‘After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music’

Nick Coleman;

‘… I don’t know how you hear music. I imagine if you like music at all then it has some kind of third dimension to it. A dimension suggesting space as well as surface, depth of field as well as texture. Speaking for myself I used to hear buildings whenever I listened to music. Three dimensional forms of architectural substance and tension. What I hear now when I listen to music is a flat two dimensional representation of music, I can’t enter music and I can’t perceive it’s inner spaces…‘

Robin Sloan;

‘It’s like a fingerprint. I can calculate the shape of your trachea from the waveform of your whistle.‘

Still thinking about the shape of sounds and staring intently at these. We all hear in different ways. Someone I once knew described music as a race to the end, a journey, something like this;

Someone else as ‘the passing of time’

Everything sounds wonderful if only you take the time to listen.

Sometimes you can see sound

Make sound. When you sleep

You know this. The robots also know it. (skip to +40s)

Everyone just needs to find their instrument

Even the sad little robots

And the cut down trees

Some other thoughts on sound and hearing

Lego are releasing a Lego for girls range. Odd that. I mistakenly thought lego was always for girls. I owned Lego as a kid (gifts from my gender neutral household).

This kit was my first, I know, I know, it has pink in it (but these where the days before I was solvent), soon I had an airport, space shuttle and pirate set which were much more fun. What kid doesn’t want to be an astronaut?

I can’t help but reflect on the importance of the toys we are exposed to in shaping our development and subsequent career direction. Lego is one of the more memorable toys of my childhood along with meccano and a microscope set. Of course I had dolls too, gifts from well-intentioned relatives but they were often neglected as I worked out stock rotation systems on my farm complete with cows and lions. I still draw upon my play with such toys in designing mechanisms and structures. Play is great for learning, but learning is limited when we impose unnecessary stereotypes.

So I was disappointed to see this press release from Lego, but I’ve worked in retail buying, VM, market research and planning long enough to know that much of this is to do with the persistent merchandising agenda of dividing stores according to stereotypical gender binary (argh). Store planners often place Lego products solely in the boy section but pink is an easy passport to the girl section and what company doesn’t want to increase their product exposure?

However, I will always feel uncomfortable with this suggestion by Lise Eliot who suggests; “… if it takes color-coding or ponies and hairdressers to get girls playing with Lego, I’ll put up with it, at least for now, because it’s just so good for little girls’ brains…”. If these are merely passports to bypass the retail hierarchy then fine, but as Alice Taylor (Makie Lab) suggests surely it is time to rethink the profession of the toys. Role models are important and some of our earliest encounters of such and imagining of future self are through the toys we are exposed to. It is time for the powerful and accomplished computer scientist lego woman, the female engineer, mechanic and girl astronaut.

I wonder if I feel particularly strongly about this given my interpretations of gender? (I won’t touch on the limitations of binary here.) I do suspect it is not just me though and so over the next few months (in collaboration with Rachel Bloodworth) I am putting together a project in which we explore the most memorable toys of females in science and technology. We’d love to hear what your favourite toys were, your thoughts on gendered toys and what you would like to see develop in the future of toys.

Please post your thoughts in the boxes below!

My research question considers if it is possible to situate the design and making process as an experience to be consumed in itself (think spectacle and performance). I like to think that my research was motivated by my childhood reading of Roald Dahl in which I realised that the processes of making in Willy Wonka’s factory were more interesting than the chocolates could ever be. Really though, I just want a legitimate reason to wear a top hat.

As you’ve possibly noticed I usually write up the events I attend, but my note taking has become quite sparse, due in part to selective hearing and my untamed ears which appear to have wandered off somewhere to do something more interesting, possibly with this cat. In other news, I successfully upgraded in September and I am now a full PhD student at HighWire. Not sure where I go to collect the badge for that, but I wait, as ever with anticipation.

After infiltrating Culture Hack North as a product designer I asked; ‘what if you make yourself a souvenir?’

Here I am talking about souvenirs on a number of levels; the making process – can the non-designer participate in designing and making and is simply existing and being, material enough for the shaping of souvenirs.

It is always good to think about what we mean by souvenirs. The term comes from French to ‘recall, remember’ and from latin to ‘come to mind.’

We understand souvenirs primarily as mementos used to commemorate people, places and events and we we traditionally think of mass produced, often tacky items such as snowglobes and fridge magnets, decorative objects that serve no obvious function. We think of mass produced goods lined up in tourist stores transported home as a mechanism for remembering one’s visit.

