the term Ener-geets™ to describe a form of information transfer between energy consumers and energy suppliers.  Let’s say consumption is pretty high.  It’s hot.  Everyone has fans running, AND the big cricket match is on.  Power suppliers have decisions to make in order to maintain a consistent supply, but what if they could provide realtime feedback to their customers that threshold levels were being reached and if their behavior didn’t change, they might loose the ability to follow the cricket match to its conclusion.

Cut the normal means of feedback out for the time being (an energy bill or brownout) and allow the power operator to send a message, perhaps in the form a tweet (from Twitter), to everyone following those tweets.  Potential overshoots to the grid capacity could be avoided. But then, this would go against established channels of information flow and place a great deal of responsibility in the power operator’s hands–er..mobile phone.

To connect the feedback loop, individual consumers could also be sending messages, informing of power cuts, potential spikes in use (a festival perhaps), or other changes or observations about consumption at the individual level.

You start to get the picture.  Now, how do w do it?

Ref: Miklos Antal, Janne I. Hukkinen, The art of the cognitive war to save the planet, Ecological Economics, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 3 February 2010, ISSN 0921-8009, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2010.01.002.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6VDY-4Y9HP0Y-2/2/8effb7b70d90787bc2250323ffeef134)
Keywords: Human-environment interaction; Belief systems; Environmental strategy; Climate change communication; Cognitive studies

My friend Jackson is helping build a bamboo garden on my deck with students from his green building class.

One of the students, Raja C. came early today and we started jamming with Synth & Harmonium and talking about music.

He showed me a music video he had on his phone and bluetoothed me a copy (It was in the the 3GP file format, so I converted it so it would be easier to view online):

His brother’s friend works at a computer store, and in his free time he made this remix by putting together a tape of a Tamil song, and a downloaded a MJ video. Raja has a few of these videos on his phone, and even an “english” MJ video, but really, isn’t the mashup more fun and relevant in Bangalore?

Photo Update: The Green Building Class in Action:

I recently scanned this report that leveraged domain understanding in psychology to the problem of climate change.  While the problem of climate changed could just as easily be reframed as a problem of recognizing variability and relevance, the research and patterns that the report draws upon can be used in the design process as levers to recognize opportunities and constraints for sustainability and adaptation.

It’s worth noting that the authors admit that the results are not drawn from a representative sample of the world’s population.  Most of the work described comes only from studies done in North America, Europe, and Australia.  Even the researchers who put the report together were from only the United States, Canada, Australia, and one member with dual citizenship in the United States and Germany.  So while the report doesn’t represent a diversity of perspectives, it does emphasize the fact that there are significant gaps in our knowledge about environmental psychology and what intercultural similarities and differences exist in how we perceive and respond to problems like climate change.

Given that much of the work in the report describes what we could call cognitive or psychological biases, there are probably vary important differences in the processes people will use to adapt to climate variability. Indeed, one finding was that perceptions & reactions to climate risks are mediated by cultural values and beliefs.

Examples of design levers (observation followed by lever):

Small probability events tend to be underestimated when based on personal experience. Thus, designer should gather multiple personal experiences (embodiment? experiential learning?)

Recently occurred small probability events tend to be overestimated. Thus designer should show longer time frames (the historical context?)

Emotions influence perceptions of risk with respect to climate change.  Thus, people tend to be conflicted and muted because it is seen as being beyond personal control.

The report also details how psychology looks at the relationship between consumption and behavior, where individual ability + motivation, context, and external motivators shape practice.

There was also a specific focus on the psychosocial impacts of climate change as driven by health an by relationships with common goods.

Adaptation in this context has multiple conduits:

• sense making
• causal and responsibility attributions for adverse instances
• appraisals of impacts
• resources
• possible coping responses
• affective responses
• motivational processes (stability, security, coherence, etc)

Which can be affected by media representations as both formal and informal social discourse that moderates the social construction, representation, amplification, and attenuation of risk and impacts.

In summary, the report identified psychological barriers to climate change action:

• unaware
• unsure
• lack of trust or believeability
• “not in my backyard”
• fixed behavior
• other people’s problem
• belief that actions are unimportant or make no difference
• engaged in token or objectively unhelpful actions
• not under human control
• other competing goals, time, resource, or effort draws

Much of the discussion and research seemed to point to a question of the cognitive architecture of risk.  That is, how are categories learned, does information become relevant, risk construed, and behavior adopted?  And what does that mean for vulnerability and adaptation?

Detection of climate change means distinguishing between climate and weather, making relevant the need for planning and decision making, and addressing expectations based on categories (e.g. latitude or place) since these beliefs bias the direction of our errors in perception.  It also means understanding how information acquisition takes place which leads to differences in perception and action even when it comes from the same source.

associative + affective processes + repeated personal experience = fast and automatic

Good for low probability events

statistics = slow + cognitive effort

Good for recent, high impact events

Ok, that’s all for now. Here’s the reference:

Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges
A Report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change

I’ve been casually reading Scott Atran and Douglas Medin’s The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature since I came back from the U.S. in January.  I picked the book up for a few reasons. One, I was familiar with Scott Atran’s work after running across it while I was studying at the University of Michigan.  Atran is an anthropologist who has been working to integrate psychology and anthropology in pursuit of a better perspective on how the natural environment and the social landscape interacts to affect belief, behavior, and practice.  Two, I am interested in how cognition facilitates learning and behavior, especially in a shared resources or public infrastructure context.  Some of Atran’s more recent work deals with negotiations and intercultural understanding for problems ranging from terrorism, common resources, and Iran’s nuclear policy.  Third, the discussions and research in the book can be helpful for artists, designers, teachers, and evolutionary biologists who want to gain better control or understanding of how, effectively, epistemology develops.

I found one particular passage to be quite helpful for a project I am working on at the moment. It deals with relevance drawing from Sperber and Wilson’s book on communication and cognition. Relevance is a pretty subjective measure of how much something matters to someone.  The articulation of relevance in these pages shows ghosts of Bateson’s difference that makes a difference, but here there is an efforts to start to describe exactly what aspects of cognition make something relevant–that is, how does the environment and one’s interactions in it affect meaning?  pay attention teachers…this is where it gets relevant to learning.

Here’s some notes:

Relevance: if processing an input at a certain time yields cognitive effects.

Cognitive Effects =

1. revision of previous beliefs
2. derivation of contextual conclusions following from input taken together with previously available information

So:

greater cognitive effect = greater relevance

While:

greater effort = lower relevance

Thus:

Salient information has greater relevance given the lower effort it requires.  Atran and Medin make this point be describing their research with different groups’ interpretations (interpretations = mappings from objects, situations, problems, and events to words. In an interpretation, one word can mean many objects) of ecological relationships and taxonomy.  They also studied school children who had a more nuanced view of ecology and compared them to urban children to try to help understand why they had different experiences in the classroom.  The conclusions supported the idea that textbooks and instruction was not relevant enough to support the expansion of learning among those with more nuanced perspectives (perspectives = mappings from reality to an internal language such that each distinct object, situation, problem, or event gets mapped to a unique word).

Learning, then, is guided by what is already known. What is learned first often becomes a category ideal.  It’s like when your idea of what tastes good, what a certain kind of flower is, or how to do a task is based on what you first learn. It’s also affects things like what we think of when we think of a bear. My image of a bear may be based on North American species like the black bear or grizzly. In India, an image of a bear may be based on their Himalayan relatives.

