Design Documents - Nina Wakeford

Nina Wakeford

Nina Wakeford: Thanks you very much. While I am doing my technical setup, could you all get out your set of keys? Your house keys or whatever keys you have with you. If you have more than one set, or more than one genre of keys you might want to get both sets of keys out, or maybe three sets, I don't know how many you have.

Thank you Matthew [Fuller] and Anne [Nigten] for providing such an interesting topic for today, and also for the whole crew here for bringing me over to talk to you. I wanted to start my discussion where Matthew left off, which was thinking about boundary objects. I wanted to think about the object-ness of things like keys. Keys have been used as a boundary object, or in other terms a "inter-professional hyperlink", by Ksenija Napan, who did work about how people conceived the boundaries between home and work. What she found out was, for many people their keys, if you start discussing their keys with them, the keys reveal the way they cognitively divided their home life and their work life. For example, many people who had completely distinctive ways of separating out their home and their work lives have two sets of separate keys, or keys that actually came apart.

So I would like you to take a minute to look at your keys. And think about how many keys you have, you know is it a very heavy set? The tech support over there had a massive set of keys this morning when I came in: MASSIVE, probably about thirty keys. I've got four keys. I've got a key to my house, I got a key to my bike lock, and I've got a key to a car, which is very interesting because I don't hold a British drivers license.

Lets think about the boundary object-ness of keys and what they reveal about social life. This is what I am going to start off with, not just as keys as an object...

Don't put them away, your going to do an experiment. Yes, oh God!

So keys are a boundary object not just because they tell a lot about ourselves, but they also show the potential for linking different kinds of discourses, for instance like collaborative practices. Ksenija Napan talks about keys, because she says not only, say to a designer or an artist, is their object-ness important; we can think about the shape of the keys, their aesthetics, we can think about ordering, we can think about how you design the next generation of keys; electronic keys; hotel key cards, which kind of link to ATM cards, cash point cards, all of those kinds of genres of items. But also through thinking about keys, or through introducing keys, say in a design meeting as a boundary object, we start to be able to talk about discourses and ideas, say between divisions of home and work. About perhaps family or social relations, about who gets to have keys, which keys do you allow your children to have, which do you allow your mother to have. Does your mother have a set of your house keys? Does one of your children have a set of the house keys? Who has sets of your house keys in fact? Perhaps you need to consider that.

In discussing boundary objects I wanted to start off with an object that we already have. I would like to move on to a definition of boundary object that kind of gets a bit more technical than where Matthew started out. [Susan] Leigh Star [and James Griesemer], in her very famous work about boundary objects in the late "80s, said "boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs, and the constraints of several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites." So, I as a sociologist might relate to keys as indicators of social relationships, you, as lets say an industrial designer, might relate to keys in a particular other way. Yet they are robust enough for both of us to have a conversation and maybe collaborate about issues of home, or work, or access, privacy, intimacy, and so on.

For the experiment, I would like each of you to put your keys in one of these pots.

Put them in Matthew, where are your keys, put them in there Matthew! Here I'll put mine in too.

The meaning of these pots of keys, hopefully will become clearer as I carry on talking. But already what I want to do is get between objects and the object-ness of objects; the reading of objects, just as we read documents, to ideas about collaborative processes and what we can do with social relationships in the collaborative process. That is where my talk is heading. I want to move from an idea of objects and boundary objects to boundary processes. I will do that through taking examples of my own work from INCITE at the University of Surrey, but also exploring more social and cultural theoretical angles.

Starting off with these boundary objects. The way that its been used in the science and technology studies literature is very much to think about items like visual representations that form the social glue in designing collaborations. Katherine Henderson, talks about engineering drawings, as boundary objects; things which can be passed among teams, can be flexible and yet made concrete through CAD or CAM systems that have particular local meanings, for example if this image on the screen did not have its particular labels would you exactly know what this diagram actually did? Who would know or who wouldn't know? But Henderson also talks very importantly about the way that diagrams not only become social glue, but become ways in which people are encouraged to follow a particular work process.