However the souvenirs that often mean most to us are items never originally intended as souvenirs.  We capture moments and experiences in many ways, we take photos, videos, we make footprints of our children to capture their impossible smallness, we mark the passing of time and the growth of our by engraving marks on walls and diaries, we become so precious about these little measurements. We collect items intended originally as disposable to remember events and experiences in time and space. Sometimes, instead of taking things home we leave objects in places of significance marking our firsts, our lasts, our loves and our losses.

It is here that the function of souvenirs actually emerges, it is on loss that souvenirs function. They mark our attempts to capture that which we cannot hold onto. We essentially outsource our memory into these objects and without the owner’s input, the object’s meaning is invisible and cannot be articulated.

So I am wondering, can we use these intangibles as materials in the making process? Of course the traditional souvenirs I have mentioned are legacy from the mass production paradigm, but with the convergence of the digital and physical in iot and digital fabrication… it becomes possible to create highly personalised souvenirs drawing upon these interactions and experiences.

A few examples of designers and developers attempting to do just this;

Social Memories; Deusche Post have created an application that enables Facebook users to create a book of their digital interactions while The Really Interesting Group alongside Andy Huntington are in the process of creating a system for the generation of Datadecs, physical infographics of your travel, media consumption and generation. They have recently launched Frtsee… the fabricated snowman that is proportioned according to your twitter activity.

We generate data in almost all our interactions, and in the passive means by which our devices listen to and betray us we can use this data. James Bridle created a book of maps documenting his travels using the location data that his iPhone secretly collected

We can even go so far as to attempt to physicalise the passing of time, this being a clock that knits as time passes and drop digital pins in digital maps to create physical markers of the places we have existed. I can utter your name or capture the sound of you in a physical artifact. In a more embodied context Be your own souvenir by BLab demonstrated the joy and curiosity of creating a miniature self using 3D scanning and printing. In this way, the lines on the wall marking our growth become much more interesting. Infact we can go so far as to fabricate things from our remains, this a fabrication from the ashes of Anne Lindeboom who died in 1984.

And so, what I am saying in this, as the product designer in the room is that with the convergence of the digital and the physical and with our tendancies to generate data through existing and being we are reaching a point in which the creation of highly personalised objects is possible. In creating highly personalised objects however their transferability and generalisability is reduced. In which case the objects become souvenirs of ourselves and souvenirs in themselves.

Contrary to what this post might suggest I don’t actually spend much time reading science fiction. My first ventures into what might be described as social science fiction were in 2002/3 with Aldous Huxley and a Brave New World which depicted a society operating on the principles of mass production and pavlovian conditioning. It piqued my interests as critiques and depictions of alternative political, economic and social orders so frequently do. Possibly, though I am never sure, as a result of latent frustration inspired by the generalised acceptance of the status quo in my product design studies science fiction presented itself to me as a mechanism by which alternative worlds and societies, interactions and values could be discussed and critiqued.

Divine Endurance by Gwyneth Jones for example, posed in a post-apocalyptic setting, where a cat named Divine Endurance and a child named Chosen among the beautiful (Cho) exist in a profoundly matriarchal world makes for an interesting consideration of gender constructs and roles. Always good to think about, but rarely posed as possibility or considered, not of course that I am arguing that an entirely matriarchal society is necessarily desirable but that this piece of fiction serves as a mechanism for considering a less patriarchal perspective.

So, the collection presented in the slide deck was a result of some pondering of the role of fiction in anticipating, shaping and critiquing the future of technology, in this case post-industrial manufacture. Something I will present in an alternative form elsewhere. More than most I have spent time thinking about the possibilities of an alternative production system, the implications for consumption, economics and society. I looked to fiction, as others do to provoke wider thoughts on as yet unconsidered implications from which I would subsequently construct a grounded academic critique.

Which brought me back to thinking about science fiction as design fiction;

 “[T]he theory and practice behind conflating design, ‘building things that exist’, with fiction, ‘making up shit that doesn’t exist’. Design-fiction–either through its own limited fictional proposition or on the back of pre-existing works of fiction–links a fictional narrative regarding a proposed object, with some image, shadow, ghost, dream, or otherwise hologrammically-real design of that object.” (Adam Rothstein)

Much like critical design or speculative design, science fiction if we are to understand it as design fiction can serve as a mechanism of inspiring design and development of technologies but perhaps more importantly in provoking conversations about the implications of technology as embedded in wider socio-economic constructs, but do we use it as such?