This seems to resonate somewhat with patterns of cognitive bias studied across different organisms in evolutionary biology in an attempt to get a better understanding of sexual selection.  Cognitive or sensory bias, as studied in evolutionary biology, refers to an organism’s set of preferences.  It’s similar to judgment biases studied by psychologists and micro economists (e.g. Tversky and Kahneman). However, in biological terms, sensory bias often has a genetic/sensory basis and can significantly affect mating and reproduction. Some well-studied examples include how Tungara frogs (Ryan lab at UTexas) or even crickets (Zuk lab at UC Riverside) influence mate choice with different call structures or signals (e.g. deep, red, loud, frequent, etc).

So in an experimental, teaching, or design setting, good examples of categories are ones that are familiar, have a high word frequency (use = familiarity + context), or that represent ideals.  So as we design interfaces, software, interactions, and signs for access, it makes sense to consider categories that are culturally relevant and that have legacies of use in context.  Additional learning uses these categories as supports (scaffolds?) to build on.

This is why representation of goals and categories is so important.  The implicit organization of knowledge around goals creates category ideals, subsequently driving category based inference–that is, the creation of new knowledge from what already exists.

So in terms of deriving an experimental practice from these ideas, a student at CEMA, Aliya, has been trying to look at how naming objects as concepts (decategorization?) rather than the names they have been given.  Thus a “chair” becomes a “people holder” or a “step ladder” depending on new contexts of use.  It leads to the question, “How do we take objects from everyday life & create a stimulus that provides an opportunity for reflection & engagement on the use, interaction, and consumption that the object supports—all while waiting for whatever that object does?”

A colleague of mine recently received a request for a response on the topic of designing interculturally.  It came from a graduate student in design who wrote about how his research “focuses on examining how culture influences visual language and what that means for contemporary designers who are increasingly asked to design across cultural boundaries”. The goal of his research is to create a guide to intercultural design.

The request from the grad student was forward to a listserve along with a statement of alarm from my colleague about the standards of graduate education.  I’m not sure what he was alarmed by, but he seemed to be concerned about the empirical validity of the questionnaire the student had sent.  I replied to forward by asking, “So what alarms you exactly about the questions as posed?  That is, what is it about his culture and your culture that makes this way of designing a guide so alarming to you?”

My colleague’s reaction to the student’s request made me wonder why the empirical validity seemed to be so lacking.  The student was making an earnest effort (something I may personally have to do in the near future) to gather varied perspectives on the topic of intercultural design.  Perhaps my colleague knows of a right way to do intercultural design or if there are more ‘empirical’ ways of conducting design research and of designing.

In any case, I took on the student’s questionnaire and found it more difficult than it seemed at first.  If anyone reading this has any perspectives and ways of going about intercultural design that are developed and seem to work, please share!

Here is the questionnaire with my responses:

Background information

Describe your current job. Please include your job title.
My current job title is artist-in-residence.  Typically artists-in-residence work with or at an institution to create artworks.  They interact with faculty, staff and students to share their processes and sometimes even collaborate.  However, I refer to myself as a design ecologist since that might better describe what I do. Initially I came to the institution I work for under the assumption that I was helping to start up a graduate program and research lab in experimental and new media.

My work ranges from research into the traits and practices that characterize experimentalism and how they contribute to new knowledge and hybridity in form, practice and context.  I’ve taught classes and developed curricula much as a faculty member at a college or university would.  I’ve led workshops, labs, and helped to organize conferences.  I research and write about design in cross-cultural contexts, and how to work across those contexts based on the kinds of knowledge that each creates.  I am particularly interested in how experimentalism and objectivity are made.  I also work to apply research in psychology, sociology, & anthropology to understandings of bias (cognitive and social) so that we can design more fluidly across different social orders.  Today I attended a grad review session to give feedback to students.  I also try to connect where possible people, projects and institutions where I see great value in their working together or in the synergy of their approaches to knowledge and its application.  Other days I just do graphic design or sculpture…still others…I call people and do all the mundane stuff that goes with helping to contribute to the maintenance of a project or organization.

Describe your cultural background. Is your cultural background evident in your work?
Please give examples.
My cultural background is based in the East Side of Detroit.  It borders two edges, the suburbs and the Grosse Pointes. The Grosse Pointes are a wealthy edge of the city on the lake, while the suburbs are mainly made of of people who left Detroit or who inhabit communities that sprung up outside of it. I lived in a pretty culturally-mixed lower-middle class neighborhood composed of houses built in the early 20th century.  I lived sort of at an edge, a hybrid zone if you will.  I went to Catholic school (like most of my family) in Grosse Pointe Park and I visited relatives in the suburbs.  I went camping in the woods as a kid.  We had a house, but we were never well-off.  My parents were divorced when I was in second grade.  My mom worked her way through grad school to support and get my sister and I through school.  I lived in the midwest most of my time through college.  I travelled to far away places a few times through the generosity of relatives.  I learned to be critical of what was presented as fact or as law because I saw it being used arbitrarily and without it’s own self-reflection or criticality.  Maybe I just didn’t like nuns telling me what I should and should not do.  Late in college I started working with a group of evolutionary biologists.  Later still I studied organizations and cybernetics.  I prefer soccer to other sports.  Especially in playing.

Is my cultural background evident?

It depends where you look.  I think it is.  I come from a strong maternal line that last generation had 10 brothers and sisters who lost their father and breadwinner during the Great Depression.  Plus they were Catholic.  So for me to be interested in organizations, feedback, management, systems, knowledge construction, sustainability, robustness, and critical inquiry + truth and justice…yeah I’d say so.

Cultural considerations in design

How important is it for you to understand the culture of your audience?
It depends on the context and what I am trying to do.  One question I ask is if my understanding matters at all.  Most people in the world are muddling by, understanding very little, and they seem to be doing just fine.  Then again, there seems to be a lot we can learn about each other–culturally speaking.  I think there is a lot to be gained in understanding each other’s culture if and when there are conflicts.  Often times this is because we are holding assumptions about how the world works deep inside us, and we aren’t making these known.  There was a recent study of negotiations between Palestine and Israel that showed how what one believed to be the sticking point in the negotiations was not the case at all. The researchers showed how a ‘reframing’ of values could allow negotiations to proceed by articulating what could be exchanged for material compensation and which values were beyond material compensation–even though it was assumed they were not—because of cultural assumptions.

Are there any specific steps you take to understand the culture of your audience?
Absolutely! I think first it makes sense to assess exactly what you mean when you say ‘culture’  I like Atran et al’s (2005; the cultural mind) discussion of culture:

“it is important to note that the question of how culture should be defined is separable from the question of how best to study it. Although we think a definition of a culture in terms of history, proximity, language, and identification is useful and (if not too rigidly applied) perhaps even necessary as a beginning point, it does not follow that the cultural content of interest must be shared ideas and beliefs.”

They go on further to describe some of the many ways culture is looked at by different fields and people with different interests, and they determine that cultural definitions are based on utility on one hand and the scope of interest (e.g. scale or subject) on the other.  In the end they see culture as that which allows the uptake of processes, of procedures, information, beliefs values and so on.  So culture then is not the nouns (belief, behavior, value, etc) that we commonly associate with culture–rather it is the means by which we acquire those nouns.

table

Cross-cultural comparison of the number and distribution of words used to describe container-like objects.