Those of you at all familiar with science and technology studies will know that the literature in science and technology studies is not only about the concept of boundary objects but also how they function...

Thank you very much, where is the other box? Has someone kept it? Could I have it up here? Thanks very much. Great, wow, there are a lot of bands. Oh it's hip in the Netherlands. You see, some quick sociology here.

So, Latour, Bruno Latour in particular talked about how boundary objects and objects that circulate around scientific collaboration teams have inscriptions related to them. Inscriptions are ways of making things that happen in labs into polished visual representations. For Latour, inscriptions are images extracted from the laboratory that appear later, say in published journal articles; clean re-drawn and displayed as figures in support of a text: the journal article. Inscriptions are mobile, presentable, readable, combinable and mutable.

For Henderson, talking about engineering diagrams, and Henderson is very much more interested in the process of engineering design, she moves on the idea of inscriptions to conscriptions. She said, for science often the inscription of the laboratory practice, drawn out in lets say a diagram of how a molecule or reactor is supposed to work, ends up as a text. It ends up as a figure supporting a text in a journal article. Katherine Henderson points out that it is important to distinguish when something like an inscription is then supposed to move on to build something else. So in engineering, for an engineering plan or diagram it is then supposed to be a call to other actions. Something is supposed to be built out of the diagram.

Henderson uses this word "conscription devices" to refer to the objects and artifacts and drawings, sketches, or computerized drawings, that "enlist group participation, and are receptacles for knowledge created and adjusted through group interaction and aimed towards a common goal." (Henderson, 1991)

With that in mind I did a nice little diagram of the talk. Here we have something that I will be making in the next 25 minutes. So the diagram shows introduction, I've done that, I've started off with the boundary objects, and then it gets a bit messy because I want to start discussing these ideas in conjunction with one another. I want to talk about the inscription and conscription, I also want to talk about design culture and interdisciplinarity, I want to make a distinction, which I've already tried to do, between object and process. I want to discuss the work I do in my own research group, INCITE, I want to provoke ideas, but also at the same time want to feed into all of this, through maybe the INCITE work, the idea of queer theory, feminist theories, and how critical theoretical work can feed into all of this.

Even through this very simple diagram of my talk you realize, a simple reading, or giving this to someone, would not necessarily help them build my talk out of it. So design diagrams, design documents, visual representations always have this local and processual and contextual nature.

Lets think about the work that I've done in INCITE, as an example of moving from objects to ideas of process. I want to discuss a three year Intel funded study on ubiquitous computing we did at the INCITE Research Lab, which conclude one year ago. In this study we were charged to think about the different ways in which location was consumed in the process of mobility around London, and especially thinking about how technology could fit into that.

If anyone has been to London recently and have done a visual ethnography, you will notice that if you walk around and look at these telephone boxes, you'll see signs on them that say things like, "check your email here" or "emails gone street". Signals perhaps if you were just a visual ethnographer, that you can access your email anywhere, that in fact the British population actually are accessing their email in phone boxes, and that this may be illustrates a lively public culture of email access.

Yet when a group of my students and I hung out around these phone boxes we found no one was using them to check their email. The phone boxes have key pads, and the common experience was, people going in, opening the door, looking at the key pad and say "shit!", shutting the door and went on to try to find a regular phone box. Because what they wanted was to make a phone call, even though all over these phone boxes there are signals that you should be doing your email there.

What we were trying to do is moving away from this formalized practice of thinking what is supposed to go on if you were doing a simplistic, symbolic reading of British urban culture, through to the mundane vernacular practices of things like wall chalking, of signaling different kinds of WiFi networks. And it seemed to us certainly at the beginning of the project that this is what was happening, a disjuncture of the reading of the symbols of access to the internet and actually what was going on. We wanted to investigate that.

