IS 272 Week 5 Class Notes

Garnet Hertz
Maker Movement
Making a physical object that results is more important to some than others

Question: Sometimes in business resources are limited and then one is tasked with something anyway. How much trial & error did you experience and could you have estimated the cost prior to the project beginning?

Dead Media is his current project

PhD in film & media studies
Archives of obsolete information technology

Poetic codings with Casey Reas
Book: processing 9visualization for non-programmers)

Erkki Huhtamo – media archaeology

Critical Technical Practice

Readings this week moving from utilitarian functions to humanities approach/phenomenology
Very subjective
Agre, Boehner, Ratto
Embracing a perspective where you’re embracing/reflecting on what’s being made and what the models imply
Abstraction/concepts←→ building

Ratto
This article provides an overview of a series of experiments in
what the author calls critical making, a mode of materially productive
engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative
physical and conceptual exploration. Although they share much in
common with forms of design and art practice, the goal of these
events is primarily focused on using material production—making
things—as part of an explicit practice of concept elaboration within
the social study of technology.

Boehner
Critical technical practice

Agre’s whole deal abt AI (HCI comes from a different set of premises that recognize different social and cultural fact) (Garnet: perversion/perversive design/doing things the wrong way)
1. Identify core metaphors of field/situation
2. Recognizes what the metaphors exclude, disregard, marginalize
3. Invert the metaphor to bring marginal to center (McLuhan: push to limits)
4. Build a new alternative that embodies the inversion

black boxing issues: narrows one’s expertise
expertise/mastery
increasing specialization=sense of mastery and ability to do sthg in the world

MT: drinking the kool aid that more is better
MT: makes me think of the peer-review project that kid at UCLA is doing – do we really need this? Is there an incremental benefit that is worthwhile?

what’s the critical message behind Garnet’s video car? Playing around with the idea of realism in video games
higher resolution/frame rate/bandwidth assumed to be better always
taking what would normally be realism, but pushing it in an absurd way, to the point that it’s unsafe; academic comp sci industry joke – not critical of politics or anything like that
cockroach robot was a joke on biomemetics
“the unsimulation of that metaphor”
MT: literalizing the metaphor

open source movement criticized for elitism and the term “open” is amorphous (Chris Kelty has written on this)
Morten: there is an empowerment notion with open access
Denkler’s argument of moral/legal benefits –

MT: Po Bronson
MT: 7th-grade woodworking, drafting, metalworking
Maybe the collection I should bring in is those items and why they are valuable

Appraisal
1. Metaphors:
1. market/asset – filtering/refining
2. time capsule
3. collection (building)
4. gateway/threshold
5. linkage (what goes with what; archival bond)
6. evidence
7. memory
8. belonging

We chose collection as the metaphor

1. Excludes:
   • Isomorphs, unique objects
   • Souvenir
   • Original context
   • Access
   • Controversial, sensitive objects
   • Nature – “live”
   • Original order
   • Social context relation to materials at other locations or outside the archive
   • Ephemera

2. Invert the metaphor to bring these excluded items central
   • Junk drawer
   • X files
   • Miscellany
   • Singularity
   • Commentary (incorporating secondary and tertiary comments)
   • Pawn shop
   • Reality shows

These are all about dynamic remediation – reuse/repurpose; all are in flux
• Rubik’s cube – antiorganization
• Disorganization
• Serendipity (small research on this in IS; was really neglected in information seeking research for a long time. How can we design for serendipity?)
o Like a shelf list online to find what’s related
•

“Bending the archive”

Embodied and culturally “own” experience
Strong subjectivism

As we think about design and tools we use, we’re in a different territory

Discretionary takes into account the user; nondiscretionary is usually corporate-designd, users have to adapt (Grudin says HCI is the history of turning away from that view)

MT:
Are there studies about the cultural attitude of a region/country/community/etc. and the discretionary/nondiscretionary nature of design?

Use the critical technology logic and the heuristics for next week’s workshop