Another step beyond this definition would be to lay one’s own cultural assumptions bare.  I’ve attached an image from Malt et al. (1999; knowing versus naming) that shows a comparison of the number of items or objects that words across three different languages.  You can see quite clearly that are quite different distributions of words for these items when you compare.  Now ask what this means for different locations, use patterns, numbers of items and how these items interact with language!!!  The most important point here is to assume nothing!!!

Ask what the starting points of culture are and move on from there.  Design is an appropriate place to do that since so many aspects of what we use to create culture are DESIGNED!  Nature is another, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to disentangle nature and the social.  I think objects and artifacts are great because they tell us some much when we fail to use them “correctly”.  The workplace is yet another spot where different cultural artifacts and practices converge.

Please give examples.
Describe a specific project. How/why did the culture of your audience influence your choice of the following design elements:

The project I am thinking of is one I recently submitted a proposal for.  The goal is to identify culturally appropriate ways of communicating climate change and risks associated with it for disaster preparedness.  Here is how the audience(s) I think would influence the following elements:

• Shapes: How are names associated? What do they reference? Are there assumptions or associations that people have with them?
• Colors: What level communicates versus disturbs?  Are there associations or not (e.g. red = hot)?
• Images/photographs: How does framing, angle, & focus matter?  And how does the semeiotic relationships between the elements in the images narrate and structure our engagement with it and with other things (see van leeween and kress for more on that one)?
• Symbols: In what context does the symbol make sense?  In everyday life? In an abstracted work setting?
• Layouts: What is the flow of information and meaning?  Where do/should narrative elements appear?
• Other? Time, the temporal view, how do we access the future? the past? the present?  On what terms and with what detail and agency?

Are there any specific steps you took to verify you were using the above elements in a culturally appropriate way? Please give examples.
No not yet with that one, but all of the above considerations were based on prior field research that identified some of these as core concerns in their engagement with the design of these information systems.  So going back to question 4: do field research.  Talk to people and ask them questions…about what makes them upset..about what they don’t understand…about what seems ‘alien’.

What advice would you give to other designers working on a similar project?

It it a similar cross-cultural project or a similar guide?
Either way: GO SOMEWHERE WHERE THE CULTURE IS NOT YOURS.  PAY ATTENTION.  DOCUMENT YOUR FRUSTRATION.  THEN YOU WILL BETTER UNDERSTAND WHAT MUCH OF THE WORLD IS EXPERIENCING RIGHT NOW.

This find (thanks Dharmang) describes a history and accounting of the Transactional Arts–which is art, where a transaction is explicitly part of the work.

Daniela Plewe’s discussion brings me back to some thoughts and notes I made about Marcel Duchamp’s Coefficient d’Art. Duchamp described it as:

“An arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.”

It is intended to describe the difference between what artists intend and what the spectator perceives.  For Duchamp, this difference is in the act of communication or transaction, where certain differences and attributions of value are made out of the interaction among individuals.  It this coefficient that structures the viewers engagement with artifacts and allows them opportunities to appropriate objects to their own needs and ends.

For Duchamp, the coefficient of art could be good (+), bad (-) or indifferent (=), but the sign of the coefficient had no bearing on the effectiveness of the work itself–only the difference between the agency of the artists to produce a desired effect in the minds of the spectators.  The effect itself is up for further negotiation between them.

Mutual information is a similar concept to the coefficient of art, but it comes from information theory and describes the amount of information one thing tells about another thing. In other words, it is the reduction in uncertainty of one thing due to knowledge of another. If we ask how information (and consequently, meaning) is shared between different sources of uncertainty (like an object and a spectator or an object and its artist), we may be able to get a sense of how they are connected and how they might respond to each other.

Mutual information is helpful as a concept because we want to understand how interactions vary with one another–i.e. how interaction values may/may not change as a result of signals, actions, and assumptions.

A component of mutual information is information entropy. Entropy is a measure of uncertainty associated with a variable and quantifies the information contained in a message.  It is similar to the coefficient of art; it may describe the uncertainty associated with an artwork as judged by the spectator.  Conversely, it could describe the absence of meaning when one does not know the value of the work.  Likewise the spectator may themselves exhibit high entropy (high uncertainty) relative to the artist if the artist knows little about the spectator and how they will perceive the artwork….at least that’s how I think it would go.

The coefficient of art is a compelling concept.  It suggests that that art has an effect, and if an effect–value in context.  Describing that value is very close to the describing what difference the work of art makes, either to the spectator or some chain extending through them.

Borrowing from evolutionary and network theory, one could pull in a set of relationships between interacting agents that describe how networks evolve and persist. Relationships endure over time from the benefits of interaction. In network reciprocity, entities pay a cost, c, while their number of neighbors, k, receive a benefit, b. If b/c > k, where the ratio of benefits to costs is greater than the sum of neighbors, the network persists because its members are gaining as a result of their interactions.

Duchamp’s coefficient of art (hereafter described using the greek letter psi, ϕ; see also: epistasis), approximates the number of neighbors, but as indicated by it separation from the actual effect of the work itself, says nothing about costs and benefits. ϕ approximates k, or rather the reciprocal of k, because as the number of neighbors (or spectators of the work) increases, the likely ability of the artwork to communicate intent, decreases. This is because of variation among the spectators who may either not be well-understood by the artist or who are perceiving differently or because the artist. Interestingly, ϕ always assumes artistic intent. If ϕ is low, it may be the ‘fault’ of the spectator, the inability of the artist to realize that intent, or of some other intervening factor.

But what about art that is created beyond intent such as generative, algorithmic, or emergent artworks?

ϕ may also be a bound on the ability of artifacts to bridge social groups, as in the case of boundary objects that have multiple uses. The intent of the maker of that object is only partially achieved, but may clearly be appropriated to serve other purposes. Here we might similarly invoke a coefficient of use–or a measure of intent in use that transforms the intent of the artist.

Far from achieving certainty, at least the idea of ϕ, of a coefficient of art, starts to unlock more questions about translation and meaning between objects and people–and of the directionality of interactions between people.

On December 4th 2009 I recorded an interview with Ewen Chardronnet. I’d heard that he’d been to space places in Russia.

I want to interview people, artists who I think have pioneered, have gone into space agencies as sort of the first artists. I want to find out what their impressions are because I have a hunch we all get affected more or less by the same set of things.

He’d been part of the artists Zero-G flights in 2003. He traveled from Paris to Moscow and then Star City is not far. There were a group of them. A European grant and various partners - The Arts Catalyst, Project Atol maybe and the artists had given in proposals and the group had come from that. His was about drug-taking in space. He was interested in thse altered states of mind and then that the astronauts had taken scopolamine, a halucinagenic, and amphetamines to cure the sickness, but lines and reasons are interestingly blurred. The proposal hadn’t gone down well with the Russians. but he was there anyway, on some other premise.

I asked him to tell me the story starting from his home so I could relive the narrative. It turned out that this narrative had also been what he became interested in. He made a film about the procedure. He wanted to show the tensions in the process. Today I watched it for the first time. I wish I could put the video here, but here is the link to the Association of Autonomous Astronauts video blog.

There was a week of training and then the zero G flights where the plane goes up and down following parabolas that give about twenty seconds of no gravity at the top and bottom of the curve.

It wasn’t so unusual to have a group of artists there because the Russians had for some time been dealing commercially with film crews etc. and Ewen said that also, they were, culturally able to switch between the technical and metaphysical thought, through these realms anyway. All the same the procedure was military.

