Design Documents - Q&A 1

Q&A: Nina Wakeford and Kristina Andersen

Matthew Fuller: What we'll do now is have a questions and answers period for both Nina [Wakeford] and Kristina [Anderson]. Does anyone have any questions or comments?

Question one [Matthew Fuller]: One question I have for Nina, in a paper you published I believe three years ago dealing with some related concerns, was how the kind of knowledge's you build up or questions you have from feminist and queer theory; how those questions integrate with the movement of anthropologist, ethnologist, sociologist and so on, people trained in disciplines that ask many difficult questions, how do these questions change when over the, lets say past 20 years as these disciplines have moved into corporations, where do these kinds of questions go? Do they disappear or how do they get rearticulated in the working practice of people who are trained to ask difficult questions, when they go into companies that are not places that you normally associate with difficult questions?

Wakeford: You mean do I get the Intel engineers to read feminist theory?

Question one [Matthew Fuller]: I'm sure they're doing that already! But can they do it publicly?

Wakeford: Oh, publicly. Um, it depends what you mean by public. I think one of the things that happen is that in doing this work you begin to shift away from a very simplistic idea of us and them, between us and industry. Certainly one of the interventions that have been made by Intel on my behalf is funding me. So for Intel publicly to be funding, certainly the first grant we got on ubiquitous computing, because in the literature review for that project there was material on notions of gay identity and feminist theory, and for Intel them to publicly fund that proposal I think was quite an interesting intervention from their part. The reason I say that you have to kind of shift your ideas of us and them is that the person in charge of funding at Intel is someone who has a PhD in cultural anthropology and vast knowledge of feminist theory. Having started off with being very shocked, as certainly some of my colleagues did, that Intel would fund a kind of study which was being conducted by someone who had her roots in queer theory, it became much more, not necessarily logical but understandable through the discourses of hybridity that although I wouldn't want to negate the huge power of the corporate mind set there are constant moments of subversion going on within corporations. These are not only opportunities for us but they are opportunities for people within corporations. I think one of the most dangerous things that we can do is persist in a kind of idea that places like Intel or even Microsoft are so monolithic that there are no cracks.

Question two [Caroline Nevejan]: This is a question for Kristina. Can you elaborate on the example you showed us from Whisper, how got from your research to a design with eight artists, and then to a final installation. You showed us the research and then suddenly there is an installation, but there were seven artist involved. How did you get to that point?

Anderson: The Whisper project is in particular a very complex process that went on for a long period of time. There was a huge amount of design documents being generated, and one of the issues that were happening was that not everybody understood all of the design documents. That meant that there were basically the workshops, and the drawings, the sort of cartoon like drawings of how the system worked, was actually also not only a way for us to understand how the issues might be received or what kind of other issues might be emerging, but it was also a way to communicate within the team. Because it was such a wide range of expertise that what happens is, for example, a specific design document for software could be read by everybody but the points where there might be a mistake or problematic meeting of software and hardware would not necessarily be that easy to spot for all of the people involved. In that sense we all did very low tech type of sketching and the workshops were actually acting as communication tools for the project itself. Does that answer some of your question? Because it is a really big question that you could write a whole book about.

Question two [Nevejan follow up]: Yes, but also you are dealing with privacy of personal space, referring to Nina's story about the re-inscriptive normativity, I mean there is a technical way that people work together, production team and timelines and so on, but was there also an ethical debate? How did that go? Or how was that influenced by the workshop.

Anderson: Absolutely, those workshops were actually about ethics. Really the subtext was to try to understand what we were about to do. In terms of just a basic level a question was: will people freak out? Are you going to be standing with an interactive installation where you'll have people coming out of it that you will need some sort of network to catch, after the experience? Particularly when you are dealing with bodies, you have to be prepared for the fact that audience members might have issues relating to body "stuff", that you might be triggering without knowing it.

