Design Documents - Matthew Fuller, Introduction
In order to give some kind of background to the discussion for today, what I wanted to do was define some of the terms that we are using. We have this incredibly long subtitle to the event, but what I wanted to do was go through and define what those terms meant for us, and also to contextualize some of the issues of this event within a wider framework.
I would like to start with a quote from Carl Sagan who is talking about the relationship between science and technology in society. He says,
"We've arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements ... profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster." [1]
This seminar is in a sense an attempt to see what happens when people make a concerted effort to go beyond the terms of this disaster, to work with technology, and to work from the basis of technologies in a way that allows different kinds of understanding to come into contact with, to re-cast and to mobilize and mutate such technologies.
This is not to say that such considerations are necessarily new (see bibliography (+ extend back to the design methods debates of the seventies)). But that a concentration on the actuality of our conditions, the way people actually get stuff done, will hopefully prove fruitful.
Essentially, the question this event poses is how to get beyond the usual celebratory or hopeful fluff-speak about interdisciplinary collaboration. At the moment particularly in Rotterdam there is an enormous effusion of bullshit about the "creative industries". One of the key phrases of this creative industry is this idea of interdisciplinarity. So rather than assuming that we know what interdisciplinarity is, this event is about asking what interdisciplinarity means, what are the conditions of working in an interdisciplinary way, what does it mean for the kinds of knowledge and practices and skills that we have. One of the ways of doing this is to look in detail at specific examples, particularly those embodied in the documents around which the collaborations occur.
The aim is to make some kind of critical or practical advance on the manner in which some such collaboration is understood, to map how and why its works, why it goes wrong, collapses, continues despite itself, or even produces thrilling staggeringly brilliant results.
So today we're going to look at "case studies" of collaboration between design teams, between artists and programmers; between spatial planners and the users and makers of space; at the ways in which researchers, designers and users interact; to examine the politics of knowledge and work generated in and between different kinds of sets of skills and understanding, systems of ownership, production and how these in turn are exemplified by the different documents that they use and how they change the form of collaboration.
The event is split up into two groups; one is Nina Wakeford and Kristina Anderson, who will present directly after me. McKenzie Wark, Victoria Donkersloot, and Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori will be in the second group later this afternoon.
You will see from the range of speakers and their bio's that this brings together many different kinds of practices in different areas of work. This emphasis on documents and on empirical experience, with projects that are actually on the go, will enable us to clarify a lot of what is at stake.
To define the terms.
For us what is Media Design? Media Design is often configured as simply stretching a skin onto a set of pre-existing structures, sprinkling some pixels on top of a database to make it look nice.
For me however, design has possibly a deeper trajectory, which is bringing thought into productive relation to matter, to material, in this case to the stuff of computational and networked digital media. I say the slightly longer name of computational and networked digital media rather than new media because I think that it sets out the parameters for the field we are talking about.
If design is bringing thought into productive relationships to matter, what is thought? A tricky thing of course, but here a useful quote is from Foucault's discussions of the history of sexuality. He says, "Thought is that which permits a certain distance from a manner of acting or reacting, that which makes it possible to make the manner of acting into an object of reflection and to make it available for an analysis of it meanings, its conditions and its goals. Thought is the freedom one has in relation to what one does, the movement through which one detaches oneself, constitutes oneself as an object and reflects on all of this motion as a problem" [2]
So the question of thought in relation to material and thought in relationship to design is very much a question of subjectivity. Who you are. And it is very much about creating a field of invention, in which one can act. So it is to take a wider definition of what media design is. But this is not to say that thought is not neutral, it's not inherently 'good' or 'social', thought is also variegated, it makes alliances and stitches up deals with different kinds of knowledge, different techniques, with ideologies, buys into particular development paths or gets locked into contracts, non-disclosure agreements and jargons
Nevertheless, this coupling of reflection and experiment in relation to computational and networked digital media is key to the genesis of most of the work here today.
Now I want to look at this term Interdisciplinarity and also the term anti-disciplinarity.
Against that, multidisciplinarity. What does that mean? Multidisciplinarity is collaboration based upon people, or each collaborator remaining within their respective skill base. Multidisciplinary work often implies a layer of management to co-ordinate independent teams.