“They do it as so-called commercial, but they are quite willing, they are interested in the artist’s crazy ideas and they really make a fuss so it is possible. Its not like, ‘oh no this is science and you are crazy’, no no they are really like arts in a way. Cosmonauts are, the Russians they have this different approach I think from Europeans. They are more sensible to lets say metaphysics or if you look at the nineteenth century the Russians were the first to write essays and astrological treaties, also metaphysics about space travel. So they were the first people to take this seriously in a way. So they have this tradition of Cosmos and Cosmonauts. So they are quite sensitive. There are also many Russian Cosmonauts…who make paintings and have a sensitivity to arts, maybe more thsn engineers and rocket pilots from Europe.”

People would say “Niet, niet” to any request, but then it would be maybe and then it would happen. So the film was about these things, the tensions and briefings. Its not that easy, people get sick, the military people are screaming…

He’d gone there at the time I’d started to get interested in satellites. I told him about my experience of going to space places and the tension of being an artist n that situation. That you are taken seriously and treated in a demeaning way, there is interest and put downs and its hard to go through. What he said was that after the flight he felt very lonely. The experience was intense and there were big parties afterwards. You are on a high - people are comparing the Zero-G to different drug taking. It makes you feel ecstatic. Everyone drank a lot and talked and clubbed. All the people who had been together on the Zero-G. But coming back to Paris, it was hard to share the experience. When you start to talk about it, you are stressed. Then you find that you cannot make people understand what you are feeling. There is something around explaining this centre of gravity, this new experience of where your centre is.

i said that what I knew so far was about the work the artists were doing. But what he was saying was taking all that away and saying what the experience was. That was his research really, thinking about the original proposal of experimenting with drug taking, because it turned out to be a bit like that. Also the whole trip was six months in preparation and anticipation. You get feedbacks too, such as the G-force feeling in the metro, you have a memory and you feel you might take off again.

Some little part of the disconnect of what astronauts/cosmonauts go through. He talked about the Association of Autonomous Astronauts that started in the ’90’s from a collection of people interested in mail art, having no money…they were interested in looking at space as metaphors,such as gravity of life. They were a fake activist group against the monopoly on space exploration challenging why working class people couldn’t go into space. He was interested in space in literature, in Proust, Klebnikov?, Cerano de Bergerac. At that time they weren’t trying to make actual connections with the space agencies, that came later. Zivadinov and Marco Pelihan, Slovinian art group NSK - they were doing abstract theatre in ‘99 about zero gravity. Then through those connections the Zero-G flight came about.

Is it relevant to go to the places to explore the metaphor? No, its different. Exploring the metaphor is more about exploring earth, life on earth. You can say of a child they are always on the moon, come down…all this language is used.

I asked about how being there might change things inside the culture.

Ewen said “I felt it was a big achievement that the Russian Cosmonauts heard about the Autonomous Astronauts” and we talked about these encounters that happen through the project of the work of artists. The artwork gives you the premise, but the real work is in the poetics of the encounter.

Here’s a recipe. I learned to make this with a family at the Pushkar fair and a small group Srishti students and faculty. It’s a traditional Rajasthani dish of dal and baati which is like a heavy bread or roll. You could probably make small baati (ours were the size of tennis balls) and bake them (no bondfire as in the recipe). However for authenticity, you could do what we did which was cook the baati in a heap of hot, glowing camel dung. The trick is finding a herd of camels to get the fuel from. Although at Pushkar it wasn’t a problem. Very tasty!

Daal:
1/2 kg moong daal (green gram)
onions, 1/2 kg spinach (shredded), coriander, garlic (crushed),
2 tomatoes, chillies
dhaniya (coriander seeds) powder, turmeric

soak the daal for 5 mins
boil 7 glasses of water with 2 teaspoons of salt
add the daal to it

chop onions and green chillies
heat them in 4 tablespoons of oil
add 1 tbspn dhaniya powder
1 tbspn red chilli powder
a little turmeric
1/2 kg shredded spinach, 2 tomatoes
when the daal has boiled enough, add chopped coriander leaves and mix

daal seasoning: heat 2 tbspn oil, add jeera (cumin seeds) when oil is hot enough and add the chopped garlic. add it all to the daal when ready.

Baati:
1 and 1/2 kg atta (wheat flour)
add some salt and water and knead the dough (thick consistency)
make balls of the dough.
cook them on a bonfire (or bake).
optional: then lightly fry the baati in ghee (clarified butter) or regular butter

you can also make a nice sweet dish to eat with the dal by then tearing bits of the baati and mixing well with jaggery (unprocessed sugar).

Urbanized Area in color.

Source: Bangalore Development Authority. “Bangalore Master Plan 2015. Volume 1: Vision Document”, pg. 12. 2007.

This experiment gives a whole new meaning to “Bio-Computing.”

Talented and dedicated engineers spent countless hours designing Japan’s rail system to be one of the world’s most efficient. Could have just asked a slime mold.

When presented with oat flakes arranged in the pattern of Japanese cities around Tokyo, brainless, single-celled slime molds construct networks of nutrient-channeling tubes that are strikingly similar to the layout of the Japanese rail system, researchers from Japan and England report Jan. 22 in Science. A new model based on the simple rules of the slime mold’s behavior may lead to the design of more efficient, adaptable networks, the team contends. Read More at Wired. Read the Abstract in Science.

What I like about this story is the use of a technology and non-intuitive way. We spend a lot of time here at CSTEP creating models of complex dynamic systems, often employing agent based models which have so many interacting parts that there are often “surprising and unexpected results.”

In this case, a team of researchers set up and executed what could be described as a “analog computing program”. Obviously, if one wanted to change the parameters after the initial run, it is a bit more costly than simply changing a parameter in a piece of digital code. On the other hand, there may be some advantages to creating predictive and descriptive non-linear models using biological agents. I am particularly interested in what the programmers at CSTEP think.

This week I am doing some research on transportation and pedestrian issues in Bangalore. I was reminded of this excellent information diagram created by ThumbProjects last year. (Bangalore is the Dark Purple shape in the center).

(Click for larger version)

In my head Bangalore’s ring road is unfathomably large, like some massive underwater giant squid that everyone knows is dangerous, but that you only experience in a tentacle that occasionally lashes out at you. I have been many parts of it in my year’s in Bangalore, but I have never experienced it all at once.

But if you look at this map, Bangalore’s inner ring road is more of a small dragon, that with the proper tools, policies and infrastructure could be harnessed and ridden to create a beautifully dynamic city rather than a blatantly dangerous one.

Are there other images or maps of Bangalore that help you understand the scale and the flows of the city and put it into perspective?

This was a post that I initially wrote for the ‘Telling Stories’ discussion group that is made up of recipients of the Wellcome Trust’s International Engagement Award.  The group practices public engagement with public health and science from a variety of different perspectives and goals.  In this post, I was exploring the role of narration and also looking at the idea of suspense as created by communication (or the lack of) between researchers and members of the public.

Part 1.
I can start by locating the visual arts as a source or medium for engagement. The answer is: myriad. In the last ten years or so (and even before) the arts domain has taken on science and technology in bushels. Some of the response of the arts has been driven out of curiosity and the desire to take on the mantle of science for aesthetic reasons. For others it has been a source of tactical engagement with the very substance of knowledge production in the sciences, defense and military establishments, and the diffusion of technology in everyday life.