If there is anything I learned from all of these types of processes is that you are opening by allowing people to contribute, but you also are taking responsibility for fairly complex stuff that might come out of it. Particularly ethics around privacy, I mean the telepathy experiment was entirely about that; we were really just there to see whether anybody would walk out, or refuse to play. These were also some of the goals of this workshop. Anything that you deal with, intimacy and privacy and trying to provide structures, whether done in net.art or whether you are working with blogs you are having to deal with a lot of stuff that is directly relating to this box of keys. It is about trust and about willingness to engage, but then it also means that for the person who is now sitting a meter away from their keys, but I also have the enormous responsibility to not violate everybody's trust. I am sure this is something that Nina is coming across as well.

I have had, in the past, projects that I've walked away from because I did not have the back up available to some of the issues that might come up. I had a particular project in England, dealing with teenage girls in a very poor part of London called Tower Hamlets. This project was a mobile phone SMS project and we were really trying to work with the psychology of peer counseling and narrative psychology, but we ended up not doing the project because we could not get a guarantee that by putting out a structure that would potentially be helpful to these extremely vulnerable girls, we could not get a guarantee that the structure would be maintained. So if you walk into a situation like that and give people something for three months and then you leave you are creating; you have a huge responsibility for the kind of chaos you might be leaving behind. Every once in awhile I think it is an artist's responsibility to say, this one I have a bad feeling about, I can't morally defend doing that so you walk away from certain things.

Wakeford: Often when issues like ethics come up in projects in University settings they get put into an institutional structure like an ethics board, they become experiments that have to be approved. Those of us working in Universities tend to get really irritated by a group of very conservative advisors saying this is not an ethical piece of work, and we feel constrained by that. But at the same time it also provides opportunities so that professional associations like the British Sociological Association has a code of ethics, which in some ways can help us, work with these issues. So if you are outside of that system or you don't feel you have a system, then you don't have the support of an ethics code to go to when you think about the consequences of what I am going to do. This has been a huge debate for many years in sociology about what happens when you leave and I think I am ambivalent about those codes of ethics whether they are sometimes a constraint or an opportunity for us to be resourceful. But the debate might be phrased in the wrong way. If we started talking in design collaborations right from the beginning about notions of reciprocity then maybe we could start from a different point rather than thinking there is an ethical component that comes up at certain points during a project that then has to be resolved. I think that is a framing that might move things along.

Question three [Anne Nigten]: Kristina, I am interested in your opinion about how over the last years we have experienced pretty much in line with the story Nina told us about the heroic issue of collaboration, I think I noticed that a lot of people take that even a step further and try to make interdisciplinarity as a heroic act. I think it is really important given the terms provided in the beginning by Matthew [Fuller] to also understand that a lot of these design and art projects are a combination of this interdisciplinary mixing of expertise with multidisciplinary models. For example hardware developers are trying to solve a problem and they don't want to be uprooted or confused through this whole interdisciplinary process, but they prefer, and I think you should respect them to work according to a multidisciplinary process. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Anderson: I agree. I think that there is absolutely no reason for everybody to attend every single meeting because then nothing would ever be done, especially not in big projects. What I hear you saying is the guy who is going to do the soldering really does not want to know about some of the theoretical theory behind the project. He just wants to know whether you really mean it when you say you want 54 LED's blinking in particular location or are you likely to change you mind. In my experience what often happens in the big projects is if you in reality have a multidisciplinary team and very often in the center of it you'll have one or two interdisciplinary people who are able to translate and able to sit in the middle of the project and say, when that guy over there is saying design he is meaning something different from when that guy is saying design.

One of the classic misunderstandings between designers and hardware engineers is when a hardware engineer overhears the designer, pointing to the object, saying "I've designed this thing". The hardware engineer takes that to mean, I drew the circuit board that makes this thing do whatever it is doing. And that is not the designer's intent at all. The designer is claiming no such thing. In fact the designer might not even know that there is a circuit board inside of the instrument. These misunderstandings can create enormous confusion. The issues that you are raising depend on the scale of the project. One thing that I try to do is work with smaller groups of people, and trying to be very clear. Rather than having these very big groups where everyone is a participant, have smaller groups and units that can work together at particular phases of a project. There is simply no need to have everyone involved from the beginning if it is not their area of expertise or their area of interest.

