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Mathematician Arnold, I just read somewhere, started a book saying: “Mathematics is a part of Physics”. And then “Mathematics is the part of Physics where experiments are cheap”.

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Here’s the quick abstract for what I will be talking about on the symposium on Creative Spaces on 17 june. But basically there is too much in it, and the story is too ‘big’ (too much to get your head around in one talk). So I want to narrow it down and slow it down a bit. I have been sort of lured into setting up the summary this way because I read one of the other contributers and they explicitly presented and “information processing model” of creative rooms. I thought that sounded very out-dated, but perhaps is is actually very modern! Is information processing back on the road again? Everything comes back, eventually, doesn’t it? Anyway I had to respond to that in some way I felt.

But I guess my ‘wooden horses’ about embodiment and embeddedness of cognition might themselves be sort of wearing off. Still, the practical issues underlying it are valid: Designers see computers as, well, as computers. And if they design on the basis of that conception, they will affect our lives in certain ways. While in fact computers do not have to be designed to be ‘computers’ for us, nowadays, computers can be anything, and we should quickly find out what we *want* computers to be for us instead of slowly drifting into a life in which everything is defined as an information search, storage and retrieval+ (storing my love in you, retrieving my self-esteem from my work, searching for inspiration with a walk in google-forest.

Feedback welcome.

TITLE Digital devices as embodied enablers: How computers may become part of an embodied, situated creative space.

SUMMARY

Parallel to the technological development of digital computing came the theoretical model of cognitivism, aka the information-processing view, in which human thought and action were seen primarily as processes of representation and computation. If human activity, e.g., a brainstorm in a creative room, is interpreted as an information proces, then the computer quite naturally connects to that proces, because a computer is essentially an information processing system. On the grounds of this fundamental philosophical assumption, one that is very much engrained in our popular technological culture, many computer applications have been developed. Such applications give the computer a role that highlight the information-processing aspects of the activity, or even force people to see it that way (in order to be able to use the system). Hence, such systems will ask the user to store information, retrieve information, compare data, represent their world in concrete linguistic units, symbolize things, categorize under name headings, and calculate ‘best next actions’, and so on. For example, in the creative environment, computer systems have been used to reduce the complex and subtle social activity of brainstorming to a ‘group decision’ proces, in which ’statements’ are summarized into ‘conclusions’ that are automatically generated by the computer. Moreover, in such a system, the physical forms and movements of the user and the system are completely irrelevant. In fact, in group decision rooms each user sits behind a screen and the the whole creative process is reduced to a purely ‘mental’ process in which the body and movement in space are disconnected from the activity.

The cognitivist interpretation of human thought has been under serious attack since the rise of an alternative theory called Embodied and Situated Cognition. According to ESC, intelligent action arises in action, as an emergent property from the tight interplay between the human body, the physical structure of the physical environment, the brain and the social setting. ESC puts realtime dynamic couplings, not information-processing, at the hart of the cognitive system. Given this new model, an interesting question becomes what the role of the computer might be within such an embodied system. In this presentation I take the creative room as a case-study. I will give examples of prototypes we have developed where the computer plays a fundamentally different role than that of a storage device for representations or a calculator of rational conclusions. Instead, the computer becomes a subtle assistent to an ongoing embodied interactions between people and the environment.

This new way of seeing computers asks new questions of designers. First: how do the physical aspects of the artefact relate to it’s digital properties? In an embodied view those two cannot be seen as seperate. Thus one cannot design software independent from the industrial design or interior design of the space, as is the standard practice of today. Perhaps some of the things one would easily design in software, may be just as well be supported by physical forms in the space (e.g. tangible interaction), and perhaps some of the things that one would normally design physically might now become interwoven with software in subtle ways (e.g. augmented reality). The second question relates to the design process: considering that embodied and situated activities are complex, personal and context dependent (based on your body in that particular environment in that social context at that particular time), how may we analyse these systems such that we can design for them? One approach may be not to analyse first and design later, but instead to engage in an iterative, participatory design process by which the design and the user’s world are strongly intertwined activities, such that the design solution will itself be an ‘emergent’ result of an ongoing coupling proces between designers, users, and the evolving prototype.

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I am currently writing a book chapter for a book in which theoretical perspectives and  practical experiences meet. The book is about design, research and user involvement (e.g. co-design and participatory design). It is not a ‘positive’ book in the sense of a methods book or a straightforward plea for co-design, rather it is more critically ‘opening the box’: what are the real problems of putting these ideas into practice and what are some of the more fundamental reasons why some things might or might not work.

In my chapter I am going to challenge the naive goal of designers to try and ‘understand’ the end-user. Much of the work in ‘user centered desin’ is focussed on that: the designer organizes research-activities in order to better ‘understand’ the end-user. But the question is whether we can really understand ‘the other’ in a way that goes beyond the obvious, or in a way that goes beyond that which you already put into the explanation yourself.

When you consider that the way I use a product - and whether that gives me satisfaction - is determined by a complex web of interactions between my brain, my body, the structure of the environment and the properties of the product, the goal I have currently in pursuit, the things I had just been doing, how I socially relate to other people and my role in the organizational system, my culture, and so on, then you realize that “understanding the user” is just three words standing in for a very long story.

Instead of saying how you should do your best to try and ‘understand’ the user I propose to by-pass understanding altogether. Because what we are after all doing is designing a product. So if we can do that without mutual understanding, then all the better, because understanding is difficult, perhaps too difficult.