There are way too many example to adequately cover here, except to say that the Wellcome Trust is a major stakeholder in this area and has been for at least a decade as far as I know. I remember a festival in South Kensington that I happened upon almost ten years ago called Sparks which featured may artists working specifically with the life sciences in some form or another. Exhibitions were held at the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum, among others (http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/festival_of_science/91…). It was largely a cultural series of events, continuing a dialogue which I have witnessed firsthand in many forms and places afterwards. It seems to me that the role of the arts in these debates has largely been restricted to Europe, but I have seen some signs in the US and now in Asia that the visual arts are playing a more tactical and more integral role in the development of engagement vectors with the public, practitioners, and policy makers.

Some examples:
Last year we conducted a workshop for artists at NCBS (http://cema.srishti.ac.in/content/bioart) which focused on introducing cell and molecular biology methods to artists so they could use them as media for performance, communication, and engagement. It was conducted in collaboration with Oron Catts, a well-know bioartist from Australia (http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/) with extensive experience in using the trappings and discourse of the lab to open up critical thinking about future scenarios and paths of social and technological development.

A group of our students is taking part this week (and won an award) in the international genetically engineered machines (iGEM) competition held at MIT in Boston, USA. This is a group of art students working at NCBS (our host in Bangalore) to develop synthetic organisms, in part to provide a forum for engagement and critical dialogue at these meetings that is not just motivated by the accumulation of capital wealth or basic functional research via biotech (http://hackteria.org/). The result was a highly influential discussion about the role of amateurs in creating public knowledge using science and technology.

Project Vision (htt p://symphysis.wordpress.com/designing-for-converging-cultures-a-diplo…) is an ongoing project here in Bangalore that uses new media (i.e. web 2.0, sensors, physical computing, interactive story-building software, locative media like mobiles and GPS) to develop forms of intimate science where urban, poor, school-aged students run their own experiments and communicate first-hand experiences with nature and their environment.

Moon Vehicle is a community project maintained by Joanna Griffin (http://www.aconnectiontoaremoteplace.net) that bridges storytelling, artifacts, and arts-based methodologies to create peer communities between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), astronomy buffs, schoolchildren, and others in order to reconstitute new narratives of science and technology as they apply to satellites, space exploration and the once and future missions to the moon.

Another timely example comes from Denmark. The Rethink exhibition (http://www.rethinkclimate.org/) combines contemporary art into political debates surrounding climate change responses in anticipation of Copenhagen.

In the US, The Center for Post-Natural History (http://postnatural.org/) takes on biotech and the conversion of biological organisms to intellectual property.

There are many, many others. But I think it’s safe to say that they have had varying impact and effect. Unfortunately (in my view) we haven’t yet developed a coefficient of art to assess its effect on other domains. Some of the examples I have cited have a distinctly critical edge. Others are more about raising awareness or, more to the point, about connecting different social communities and groups (e.g. science practitioners and schoolchildren).

One of the most important things I have learned in the last few years about public engagement with science comes from the field of science and technology studies. Sociologists, philosophers, and historians have started to demonstrate the value of media (especially visual) in the production of science and technology and the resolution of debates about scientific truth and public acceptance. The production of artifacts, objects, and “things we can wrap our heads around” is very important it turns out.

I think the lessons from history and sociology leads to some clarifying questions such as “What is the material basis for engagement?” and “What is engagement made of and where does it live?”

Part 2.

My perspectives
Many of my perspectives on public engagement are shaped by my experiences as both a practicing scientist studying evolution, ecology and behavior in lab and field settings, as an artist and designer working to develop communication and engagement tools, and now working to assess options for better decision making in public health, energy, and infrastructure.

As a biologist, my perspective is further shaped by host-parasite dynamics and their implications for disease in populations. I am also influenced by network science and complex systems. As such, the interaction is the focal point of engagement. How the interaction is created and maintained is significant for me.

As a designer, so-called design thinking influences my approach to engagement. This often means thinking critically about how the engagement process can transpire as part of everyday life–that is, part of the daily routine that people struggle with and recreate everyday.

I think the questions raised in previous posts about the motivation behind “science’s” engagement with the “public” and who makes up the “public” are critical because they help to identify the costs and benefits of engagement and the location of engagement as it pertains to the public. Still I think we need to constantly open up our assumptions further to scrutiny.

Of Scientists and Risk
I know scientists to be a very heterogeneous community involved with many others in the production of knowledge. In general, the people are exceedingly nice, driven by their own curiosity and desire to create understanding that will make a difference, however far downstream. Science, however, is also composed of lots of others, including the organisms and the tools used to develop new hypotheses and results. By far the most practical defining feature might be its place–where it is done and how that place structures the kind of interactions that in turn lead to what we call new knowledge.

Let’s be clear. In the West, science and by extension public health is hardly the product of scientists alone. Many individuals are involved from students, to researchers, financial managers, glassware technicians, viruses, lab rats, secretaries, publishers, reviewers of literature, politicians, middle-school teachers, clergy, university boards, ethics review panels, biotech company shareholders, news media and so on. All of these individuals are possibly working to do one thing–identify sources of risk and manage the uncertainty that arises out of the everyday interactions of people and their environment. If they can scrape out a living in the meantime, all the better for them. So yes, in a sense I would also say that because risk and uncertainty are trying to be minimized, science and technology have a lot to do with securing and locating ways to create wealth. And yes, all of this scales greatly with the complexity of the science (think: CERN or the HapMap project).

I prefaced this as part of the Western tradition 1) because it is of direct lineage from Christian emphasis on divine intervention and design, and 2) because I have found that (in Asia at least) very different traditions underlie the identification of risk and the communication of uncertainty. My sense is that in Asia these are intrinsically related to variation in the ordering of time, and I’m anxious to discuss this with others that know more than I do.

“The Public”, User Needs, and Witnessing
On the public side, I would prefer to say civil society–that is those who are engaged in social contracts relating to economics, technology, common goods, governmentality and so on. And I agree that it is correct to say that it is an even more heterogeneous group.

One way to think about civil society is much like designers think of their users. There is a simple axiom that underscores the work of many successful designers: user needs drive the acquisition of a product or service. Public heath knowledge and science can be that product. Yes, this is a very functionalist way of looking at it, but this principle of participatory design involves end users in the design process to help ensure that it meets user needs and is usable. It has been a successful strategy for architecture, software, and business (the customer is always right, right?). Why should science and its cognitive technologies be an exception?

By adopting user perspectives the scientific community can recognize that its practices may or may not resonate with user needs: socially, by ensuring equal access for disenfranchised groups, economically: by creating new opportunities for capital development and financial transactions, and politically: by improving the quality, speed, and sensitivity of social technologies to the needs of local users. It’s not that science doesn’t already do these things. It just isn’t always evident to the average user. In the realm of health, sometimes it’s just a matter of making the benefits clear so that they justify whatever costs there are in the user’s mind.

One of my favorite case studies come from evolution and its approximately 50% public acceptance in the United States. Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolutionary theory and biology, acquire evolutionist and creationist beliefs. Evans describes how Western religious and philosophical traditions emphasize essentialism, teleology, and intention, and in the process limit the cognitive appeal of natural explanations for the origins of species. She argues that because these ideas tend to show up repeatedly in public representations, they constrain the inferential reasoning capacities of the developing mind. It’s an observation that suggests science’s own predilection for categorization is at the root of evolutionary biology’s social friction.

I think these cognitive biases come into play often, for good and bad. I’ll want to describe some others, but I need to take a detour first.