The way we investigated was to look at one bus route that ran through London, the number 73 bus route, which runs from Victoria Station in the south of central London, with its influx of people from Gatwick Airport as well as southern stations from the south coast, through all the boroughs of Westminster, Camdon, Islington, Hackney, and Harring[gale?] right through to a much more deprived area of Tottenham in the north east of London. In doing this, what we were trying to do was think about how mobility itself could create a sample for a sociological, but also collaborative work.

In designing this study I was inspired by a cultural geographer, I suppose, called Francios Maspero who'd written a book called Roissy Express in the 1980s, I believe. In that book what he'd done is, with a photographer go to every stop of one of the Paris [Aire Bever] lines got off with the photographer and done a little cultural geography with photos of each train stop. I thought wouldn't it be interesting to actually use that as a way of sampling the city but with technology in mind. It was very important for us, and here is where the processes of queer and feminist work comes in, to think about different kinds of populations through which the bus traveled. For example Islington is a much more rich area with quite a bit of new media culture compared to a place like Hackney, which is the home of not only a large Muslim and [G]ay population, but also Turkish and Kurdish asylum seekers. The bus route goes through traditional Hasidic Jewish areas and through to a very strongly Afri-Caribean area of Harring[gale]. Thinking about notions of diasporic identity, of marginal identity was absolutely vital as we were capturing movement through the city.

How did we end up translating this work. Here again we get something that you would call a design sketch. This is a sketch done by Phil Brook who was one our collaborators at INCITE, and he went through an interesting process listening to our work, this sketch on the screen was made a couple of years before our blogs hit the headlines, and he started thinking about the process of what he would sketch, how he produced this design sketch, how he produced this kind of boundary object for us to discuss, in the course of our collaborative meetings.

What was particularly interesting for us about that process was, we expected as researchers that we would give our report to him and then he would do his sketch. There was somehow this notion that we were the researchers and we would do our research, give him a report, some sort of feedback, a PowerPoint, and then he would create his object. What instead happened, and this would be more familiar to those who are more involved in design processes, was that as soon as we started talking, he started sketching out ideas. I could see some of the students say, "wait we haven't got to the conclusions yet." Why is he starting this process of design? Right away we had to re-think the way in which collaboration might take place through this type of fragmented process. Rather than the idea that a complete object, and object of research, a concluded object of research would be transferred into some object of design.

I have also written else where how these grey boards, grey foam sticky boards for messages, have become boundary objects in the INCITE studio. And you can see at the bottom of one of those slides some of the previously mentioned design sketches. The way in which these grey boards are used is to start to encourage the researchers, including myself, to produce visual knowledge and perform visual knowledge, about sociological research, in reflection of some of the design processes of our collaborators. These grey boards are quite interesting because they don't act as static objects, even though we might take photos of the locations where we were researching and put them up, for instance a gay pride festival or a Hasidic Jewish area, or a Turkish internet cafe. These items can't just exist. They have to exist as something which is performed; a process, and the meaning of them emerges as we discuss them, as we touch them, as we move around the pictures, as we actually engage with them, as objects as well as processes.

We also have taken our bus study into the heart of Intel, and run meetings and collaborations with staff at Intel, in this case at Hillsborough, Oregon in the U.S., particularly with the peoples and practices research group. Here what you see on the screen is some of the Intel folk having an in depth look at the bus data that was generated in our collaboration, including some origami boxes, which we encouraged them to build. The origami boxes included in them data that we gathered from the bus study, but was only revealed when you started folding the origami box. You could only tell who said what and how the inside and the outside of the bus related by actively engaging in folding the box together. And this again became another, not only boundary object, the origami box, but a process of engaging people.

Second example. Recently we collaborated with the Royal College of Art, interaction design course to bring together students from sociology and interaction design, on an intensive week long project where the designers and the sociology and social research students had to work together thinking about design responses to social issues. Largely generated from the sociologists research. So you had, for example, a team that included an interaction designer and a researcher looking at notions of Greek-ness, and Greek memory across London.