So instead of understanding each other, consider that the user and the designer will *work on the design* together. In between the designer and the user, then, would stand the evolving product (prototype) itself, and that prototype would serve as an interface between the thoughts and actions, well, the ‘life’ of the designer on the one hand and the thoughts and actions, well, the ‘life’ of the user on the other. The designer’s interpretation of what ‘we are doing’ might be very different from the user’s interpretation of ‘what we’re doing’, but that doesn’t matter so long as everybody is satisfied about ‘what we’re doing’.

One of the interesting questions emerges is whether we know of examples in which it was clear that the resulting design (product, building, service) was relevant, good, high quality work, and yet at the same time it was also clear that the contributing people *did not understand each other at all*.

Does anybody know of such examples?

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Vandaag ontving ik per ommegaande electronische post (dwz ongeveer een uur na publicatie van mijn youtube videootje) de volgende boodschap:

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Ik heb er wel weer genoeg van, van die aaachterlijke teringzooi.

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Als je in het Nederlands kwettert over een onbekende Deen, is dat dan privacy schending? Zo ja, dan zal ik de naam XXXX alsnog snel veranderen in Bjorn Michaelsen (update: gedaan en opnieuw gepost, zodat de www.link ook een nieuwe naam krijgt).Bjorn Michaelsen is de eigenaar van het huis waar Christine en ik logeren, tijdens onze tweede week van de cursus Design Anthropology. In Sonderborg, Denemarken. Bjorn spreekt geen woord Engels, dus ik had ook in het Engels kunnen schrijven, maar Nederlands lijkt me nog veiliger.

Bjorn is een vriend van de man bij wie we eigenlijk een B&B arrangement hadden besteld, maar diens huis was vol. Bjorn verhuurt kamers, dat is duidelijk. Hij heeft zelfs een B&B kaartje, dat in een klein stapeltje op het bureau in Christine’s kamer ligt. Maar verder was dit huis voor ons een raadsel. Bjorn is er alleen in de ochtend en soms in de avond, en verder hebben wij het rijk alleen. Tegelijkertijd is dit overduidelijk Bjorn’s eigen huis. Met zijn eigen keuken vol met typische spullen die in een ‘eigen keuken’ staan - en niet in een huisjespark keuken of een guest-house-kitchenette of een hotel-pantry. In de woonkamer staan Bjorn’s eigen meubels. Naast de CD speler liggen Bjorn’s eigen CD’s (een soort Deense slagers en een cover album van ABBA). Aan de muur hangen foto’s van - zo vermoedden wij, Bjorn’s vrouw en Bjorn’s kinderen en Bjorn’s kleinkinderen. In de laadjes van de buffetkast op mijn kamer liggen ongeveer 25 verschillende electro-technische appendages, zorgvuldig gegroepeerd op functie en grootte: usb-kabeltjes, batterijopladers, telefoonopladers, mini-jack, tulp-aansluitingen, en wat al niet. Er ligt ook een paspoort van Bjorn. Omdat het op *mijn* kamer lag vond ik dat ik erin mocht kijken. Als jullie vinden dat het niet mocht zal ik de vorige zin verwijderen, waarmee ik mijn handelen helaas niet ongedaan kan maken. Bjorn is 70 jaar oud. Hij heeft ook in het Deense leger gediend, want er lag een soort boekje van het leger; en waarschijnlijk lag hij in Duitsland, want daaronder lag een woordenboekje Tysk-Dansk en Dansk-Tysk. Onder het paspoort lag een grootboek van een loterij vereniging - een soort Bingo vermoed ik. Bjorn is penningmeester! Behalve foto’s van zijn vrouw wijst niets op de aanwezigheid van een vrouw - dit huis oogt als een vrijgezellenhuis. Of toch niet. Onduidelijk. In de badkamer, in het bovenste kastje naast de spiegel, een beetje achterin, staat wat make-up in een tasje. Alles is overigens keurig opgeruimd in dit huis. Bijna te keurig.

Hoe zit dat nu met Bjorn? Vanochtend hebben Christine en ik onze ethnografische observaties naast elkaar gelegd en op basis van de beschikbare feiten een improvisorische hypothese opgesteld. Zonder teveel in detail te treden is hier de bottom line van onze theorie: Bjorn’s vrouw is recent overleden. Bjorn heeft een nieuwe vriendin. Hij logeert bij zijn vriendin en verhuurt zijn huis. Toen Bjorn even later langs kwam hebben wij een participatief gesprekje met hem gevoerd. Onze hypothese bleek volledig juist te zijn. Dus ik vind dat Christine en ik nu al geslaagd zijn voor de cursus.

Nu ben ik toe aan een cursus over ethiek in data-verzameling.

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Closely related to the Critical Design movement is the concept of Provotypes: Provocative Prototypes. Today we made some. The assignment was to convince engineers that a certain thermostat system was too complex for end-users to work with in daily life. The thermostats were all in separate room and separately controllable, but if one would want the heating system to work optimally, one would have to set all the controls to the same value. The engineers’ position up until that moment had been that the users simply must learn to use the system, which wasn’t so complicated. We built a provocative prototype that would show how the current system was perhaps understandable, but still not workable, in practice, by the users. We created a balance beam with two plates. We called it the Balancing Breakfast. The engineers (just other students in our group) were asked to sit and eat from the plates. Only if you would eat in exactly the same rythm, and grab something from the plate at exactly the same time, would you be able to use this Balanced Breakfast. But of course in practice the balance would tip over and the food would be spilled on the floor. That way the engineers could understand what the problem is from the perspective of the end-user. That is (more or less) what a provotype is for. I mostly was interested in how the provotype evolved. I will write about that in another blog.

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