Engagement, Stories, Suspense, Scenarios, and Fallacies
I personally feel that if scientists, policy-makers, and funding bodies are willing to involve cultural workers like artists and designers in the process of science and its associated applications, there is good news for broader participation because they cultural workers tend to excel at reconfiguring essentialist categories, and they often like to do it in public. There is some indication that this may be a general rule because visualization involves so much codification, creation of meaning, and translation of concepts and ideas into tangible, material artifacts for cognition and discourse. In effect, the sensory object is a vector for witnessing.

Witnessing
In their book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, authors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe three types of public witnessing of science: the direct performance of experiments in social spaces (imagine if the laboratory were a chapel or temple), reporting experimental methods in a manner that enables someone to replicate the experiments themselves (like primary journal articles that recount the plot), and virtual witnessing by producing in a reader’s mind an image of an experimental scene that displaces the need for direct witness or replication (this, I argue, is much like a story in someone’s mind constructed from the plot). We need more of this public witnessing if science is going to connect with society in a dynamical way.

Suspense and Narration
The idea of witnessing in science is intimately tied to the production of suspense in narrative. Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiousity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.” So when thinking about public engagement we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

The difference between surprise and suspense is also relevant. This passage from a conversation between Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut helps to make the difference clear.

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the audience knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.”

Suspenseful Science?
My reason for taking this detour is to try to show some of the different narrative techniques that can be used in the construction of public health engagement and of science in the collective mind of civil society. Curiosity, surprise, and suspense (pure/impure) are all narratives tactics for engagement.

Curiosity is important for people attending to and learning on their own, but I don’t think it necessarily develops in people unless the benefits are of satisfying it are known to them.

Surprise is also relevant and critical to sensations of astonishment–and of being placed in a new reality that will cause dissonance and therefore growth.

Suspense, while composed and related to surprise and curiosity, has a more pedagogical function. It builds up knowledge of scenes and constraints using what I think Shapin and Schaffer described as virtual witnessing. The audience/spectators build the story themselves, creating it from the narration and plot to fit their own needs, and to adapt it to their own context and location-based experience. I think this is especially true for impure suspense because pure suspense rings of master narratives and the hindsight needed to create contrasts among moral outcomes. Life is not so much like that. Impure suspense allows us to decide the moral outcome during the process. We are never sure if we have chosen the right one, and we may not know even after the “movie” has ended.

So how can public engagement efforts use suspense to build better acclimation and participation among its audiences?

Scenarios and Fallacies
One possibility lies in the construction of scenarios about the future. Scenarios are descriptions of alternative future states where narration helps to articulate the shape and distribution of actors, procedures, and resources. Scenarios can be general or highly detailed, and they can be shown or represented in a variety of ways from verbal description, acting or role playing, visualization and imagery.

I’ve recently delved into the techniques of scenario development. They serve a number of important functions for individuals and organizations. The most important is perhaps building out aspirations and ideas of what the future could hold–even if the present lacks those characteristics. In this way preferred futures can be imagined, but even when the future is imagined to contain destructive relationships, it aids the processes of critical thinking and adaptation. For individuals, recognizing opportunity and constraint is the first step to capitalizing on it or avoiding its pitfalls. Arjun Appadurai has been highly influential in defining aspirations, or the capacity to aspire to a better future, as an important feature of cultural capacity. Scenarios, as extensions of aspirations, are a way to work forward, to rearrange the systems and see what new hybrids emerge and how they might affect well-being.

For organizations, scenarios can help create common ground. The dredge up assumptions and interactions to create a big picture where knowledge can be exchanged. When scenarios are combined with games and simulations, they provide an opportunity to work through challenging situations, to create memories of the future, and out of these take the confidence to undertake critical adaptive change without incurring any of the risks that real experiences entail.

One of the discussion themes asked what happens when artists and others ‘misinterpret’ the science or present it in a biased or misleading way. Rather than seeing this as something necessarily counterproductive, creative interpretations provide circumstantial detail that may be critical for the social fluency of science. A creative depiction of evolutionary technologies, such as Chris Landau’s The Flocking Party (http://theflockingparty.com/), should therefore be seen as a ‘minority report’, suggesting possible avenues for experimentation or areas of conflict between science and society.

On the contrary, critics of scenarios have argued that they aren’t effective in the development of policy precisely because of the detail they incorporate into their ‘worlds’. Morgan and Granger (2007) have argued that scenarios come with an implicit expectation of liklihood–that any particular scenario is more likely to occur in the future. As I already stated, predicting the future is not a goal for scenarios, but critical responsiveness to uncertainty is. Morgan and Keith based their argument on a common fallacy (and I will include another) that I think are important for us to consider as we take on public engagement through narrative.

In adding detail to a scenario or, let’s say, a compelling tale of science, we create compounding descriptions that run the risk of invoking the conjunction fallacy. A frequent example was developed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They gave respondents the statement:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

and asked: Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Logic and probability tell us that #1 is more probable since it is increasingly unlikely that she is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

The issue here is that we want to include more detail and visualization in our stories, but in doing so we possibly risk compounding peoples’ expectation of what is and is not likely to happen.

Vividness is another concern. According to wikipedia, “The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Although misleading vividness does little to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.”

The availability heuristic says that we often place events we have just seen or experienced in our memory more prominently, even if we know them to be less frequent occurrences. I can’t tell you how many times my Mom called me late in the evening when I was in college to warn me abut something she might have just seen on the evening news as a possible risk. The detail that many forms of media and engagement provide can also bias judgments that we would otherwise weigh more carefully.

I think somewhere there is a sweet-spot. I like this account of The Critical Art Ensemble as a group that routinely replicates scientific experiments in public spaces such as malls and parks in an effort to publicly verify political claims ranging from the presence of GMOs in the food chain to the terror threat of biological warfare. One of CAE’s projects with co-collaborator Beatriz de Costa is described by Regine Debatty from the blog we-make-money-not-art this way:

GenTerra is essentially a participatory “theater”…Scientists and artists are talking the public through the process and implications (whether they are purely profit-driven or feature some utopian qualities) of transgenics. Materials are then provided to allow people to get a hands-on experience by creating their own transgenic organism…After that they become actively involved in risk assessment by deciding whether or not to release bacteria from one of petri dishes of the release machine.

Even if the feedback generated doesn’t make it back to the lab or policy office, it’s a form of participatory design that seeks out users of science.

Another example was developed in Europe and has now spread. Some of you may have read about Science Shops as one possible form of engagement that pits user needs in direct contact with professional researchers. Here is a blog post about this that I wrote awhile back (http://blog.cstep.in/?p=319).

There is a fantastic series of podcasts produced by the CBC a few years back. The podcasts interviews many noted historians, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists to help distill what science is, how it’s claims to knowledge and facts are produced, and what many of the critical themes and questions are that science has to wrestle with including objectivity, fallacies of “historicity-turned-relativism”, and others.

Many influential authors contribute including: Richard Lewontin, Peter Gallison, Lorraine Daston, Steven Shapin, Bruno Latour, and James Lovelock..among many others.

You can download all the podcasts here:
http://castroller.com/podcasts/inrecentyears?page=1

Today was my first day of work at CSTEP. The entrance to CSTEP is located right before Infrantry Road goes into one way mode.

I have been to the building a handful of times before. In previous journeys I have walked, taken an auto and gotten dropped off by Taxi on previous visits. Even though the building is on a T-Junction that leads to a 1-way street I seemed to have arrived on a radically different path every-time.