They came up with and idea of a playing board across London where you could think about Greek identity and where it existed in London. What was interesting for them was how they moved to this kind of object which could be discussed by sociologists or interaction designer from their joint field of work. Doing joint field work I think is a really interesting way to get within the process of collaborative practice. What the pair did was, they spent some time going to Greek and Turkish cafes in the Greenlanes area, and asking, when they went into a cafe, where is the center of Greek community London. And every time they went to a center of Greek community, in these cafes, the people that worked their would say, "oh it's not here, you want to go to this next cafe", and so they went onto the next cafe and at that cafe the people there would say "oh no, you'll find it at Dimitri at the next cafe", and so they went to the next cafe, and by the end of the day, not only were they very full on very good Greek food, but they also had undertaken to go through the process of endless displacement of this final answer of where is Greek-ness. And in this image is one of the resolutions they came up with in thinking through this process. So as it says, it could prevent interviewees from thinking of a map as a fixed entity.

Another fascinating project was a collaboration between a graphic designer and researcher who'd done work on racism in Mexico amongst Mexican woman. The notion that people or women in Mexico themselves under went a discourse of racism and discrimination in relationship to each other. They developed this idea of interactive beads, which were related to ideas of shame, ethnicity, racism and so on, but you actually interacted with them. Again it is not the objects here that I want to focus on, even though they could act as boundary objects to other conversations, it's the design process through which they went, sometimes very tricklely to think about this kind of partial resolution of the problem.

Thirdly, a collaborative team of students who were thinking about teenagers body image, came up with this design proposal called Mirror Mirror. Designed as a changing room mirror the girl sees both her reflection and words which suggest how she thinks about her body. This is another idea of bringing together three years of field work, of doing interviews with teenage girls, into something that might be engaged into an interactive design process.

Now I end with this sketch, because in its mid-point of the collaboration, about half-way through the week produced a rather interesting sketch. And this is a sketch not of the solution but instead about the process. This team kept trying to come up with something, the designer in particular, kept thinking I need something to visualize the process, and they came up with this idea of the Feedback Bagel. They wanted something that is thought provoking, and I have know idea why that is the cheese, iconographic, disposable, dynamic, detailed but simple. And this in a way is quite interestingly linked to the diagram, but also to emerging ways of working.

In thinking about these process I want to expand on that notion that Katherine Henderson talks about the conscription device, but talk about these boundary objects as involving boundary process. In this case at the RCA [Royal College of Art], the tensions between the social sciences and the interaction designers and how they resolve those, but yet how tensions remained, and how that tension became productive for thinking through things.

So boundary objects or processes, what is possible? I think we have to think back to the cultural norms of design practices, and Matthew was eluding to this before, and specifically the social and structural constraints of design practices. If we think about an anthropology of design practice we might notice that the particular norms of collaboration designers, certainly in Britain from foundation courses, are told that you are going to have to collaborate to be a designer. But also this notion that designers have a relationship to, if not a direct investment in some ideas of marginality of the avant-garde. There is also a pragmatic responsiveness to industry or national agendas, whether that is something about creativity, whether it is something about creative industries, whether it is about European regeneration money, and perhaps most controversially, and maybe some people disagree with me, is what I would call a re-inscription into normativity. And I am thinking here of some work done by Angela McRobbie in the UK about fashion designers and fashion design students, and how many of them spend a lot of time trying to observer and use very radical cultural agendas of street style, whether that is through marginal ethnic populations or sexual cultures and so on. And how they try and bring it back into their work in fashion design. But, fundamentally how many of the critical elements of discourses found on the street, is brought back into the much more conservative language of fine art once it comes back into fashion practice.