In a by now classic division of labor which works because its objects are well and truly known one often sees in digital media configurations such as:
- user
- content providers
- interaction designer / information architect / artist
- programmer / scripter
- system administrator
Interdisciplinarity on the other hand involves an idea of going beyond these limits and mutating them. Roland Barthes suggested in a, quite well known discussion of text,
"What is new and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity, which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively ... when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down ... in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation." [3]
Interdisciplinarity, in the way that Foucault describes thought, is something that has to escape itself in order to occur, interdisciplinarity is also this moment where you're faced with a problem or a set of things that need to be done which mean you have to get out of your own head and skin to find out what exist between you and the problem, and other people involved in the same problem. Interdisciplinarity is the creation of a third kind of practice, which is neither: a number of times over the past few decades, it is a field that has been referred to as a Third Culture.
A classic example of an interdisciplinary field, that stretches from the 'hard' sciences to cultural analysis and digital art practices is Cybernetics.
Now this other term, anti-disciplinarity is to take the question not of multidisciplinarity with its fixed borders and demarcated crossing points, but of transdisciplinarity as its starting point. Given present social and especially ecological conditions, which themselves demand the transcendence of knowledge relations based upon splits and upon specialisms and their interleaving with power relations the ability to 'question everything', to call all of reality to account is as much an existential necessity as a creative one. This is a question of mobilizing intuition as much as analysis, a scepticism that realizes something must yet be done.
By anti-disciplinarity, I do not mean that what Nietzsche called the "terrible consequence of 'equality'", that, "finally, everyone believes he has the right to every problem", [4] that everyone has the right to speak about everything with equal weight, but that if you can mobilize enough momentum, enough discipline, which can be psychic as much as intellectual or practical, then divisions of labor can be over-run.
So in all the projects under discussion we are looking at cases where people have to find ways of working outside of their own skin. Where all practice involves some kind of mixture of learning, knowing, finding, doing and inventing outside of ones 'expert' area of knowledge, while at the same time connecting to the people and the processes one is collaborating with.
What is collaboration? A hidden question in the subtitle of this event, 'mapping interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary work in media, software and society' is the question of what kind of work are we talking about? That of free peers ardently joining together to realize a mutually dreamt of project? Yes, sometimes, it happens, so that is part of what we're talking about. But even in these cases there are kinds of asymmetry, of skills, of time, of experience, of resources and so on.
Asymmetry between actors in a project is not something that is necessarily negative. For instance one can see p2p networks as leveraging maximum collaboration with minimum input. Equally, the many eyeballs approach of Free Software works from the way in which many people are able to develop a project by the accretion of many small improvements.
The production of different kinds of productive asymmetries can also be extremely useful as well as a problem. And it is also emerging in media design as something that if very much leveraged within design that is intuitive, design that is distributed, and design that is about making new relations between pre-existing elements, especially in computing environments that are piped together and reformulated. However today we will also see problems about asymmetries of skill and the different kinds of problems that can bring up.
Perhaps the question of how to engender systems, which work from the basis of from each according to their ability to each according to their needs, becomes increasingly something we can taste as far as digital media is concerned, especially in the field of distributed design.
I wanted to show this image of a peer-to-peer client, Azureus, a BitTorrent client. You can see that this image shows the network from a number of different perspectives, as you are actively involved in the network. The central figure is your client; the others are the clients that are connected to you. This is a dynamic image, and you can really sense that you are a part of this network that is shifting films software, files, and music, around the network, live. There are different ways you can interrogate your connection. You can find out different statistics about the network and it is an interesting form of design that makes clear the kind of collaborations that occur within BitTorrent.
I think this question of how to visualize what is going on in these networks is very interesting.
At the same time, asymmetry of power is something we need to recognize as effecting possibilities for collaboration. For instance, in recent months debate has surfaced in a number of places about whether graduate students should be bloggers. [5] Apparently, according to at least one commentator, a professor from Harvard University, discussing things online, including their working life, might 'hamper future prospects'. Blogs and other such systems which allow people to aggregate information and analyses of it are, amongst other things, a form of collaboration, but they are also inserted into class structures and embedded into wider systems which often make people pay too high a price for thinking openly.