I have lived in Bangalore on and off for 4+ years and am still developing a mental model of the city. In part, I have grown up navigating the “rational” grid system found in American cities such as Manhattan, Portland OR. I have also lived in Hong Kong, and although I never quite figured out the street plan my primary means of transportation was the MTR and bus system which was very clearly signed and mapped even so even a foreigner like me, with no Chinese language ability could easily move around.

Now I need to figure out my daily commute to CSTEP. I do not own a car, and ideally I would like to avoid having to take an auto to work everyday. My main concerns for getting to work are safety (not getting hit while crossing streets), health (avoiding peak pollution) and sanity (minimizing time spent in traffic jams / listening to honking). What are my options?:

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WALKING: I have done the walk from Home to CSTEP before. The positives are that I get a little exercise before I arrive at work, and the distance I have to cover is actually much shorter than motorized transport because I can avoid many of the one ways and roundabouts that make the driving trip so long.

The negatives are that the walk is along some very busy car streets, the pavements are not comfortable for walking forcing most pedestrians onto the streets themselves sharing space with motor traffic. This causes the walk to feel claustrophobic and forces me to be very close to the fumes from the motor vehicles. In particular, the section where Jaymahal Road meets Miller road is extremely dangerous for pedestrians, are there are no pavements or provisions for non-motorized traffic.

BUS: I have no idea where a bus leaves from or how I would even find out what bus routes are available. If I find this out I will give an update.

AUTO: This is a fast way to get to work, although the location covered is greater than walking because of the one way streets which have to be avoided. Although is cost is not great (30 - 50 rs. depending on route) it is still more expensive than Bus. A major negative is that taking the auto to work puts me in the center of traffic pollution. The cost is not a major disincentive for me to use Auto’s. Regardless, I am primed to use the bus, but I can not figure out easily if there is a route, before I can even determine if it would be convenient.

After ManU went up 2-0 against Arsenal I started browsing and commenting on the submissions to this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition that the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC run each year.

Some observations:

• Lots of games and game-like labs in the mix.
• Art/Sci is now officially mainstream.
• Climate and Sustainability are BIG social issue themes in the sci/tech proposals.
• Lots of brands in the mix (Exploratorium, National Park Service, xlabs, Media Lab, Eyebeam, etc)

But after culling through them for an hour and a half, I think I got a good sampling of the 800 or so submissions to the Learning Labs track. Here are a few that seemed interesting, relevant and promising….to things I’m interested in..

ENERGY & CLIMATE ADAPTATION

Empowering Collaboration between Students and Vulnerable Communities in Three Degrees’ Real-World Climate Justice Seminar

Energy Game

The Wild Life Virtual Barnyard… Saving The Planet One Climate Cartoon At A Time!

Powerhouse: A Social Game That Teaches Players About Energy Efficiency

Climate Changers: An MMO virtual lab game to save a planet

Young People Take the VITAL SIGNS of Climate Change, Build Scientific Habits of Mind

Disadvantaged Youth Exploring Sustainable Energy Collaboratively Through Video Games

Pooling Resources Project [Prp]

OUTLIERS

EpiLab: Student-led epidemiology and public health surveillance in a global network of high school classrooms

HowStuffisMade & HowitcanChange: participatory platform to change the most toxic of global human activities.

Hackteria

WATER

On the H2O Case

Dry Land, Grey Water, Green Future: Interactive STEM Learning Through Gathering and Visualizing Environmental Data

Water Case Studies: Exploring Social History and Environmental Impact to Create Collaborative Solutions

Where People Live

Anthropogenic Biomes as a Region for Research in Evolutionary Design Ecology
Many systems of classification for regions ignore the integration of human influence and ecosystem form, process, and diversity. This situation was common when I was in school and we learned about different ecological regions that were described largely by vegetation type and the weather patterns.  A definition of region that is based on many interactions between society and nature, including perspectives  on global patterns of sustained direct human interaction with ecosystems, may be appropriate for weighing studies of human health, its interactions, and driving factors. Anthropogenic biome describes a recent and perhaps better system of regional classification than have previous definitions (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008) which have tended towards pure forms of nature or the separation of nature and society.

Anthropogenic Biomes: Definition
Anthropogenic biomes are similar to ecological biomes: they describe patterns of vegetation, climate, and ecosystem processes. However, they also take into account the anthropogenic influences of land use and population density on ecosystem processes. Ellis and Ramankutty characterize anthropogenic biomes as heterogeneous landscape mosaics, combining a variety of different land uses and land covers. Some of this heterogeneity is driven by natural landscape variation, as well as human enhancement of natural landscape (e.g. intensive agriculture) and human created landscape (e.g. construction of settlements and transportation systems).

The Regional Classification System they developed is as Follows (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008):
Dense Settlements: Urban, Dense Settlements

Villages: Rice Villages, Irrigated Villages, Cropped and Pastoral Villages, Rainfed Villages, Rainfed Mosaic Villages

Croplands: Irrigated Cropland, Residential Rainfed Mosaic, Populated Irrigated Cropland, Populated Rainfed Cropland, Remote Cropland

Rangelands: Rangelands, Populated Rangeland, Remote Rangeland

Forested: Populated Forests, Remote Forests

Wildlands: Wild Forest, Sparse Forest, Barren

Of Earth’s 6.4 billion human inhabitants:
40% live in dense settlements biomes (82% urban population),
40% live in village biomes (38% urban),
15% live in cropland biomes (7% urban), and
5% live in rangeland biomes (5% urban)
0.6% live in forested biomes.

Asia and Oceania have the most diversity in the distribution of these regions around the world.

Global Anthropogenic Biomes

Further refinement is possible (Alessa and Chapin, 2008) by resolving distributions of social values, dietary patterns, movement patterns, resource use and between local and regional scales, inter alia.

Why Anthropogenic Biomes Matter for Public Health and Other Forms of Research
Anthropogenic biomes are a more accurate description of broad ecological patterns than are systems that exclusively describe vegetation patterns based on variations in climate and geology. Likewise, anthropogenic biomes may be better at representing patterns of human interactions with the environment and describing the driving factors in health outcomes. There are multiple reasons for this that stem from the varied roles that ecosystem, climate, cultural, and social relationships enact in dialogue with each other.

Anthropogenic biomes differ substantially in terms of basic ecosystem processes (eg carbon emissions, reactive nitrogen) and ecosystem biodiversity. These factors in turn affect the relative availability of resources for that region, including and especially ecosystem services like clean air and water and nutrient availability for agriculture.  Furthermore, they must necessarily feed back into human ways of knowing and interacting with the environment.

Anthropogenic biomes can be connected to global patterns of ecosystem processes, along with anticipated future increases in human influence on ecosystems and the associated health outcomes due to climate change-driven risk factors.

Genome by environment interactions may be particularly relevant at this scale of interaction. The region definition is appropriate to human movement patterns and thus exposure to sources of chronic and acute risk from disease and consumption patterns.

The land use type itself determines a wide variety of factors including interactions with other humans, livestock, dietary consumption, levels of hydration, energy intensity, and other factors.

Culture, ethnicity, and language are also important in response to land use and domestic patterns of consumption ranging from food use and taboos, communication of lifestyle and health options, provisioning of nutrition, water, and energy, availability, and the use of technology to process and maintain different lifestyle patterns.

In each of these regional definitions, the interactions between landscape and human activity affects affluence, access to health care, and political regulation which suggests that these are are other possible subdivisions since these regions correspond to human social, transport, technological, and social networks–especially in dense settlements versus villages and remote areas.