So I think there is a re-inscription often of this idea of marginality into normativity in a lot of the design practices especially as it is taught and maybe as it is practiced. So if that is the case I think we need to develop some kind of politics of intervention explicitly understanding how and where we intervene. With boundary objects we could intervene, we could create and distribute them. We could try and develop something like a gay-dar, we could give our students a gay-dar project. We could produce a radar for gay people, you know try to figure out how you could tell heterosexism. You could try and create around the idea of objects. But I think equally interesting and maybe some what more pragmatically possible is how we intervene in boundary processes. How to bring in social structural issues from say queer or feminist studies.

I would like to discuss two examples. Firstly... and they are both from American theorists and that itself needs to be discussed but I'll come back to that. Firstly is the work by Lauren Berlant about the changes in the public sphere. Lauren Berlant has the idea that we are engaged in a process of public-ness, which is about public intimacy. And what she means by that is that our notion of the intimate sphere has become very mixed up with the public life of the American nation. Think Oprah, think talk shows where people confess their most private intimate moments to the nation. And often how they are staged so the talk show host makes it clear that they haven't even told their friends and yet they are telling the nation. There is this public intimacy which maybe relates to therapy culture, a kind of psycho-analytic move in American culture.

All things that Berlant suggests means the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. Instead of acknowledging struggles of wider social groups, a national politics in the states depends on an idea of nation whose survival, the nations survival depends on personal acts, the family, normal reproduction meaning amongst heterosexuals, marriage: heterosexuals, and a kind of personal morality.

With this in mind, Berlant then talks about the rise of public intimacy. In the process of collapsing political and personal spheres into a world of public intimacy, "a nation made for adult citizens", she says provocatively, "has been replaced by one imagined for fetuses and children." If you think about all of the reproductive rights battles, the battles about same sex marriage, the battles about all of those kinds of issues of intimacy, sexuality, and citizenship, Berlant is referring to that kind of network of relationships.

Now you might be asking, why on earth, how on earth is this related to a collaborative design process. The reason I am bringing it up here is because that linkage becomes unthinkable. If you think about my question of how we intervene with boundary processes, how to bring in social structure issues we could start to imagine ways in which ideas about the public sphere, about the public-ness of what we do in collaboration could be perhaps queered through some of Berlant's ideas. It is not an easy task, I'm not suggesting a formula or anything other than a messy intervention, but I am thinking about if we take seriously ideas about collaboration, the public process especially with things like blogs, how do we queer it? how do we start thinking about public intimacy in our collaborations?

One way, which I have discussed before, is to stop thinking about a collaboration as a heroic act. A lot of reports about collaboration tend to progress with the following story: we got together, it was really hard to talk to each other, but we made it through, and look at what we've produced. And this is said in this type of heroic narrative. Maybe what we need to think about, is intimacy narratives within our collaborations. Maybe we need to actually measure them, not in terms of the dynamics of what was produced but in terms of the amount of intimacy, or not, generated. Why not think about metrics of evaluation through a queer social process.

Another idea might be, taken from Lawrence Knopps work on queer diffusion. This in particular I was thinking about in relation to documents and information, in that often the rule of thumb about ideas are disseminated through a team is one of diffusion. So someone has a good idea, and then somehow that idea gets spread in a linear way to other people in the team. I started thinking about what tools does queer theory have for us, what tools does this approach, that questions the heterosexual monolithic outlook on the world offers us in thinking about this idea? For this I looked to this cultural geographer, Lawrence Knopp who points out that "diffusion has been imagined as measurable and autonomous information transfers, hierarchical flows, sometimes derived from models or simulated behaviors". I know that from some of the sociological interventions of thinking about diffusion is, that you get a lot of people very committed to developing simulated models of social processes. But what Lawrence Knopp talks about is something a lot more messy and a lot more subtle. Knopp says, "why do we rely on such conservative and static models of how ideas move through space?" And we can think immediately here of the space of a collaborative team, whether it is virtual or face to face. For example, models which suggest that political resistance amongst queer people, his case study, begins in cities and then diffuses elsewhere. So there are some very interesting points that he makes about how the assumptions of lesbian and gay people, that a radical politic develops in London, New York, San Francisco and then diffuses to Croidan, places that are off the map of cool trendy and urban scenes. Knopp really questions that, and he says in fact, our whole notion of diffusion and queerness points out some quite challenging ideas. He says right at the beginning, that that model only works if we assume that a process like heterosexism has a linear autonomous logic in which it works. He says instead "heterosexism is an incomplete, incongruous, non-hegemonic, and spatially diffuse set of social relations and practices full of possibilities for subversion and reconfiguration", even in the provinces you can start to make much more interesting, and make productive for us an idea of counter flow or a spatial hybrid. Knopp interviews a lot of people who live in two places, they live in San Francisco and in rural Minnesota, and they say that they manage their identity by thinking through the hybridity of myself, and the hybridity of the way I transfer knowledge to both of those places.