Such considerations are not inherently something new. In his discussions with programmers laid-off by IBM in the 90's the sociologist Richard Sennett found that "people in this high-tech company rarely put on-line their judgments or criticisms; they wanted to leave no traces for which they could be held accountable". [6]
In a working world in which one is constantly admonished to be creative, to be 'refreshingly honest' and to express oneself but in which one is also embedded in power structures, something has to give. At the same time, the experience of a number of our students is that such sites have been a significant way to mobilize interest and involvement in their projects. Involvement that is far more real than some anxiety-induced conformism. Equally, judging by an ICM poll in the UK last week [7] which showed the rather unlikely looking figure that one third of people under 25 had some form of personal content available online, the sheer scale of the participation in presenting content online either makes such negative effects impossible to manage, ludicrous to envisage or shows how irrelevant to emerging knowledge practices parts of universities have become.
Similar kinds of things could be said about critical thought in design, or to some extent in electronic art, collaboration, which also involves pointing out problems, making difficulties available to people to think through is not risk free in situations of asymmetry of power. And these questions about what kind of forces collaboration exposes itself to as well as those it unleashes will inevitably turn up a number of times through these sessions.
So the last thing I'd like to clarify is, what are documents? In the drawing game Exquisite Corpse, favored by early Surrealism as a way of accessing the uncanny, a sheet of paper is folded and passed between players. Each stretch of paper between a fold corresponds to a section of a body, head and shoulders, chest and stomach, loins and upper legs, shins and feet are filled in. The paper is passed onto the next player. The next player cannot see what the previous player has drawn. Small marks running from one side of the fold to the other indicate where the continuity of body parts is required. The next player takes up the drawing from these points. However bizarre or poetic the work done within the folds might be, the funniness or poetry of the results depends on their chimerical conjunction: those small lines where work must begin are key.
Interdisciplinary work, or work that attempts to use one form of knowledge to achieve resonance or results in the materials usually associated with another has a similar set of qualities. Technologies provide entry points instead of such marks. These might also be obstinate, requiring work, answering only to particular codes, voltages and connections. Simply hooking the parts together doesn't guarantee results. Knowing where they might be found, learning ways to trick them into receptiveness conjoins many kinds of skill. Knowing how and where to make such marks, so that others can pick up the work, progress with it on the next stage is key to effective work. The various marking points, putting in place the moments of transition from one kind of work, one kind of technological embodiment to the next.
For instance with the BitTorrent client, the reason why there is the possibility to make these clients is because of API's, which sit on top of in relationship to BitTorrent, but configure the system differently. This question of marks is not just a question of protocol for poetic collaboration, it is also very much a technological question of how do you make things available to others you work with.
In anthropology these elements, these marks or shared points of connection, are often referred to as Boundary objects, documents, things, ideas, words that provide a common point of articulation. Nina [Wakeford] will speak more about this later in her paper, but it is worth flagging this concept and what it refers to, the things that move in between the different people involved in a project. As we move through the different presentations, keep an eye out for the different marks or boundary objects.
I would also say, that each marking, each entry point provides its own kind of opportunities for an 'exploit' a hackerly use of some bug or security flaw enabling one to enter a system, to reinvent it or break from an expected path.
Now what I hope will happen is that the few small remarks on terms I've proposed here will themselves get used as such marks, or as boundary objects for a discussion that we will have to day. Most importantly, I hope they'll get hacked and improved by the people whose presentations follow.
So I would like to thank you for coming today and hope you will all take time to join in the discussion that we will have.
1. Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World: science as a candle in the dark, Random House, London, 1995
2. Michel Foucault, cited in Paul Rabinow,Anthropos Today, reflections on modern equipment, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2003
3. Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, in, Stephen Heath ed., 'Image, Music, Text', Fontana, London, 1977
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Will To Power,trans Walter Kaufmann, Vintage, New York, 1968, §860
5. see for instance: Caleb McDaniel, The Blogging Graduate Student http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/10109.html or Rebecca Goetz, The Tribble Fall-Out, and what we can do about it, http://rebecca-goetz.blogspot.com/2005/09/tribble-fall-out-and-what-we-can-do.html
6. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character, Norton, 2000
7. Owen Gibson, 'Young Blog their way to Publishing Revolution', The Guardian, 7th October 2005, http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,16559,1586891,00.html