Some academics and technologists do obviously, but the impact and value of this is ultimately undermined by the market and pursuit of profit and power. Interestingly, it perhaps isn’t so much about how the technologist and the academic perceives and utilises science fiction, because somewhere in the wider subconscious there is an instinctual referral to science fiction when a new (to public) technology emerges and perhaps feels uncomfortable, google Siri and Skynet for example. Though often accessible, these reference points are not often widely shared (show me the real Sci-fi consumption statistics if you wish to argue this point). So i’m questioning how knowing the appropriate reference points in science fiction might impact how a hypothetical-non-tech-me might adopt, use and understand a technology? Would this version of me use Siri or Facebook or Twitter the way I do currently if I was more clued up on the fictional implications of Skynet or Newspeak? Probably not.

My first encounter with an Apple was in 1991 or 1992 when I was around 7 years old, I believe I used an Apple classic and logo language to programme a LOGO turtle, surely education at its finest. This was also around the time I established myself as a Lemonade stand pundit and perfected the art of encouraging lemmings to meet watery deaths via the Commodore Amiga. After this my computing encounters were of a series of whirring plastic PCs in ‘Information Communication Technology ‘ classes where the goal of our ‘education’ was learning how to use Microsoft Office products, surely education at its worst.

My next memorable encounter with an Apple product was in 2005, where, after years of nudging PCs into submission I committed to Apple products. I was studying engineering technology and had an elective in product design. While the engineering students had PCs, the design students had fields of Apple iMacs. I believe the crisp uniform lines of iMacs in the design studio were responsible in part for seducing me towards a design career. Of course, buying an Apple was at that time similar to joining a religion, the unpacking, the knowing smile when a new apple user struggled to close documents, eject hardware or shut down; the moment the genius bar repaired your broken heart hard drive, the Photo booth picture games with your other half. Now in 2011, I don’t really notice what computer I am working on, and that is the point, it is reliable enough for me not to hate it, perhaps the reason I write this now with four apple products on my desk.

*quote (not by me) Steve has better places to see.

I’ve found myself increasingly engaged in discussions around encouraging females to pursue science and technology jobs, which makes me think about my school days. I grew up and was socialised in a relatively gender neutral environment as a child, I had no perception that being female should in anyway shape my decisions or life ambition. I was educated in an all girls school in Ireland, where  I loved science and technology and was good at both ‘academic’ and ‘applied’ subjects. I was comfortable with the ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ labels, (wearing them with pride alongside my Jamie Cullum and Pixies badges) and had a minor crush on Marc Newson. I received Nuffield Science and Technology bursaries and Gold, Silver and Bronze Crest awards for my efforts. Consequently I had no conscious awareness of what being a female might mean for my career until I reached upper sixth (16/17 years). It was at this time that careers advisers and teachers played a role in shaping my career choices. At the time I recall being discouraged from pursuing architecture (despite having the grades) because that was a ‘mans’ job (advice received 7 years ago), but encouraged to pursue the ‘professions’ (law or medicine) or to pursue a teaching career in the science subjects I had studied. Looking back I often wonder what I would have studied if I had known females working in computer science or engineering. I suspect, regardless of female role models, if I had known more about either of these subjects rather than the outdated blurb so often found in career books I may have shaped my career differently. I began by studying psychology (QUB) incase you are wondering, but returned to technology through a mash up of electrical and mechanical engineering, industrial design, computing and management, and of course  HighWire .

With this in mind I was recently invited to talk to some young females making career decisions. These girls were specifically interested in technology subjects. They weren’t thinking about the gender make up of the fields they were interested in, they weren’t worried about how this might impact their career, rightfully perceiving themselves as capable and equal. Rather they were discouraged by the (school) career advice they received suggesting that career advisors appeared to focus on their ‘softer’ subjects, and that much of the advice and direction they received was shaped in response. An examination of their collective pool of subjects made careers like engineering, computer science obvious choices but they hadn’t received much advice about either. Furthermore they had no knowledge of anyone female working in these fields, listing instead James Dyson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg  and Phillipe Starck as their most recognisable role models. Encouraging that it wasn’t about perceiving that they were unable, or unequal; rather it was a simple lack of visibility of possible career options and consequent unawareness of who they could become. It all sounds a bit familiar.