The counter flows, those might be people who start off living in London or San Francisco and reject that kind of gay urban life and go and live in the country. Thinking and queering the notion of diffusion of information transfer it can give us even more tools to think about how knowledge moves through design teams. What would it mean to take seriously this idea of counter flows and spatial hybrids and the messiness, complexity and contextuality of collaborative process.

I want to finish with two things. First, the exercise with your keys and secondly some ideas. The reason I got you to gather the keys together was in memory of a game that was done largely in the 60s and 70s of parties where people would go home with other people's keys and other people's people. Do you know about this? So I thought that this signals the different ways that we can think about collaborative processes. So say instead of thinking about our own keys and perhaps swapping keys with a collaborator, we engage something which is much more fluid, which is a chance, and intimate experience and ask the question, do you really know who you are going to go and collaborate with? Do you really know how intimate you we be with them, when you actually want to come up at the end of this and grab your own keys and get away as fast as possible. This is a way signaling a move from the object-ness of this, not that they cannot tell things about social life, to a process, to concentrating on social relationships, to thinking through what is the social relationship of this 60s swinger party, how could that be brought into a conversation. I am not suggesting that we do collaborations of swinger 60s parties, although I am sure that someone will now go do that, but the idea is to concentrate on the social relationship and concentrate on different, maybe queerer, more non-hetero normative configurations of a social relationship within the design process.

As I've said the ideas and opportunity is to create inter-professional hyperlinks, which if you remember Ksenija Napan said these were inter-professional hyperlinks, to create those processes not just objects.

Another trick of the trade might be to use the rhetorics of method and methodologies to talk about intimacies and tensions rather than just logic and information transfer or knowledge management of documents. As well to draw on local cultures and theories of social movements and structural changes rather than relying on sometimes what I think is itself quite conservative issues of critical design or design noir alone.

Going back to my point about those being American authors, what would it mean to create a much more robustly European critical practice, not in response to that, but in response to our own ideas about what the public sphere is and what it might become.

Thanks.

Matthew Fuller: If there are any immediate questions that you have, or points of clarification...

Question one [Lev Manovich]: Well that was quite fantastic, but I do have some questions which are maybe more general and maybe I should wait, but I've become impatient. The notion about boundary objects, and you've provided some definitions and I am not very knowledgeable about it, but they sound very useful for us, but at the same time it seems like, let's start thinking about design practices or collaborative processes in this way, practically everything is a boundary object. A piece of paper, a computer file, etc, etc... so how do we limit this notion to make it more useful?

The second question is, in a way I think you were quite right to make fun of this heroic collaboration, because practically everything produced today in this mass culture is the result of cooperation between various professionals. Whether that takes place in a building, outside, in a commercial setting, or in a field, the only people who don't collaborate is the person who does the laundry, or a shoe maker, these artisan kind of tasks. So practically everything in the professional world involves interdisciplinary collaboration, sometimes with thousands of people. So shouldn't we somehow limit the notion of collaboration to some very particular situations which are different from normal everyday, creative work, which is by default collaboration?