For these reasons, anthropogenic biomes may provide more of a mosaic-like image from which to base categorizations used by clinical and other studies of health compared to political and continental boundaries which conventionalize migration barriers and tribal relationships. Geographic and political definitions will slowly shift, leaving only historical genetic signatures. Furthermore, anthro biomes are not specific to any particular disease or health outcome. They may encompass suites of infection and disease patterning where behavior, exposure, risk, and land use are correlated. They may also be indicative of linked health outcomes at the physiological level where, for example, musculoskeletal disorders and endocrine system perturbations are bound by human-influenced ecosystem interactions.  Or they may suggest psychological correlates, linking cognition and landscape to disease and health risks.

The main point to consider is that ecological relationships, including land use and human infrastructure development, script behavior and consumption in ways that drive health outcomes. Understanding human influenced ecosystem patterns helps us identify areas of positive feedback between health risks, land use, population density, and the construction of everyday life.

References
Alessa, L., & Chapin, F. S. (2008). Anthropogenic biomes: a key contribution to earth-system science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 23(10), 529–531.

Ellis, E. C., & Ramankutty, N. (2008). Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 6(8), 439–447.

On Monday there was a lecture at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore by William D. Phillips, Nobel Laureate called “Time, Einstein and the Coolest Stuff in the Universe”. It was the Vainu Bappu Memorial Lecture, with a huge crowd, a packed auditorium. Why I’m writing about it is that it was like a good old fashioned science lecture, full of wonderful, spectacular experiments. I realised I was actually on the edge of my seat!

He was talking about atomic clocks and that the cooling down of atoms increases the accuracy of measurements and timekeeping and this can matter for systems like GPS. He said that somewhere he went to, he walked past a door that said “Director of Earth Rotation”. The rotation of the earth is one kind of ‘tick’, its regular like a pendulum or the vibration of an atom, but, apparently the rotation of the Earth isn’t always the same - fantastic news - and so every so often the clocks and the Earth have to be synced back together.

The video is from the end of the lecture when everyone was crowding round and asking more questions. He used lots of liquid nitrogen - he was chucking it down the aisles - because he was wanting us to understand cooling. He wanted us to understand that his experiment is about cooling atoms to four million times cooler than the temperature of outer space. Its something too abstract and extreme to understand, so he must have wanted us to understand the relative strangeness of nitrogen’s freezing and boiling points as a step to believing what he was telling us. He said it was about “the adventure of getting to colder temperatures”

The atoms are cooled by lasers. As the resonance of the laser approaches that of the atom, it moves towards absorbing it and in the process looses energy and slows, which is what cooling is, slowing down. The other part of the problem was having a container for the atoms in which the atoms wouldn’t touch the sides and condense. This is to do with BEC: Bose-Einstein Condensation. So he explained the magnetic bottle with this levitating magnet experiment.

He had IIA work hard to include the experiments in the talk. In his vote of thanks, Bhanu Das said how loved he is as a teacher and scientist. You could see by the generosity of his explanations this was true. He gave us the keys to understand something very complex and extraordinary. He told a great story.

At the Solar Eclipse the skies belong to the people again and that’s why I had to go there, to see how I could make my own connection with the Solar System and how other people did too.

Hinduism contains an ancient science of eclipses that now manifest in rituals: not eating during an eclipse, not looking at an eclipse, taking a bath after the eclipse. The particular, unusual circumstances of an eclipse, more than likely create atmospheric disturbances that could make it wise to be indoors and not eat. The Bhabha Atomic Research Centre were making tests at Dhanushkodi, so maybe they would rediscover this.

I took a night bus to Madurai and then at six in the morning, a car to Rameshwaram. The sun rise was impressively rich and red-orange, it looked ready for a special day. With the morning mist it turned white like the moon. I was going to the place where the Bangalore Astronomy Society were meeting. I wanted to get a sense of how they helped people participate in astronomy.

The first people I found had this viewer, made with a mirror in the tube, a reflector to take the image down the box tunnel, a lens to focus and the tracing paper to catch the image.

Other people set up cameras with filters to take photos, but these were for one person at a time. I liked how these people had made something that let lots of people watch at once. I liked how the momentous singularity of the eclipse became reproduced on a tatty piece of tracing paper and a cardboard box, how it became part of the things on earth, not separate.

This was another device, made with a waste paper bin. Really like the little boy putting the goggles on to look. So funny!

The eclipse takes time and during that time we all found different ways to see the eclipse. What I found curious was tht you can’t look at the eclipse. You look most directly through your goggles, but even that feels like such a barrier and gives such an abstract black and white flat image. Its hard to think that this really is the moon passing over the sun. This was what I was trying to feel, that these were two celestial bodies and there was a distance between us, but the feeling didn’t come easily.

There was a tree on its own across the sands and I realised people must be looking at the shadows and for some time we all played with the pin hole-shadow-camera obscura.

A woman was making a pattern of holes, she made a paisley shape and together the group figured out how to cast the eclipses. Someone said we should make a heart next.

Then making the eclipse appear with our hands. That was very poetic. To use your hands instead of your eyes.

As the moon entered the sun entirely there was great excitement and crowding round the viewers. This was what people wanted because they could photograph and look at the same time.

Two ladies lay on the ground watching through the goggles and it seemed to me that was the best way to look, forget the photos. So for this first or second contact that’s what I did. There is something extremely beautiful about this shape with the inner circle just touching the outer circle. Its the point at which everyone cries out to see ‘Bailey’s Beads’, the slightly bumpy edge, and this I was told later is actually caused by the craters and mountains of the moon. The texture of the moon itself is what you see, very wonderful.

I wear my Grandma’s wedding ring when I travel alone here sometimes. A gold ring. I look at other people’s photos now of this annularity and it gives me time to remember how beautiful this gold ring of the sun was to see, even in this very patchy, messy way that we were seeing.

Somebody said that the skies use to belong to everyone equally, but now that science, scientists and scientific instruments have discovered so much more, when we look at the skies we are ignorant. We know that what science knows is way beyond us. The cities too have taken away the stars that we could know.

As an artist interested in creating group viewing experiences for watching the cosmos, it was easy to see that these contraptions could be pushed a further, that if the image was projected into a dark room, like the meditation hall we were right next to, the number of people able to watch and the quality of seeing could become much richer, by paying attention to the aesthetics.

I was using a mirror to put the eclipse on the Swami Vivekanandar Memorial Hall.

The little boy who looked like a Bollywood star wanted to do the same and he put the image momentarily inside the doorway of the hall and there it was, the eclipse inside a dark building, very stunning. I don’t have the picture and the rush towards annularity was starting, but that would have been the thing to do.

This is a picture my friend Rohini Devasher took of the eclipse chasers she was with from Delhi S.P.A.C.E. (Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators) in Varkala, just to see some more of this range of instrumentation for looking at something, the sun, that lets us see, but which we can’t see directly, that blinds us.

I’d love to make a building and a mirror for next time. But at the eclipse I liked the makeshift technology, the hands on processes, th way we formed a group helping each other to see. On the way back I was talking to the three amateur astronomers who gave me a lift about putting in a proposal to use the Kavalur observatory. Pavan didn’t think non-professionals would have any hope of access, but I got really defensive and said yes they could and that its only when you bring in people from other backgrounds to understand and use technology that new applications can be found. Rishi said that was what had happened with computers. It was suddenly very clear that the instrumentation of cosmic observation is proprietary and attached to hierarchies of knowledge and that this solar eclipse was a rare opportunity to break that down and for people to create their own observatories.