In anycase, I’m writing this post (quite late) to document a few women in technology, design and related disciplines that I have met, worked with or find interesting;

Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh inventor of Sugru, Emer Coleman Director of Digital Projects,Greater London Authority and The London Datastore. Caper kids Katy Beale and Rachel Coldicutt; Virtual Revolution BBC, Guardian Tech Weekly, academic and journalist Aleks Krotoski; Collaborative consumption, author, innovator and speaker Rachel Botsman; designer, artist, educator and magician Jane Prophet ; researcher, writer, fellow,consultant and manager Georgina Voss; RIG London, Designswarm, LIREC  Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino; Adafruit industries Limor Fried; BBC R&D Maxine Glancey; Architect and designer Neri Oxman. Some of my design related favourites include Renny Ramakers Droog; Paola Antonelli  MoMA and Matali Crasset furniture and product designer and finally someone I would like to talk to in the course of my research Maxine Clarke Chief Executive Bear of Build a Bear Workshop.

Of course HighWire has wonderful women making their place in technology; Nina Ellis, radical knitting & serious gaming for social change; Rachel Lovie transmedia storytelling games as a tool for transformational learning; Rachel Keller wellbeing and knowledge transfer through community quilting; Becci Pearce technology and organisations; Marcia Tavares Smith Fashion 2.0; co design in fashion; Helen Pritchard arduino wizz, artist and researcher playing with data; Ester Waite generative possibilities of learning, organising and achieving innovative ways of performing our world into being; Brandi Richards cyber sustainability and Jonnat Middleton artist, anthropologist and panda bear enthusiast.

The evening began with an introduction by Jack Roberts covering the history of manufacturing, the industrial revolution and the associated socio-economic conditions. A brief view of the technological evolution which brought us through from pre-industrial to post-industrial with consideration of the changing commerical, consumption, managerial and organisational structures.

On a design perspective Jack points to how digital trends have allowed us to create, personalise and control our own digital aesthetic through our social network pages, sites and avatars, he notes how we observe this emerging in the physical world pointing to cafe press and other customisation platforms as a starting point and towards Ponoko, Ucodo, Digital forming as the future. With digital fabrication impacting various industries including; Architecture; Radiolara pavilion: Medical; Food and Bio; Organovo. This was followed by a panel with Brendan Dawes of Beep Industries, Assa Ashuach of Digital Forming, and Soner Ozenc of RazorLAB.

Of course no discussion of digital fabrication can neglect intellectual property – the digitisation of design and manufacturing opens the design and manufacturing of physical products to the possibilities of piracy, openess, re-mixing, just as the music and film industries found on their earlier digitisation. Heated discussions resulted as to whether DRM is really the best way to tackle that, personally I don’t think so, I wonder (perhaps) if an alternative economy, alternative forms of ownership are the way forward.

Again, as with any of these discussion the ‘democratisation’ debate reared it’s head questioning ‘will the enfranchisement of untrained people with technology lead to a glut of, in this case, poorly designed objects?‘ This is a tricky one, one that calls for questioning of motivation, metrics of value, and accountability. Examination of the output from Shapeways and Ponoko might confirm this suggestion, but I think the reality of this debate hinges on motivation and ability.

The barriers to participating in design and manufacturing are ever decreasing, but many of us will perhaps after a few initial attempts have neither the motivation nor attention span required to actually design a product from scratch. Instead, we will find that platforms and digital tools that bound the design space and ensure functionality and quality will be an entry point for consumers; Droog and  Assa Asuach are working on this space already. This doesn’t negate the role of the designer, rather it points to an evolving role, that of facilitator and a renewed interface with the consumption and production space.

What is less discussed in panels such as these are those of the current changing social and economic conditions that might be considered relevant and influential in the emergence of production systems based on digital fabrication.We can look to  neo-Smithian, neo-Schumpeterian and neo-marxist approaches to bring us to ‘post fordism’ but who do we point to in discussing the now and the near future? I’d really like to know.

You can read more about this here from Future Human and my notes on a related RSA talk here.

I blogged a few weeks ago about the Escher Joint by Benjamin Parton RCA, and noted a lack of web details. Benjamin has since kindly sent me some images.
‘…Partly inspired by the deceptively simple aesthetics of the Rietveld joint, I wanted to develop a functional yet elegant system that was flexible enough to utilise a range of common materials yet simple for a manufacture to produce and and individual to use.The resulting shape is a lattice based on identical pieces of square section aluminium tube cut on a bias at each end and is reminiscent of Escher’s mathematically inspired drawings.

I like the simplicity of this system, allowing the user to build self directed configurations using standard timber cuts. Thank you Benjamin.