Wakeford: Thanks Lev. Both of your questions are about limits. Boundary objects where do they stop, and collaboration where does it stop? I think perhaps what I did not make clear was, that is the reason why boundary objects should always go with the idea of conscription devices, because it is not only about the object of a key, but what gets to be used to organize work practices as well. So it is actually, say with an engineering sketch, might be as functional as a boundary object as the water cooler, but the engineering sketch goes further to organize a lot people's work. I think that is how I divide it up. Yes in terms of a practical boundary object the key may or may not end up functioning as useful for producing more work and that is why I introduced the conscription devices, which are being not only about the social glue but about programs of action.

Question one [Lev Manovich]: But how would a document produced in a management situation such as memo also be a boundary object, or is a boundary object a type of mobile inscription where in fact more than one person leaves with an inscriptions? Or is that not possible to say? Or would a boundary object also be something like a document in which more than one person inscribes something?

Wakeford: I am not sure you need to actually put anything onto paper. But I do think that it organizes work in a particular way. There are some sketches that get taken up by a design team and some that maybe don't, or some objects that become iconic of a particular design process. Certainly I've engaged in design collaborations where something which doesn't seem at the outset to be an object comes to represent our whole process. We can't necessarily at the outcome decide what that is, but I do think, going quickly to the second question, isn't everything full of interdisciplinary and professional collaboration? I think that is absolutely right, and I think one of the challenges of this kind of approach is to start focusing on the boundaries. I first trained as an anthropologist and a lot of my early reading was about how ideas of pollution get defined. One way to think about interdisciplinarity is who is in, and who is out? And where do the boundaries get defined around a team. That gives us someway to think about different kinds of interdisciplinary design practice. For example, are the dimensions of interdisciplinarity defined by the local state authority, these are all of the people that have to collaborate. Or are they somehow defined by the limits of funding? Are they defined by the identity politics, "our team must be all women", there are lots of different kinds of dimensions, I think they themselves exist in tension and at a very productive root for a study of interdisciplinary design collaboration would be to just start off looking at breaches of boundaries between the teams.

Question two [Anna Nigten]: Can you explain a bit more about what you mean with intimacy acts, because that can be interpreted very broadly...

Wakeford: So what I mean by the range of intimate acts?

Question two [Anna Nigten]: Yes.

Wakeford: I think for me the ideas about intimacy in a collaboration team has come up several times as one collaborator who talked about driving between two points and a certain song coming on the radio and him wanting desperately to ring his other design collaborators because he knew that that was his favorite song. And there is a kind of transfer of affect or emotion that I think is quite interesting in producing certain kinds of social relationships within the design team. Maybe that could be included in repertoire of intimacy.

Other kinds of repertoires of intimacy might be shared experiences or shared activities outside the main design task. I think that the ways in which intimacy becomes defined would be highly localized to each design team and the cultures of that design team and also involve relationships of power. Matthew brought up the idea of asymmetry, and I don't want to suggest that these intimate acts are all symmetrical. I think they do involve ideas of power and ideas of who is doing project management, what kind of radical or queerer intimacy is allowed?

Question three [Mackenzie Wark]: I share Lev's point, if I understand it correctly, and that is all objects are boundary objects. That every relation produces an object, but it seems to me that there is one type of boundary object that trumps all others and those are the ones connected to property, of which keys would be a fabulous example. And indeed the very expression of the object refers directly to property as a kind central category. And there are clearly centers and peripheries but they are defined for us. That is not something that we get to control.

Wakeford: I think that is absolutely right, one relationship that could define boundary objects would be notions of value, that would be a way of carving out a field or where the value is then related to property. That is exactly what I am trying to get at, these ideas of defining boundary objects through other theoretical vocabularies, whether that be value, or intimacy, whether that be power and so on, and thanks that was great that you brought that up.