Question four [Calum Selkirk]: Nina, with regard to normativety and queerness I wonder if perhaps the nature of queer is something which is completely included and perhaps necessarily so. And dragging out this data is perhaps undermining or changing the kind of real life quality of it. Visibility is sometimes very important to change things. But there is also this... like Leslie Feinberg that kind of story is very brutal in its lived form but there is also this... it couldn't of happened without the context having been completely shit on and so undermined. And I wonder if bringing this into the discussions of here are these things for Intel to consider about technology, whether this is making things to accessible, while no longer being able to engage with it in a real life process type of way.

Wakeford: It is a really good issue. I think I draw on my own ponderings about this through the work by Joshua Gamson called Freaks Talk Back, and it is a study of sexual minorities on day time talk shows. He talks about the tight rope of visibility because he says in some way he himself feels conflicted; is it a good thing that these stories of not normal people are out there on TV. And people know that everyone is not of a certain ethnic and sexual culture, racial culture or class culture, or is it, as the first bit of your question seems to suggest, is it dangerous for those cultures themselves. I think that it does have that double edge to it, and for me the problem with the way of framing the argument the way I think you were getting ready to frame it is, that it suggests that A. I can perfectly translate those cultures into Intel and B. that they are so fragile that they will disintegrate or not keep going when I do so. That's part of it for me that maybe some of the models would suggest that they would be harmed more than they could actually resist it. Again the notion for bringing queer theory in, with its background in post-structuralist debate is that it does have that constant urge towards a deconstruction of its own terms rather than an idea that it is a whole that can be taken apart.

Question four [Calum Selkirk, follow up]: I think that lived experience is by its very nature inclusive. It is not something that... obviously you can look back at it and pull strings of data from that lived experience, but I guess what I was trying to suggest was that it is all to easy to fall into a pattern of becoming simply a string of data.

Wakeford: Oh, all right I understand a bit more. Your right, and part of my own move is to move away from this notion of experience which can be fed to anyone whether it is an academic journal or a design team from a hi-tech corporation, to notions of queering social structures. That is why thinking about the public sphere or about queer diffusion seems to me much more important in terms of boundary process and not necessarily presenting life stories of normative people, which I think you are absolutely right about those kinds of ideas, like processes being incorporated is a different type of dynamic. Is that a bit more an answer?

Question four [Calum Selkirk, follow up]: Yeah, and also the idea that then suddenly your watching TV, you could be watching commercial products directed towards you as a sort of non-normative individual or an outsider and that I am not saying it always works in this sort of way, but I think I am definitely skeptical and suspicious of psycho-analytic or sociological kinds of practices that essentially try to bring out all of this life process and make it publicly visible.

Wakeford: I think it is healthy to be skeptical.

Question five: I have a question for Kristina. You showed us your project of the children, you explained how it worked technically, but what are your goals and what are the conclusions? For instance when you get feedback and especially unexpected feedback.

Anderson: That project was really not a project with a capital "P"; it was really just a set of exploratory objects. In that sense it is more like a step in a process. What I was interested in doing, my "meta-project", is this meeting between tangible objects, computational or intangible concepts of data. When this is the kind of thing you are interested in the electronics, the technical capability, the naive physics of the electronics you are using to do this becomes incredibly important. Because these are the tools you have available.

Naive physics is actually a really good concept to look at, naive physics is a concept from artificial intelligence, and the idea is that there are two kinds of physics. There is the kind of physics that the people in university are doing, very complex and hard to understand. But then there is the kind of physics that you use to get out of your front door in the morning. So, being able to guess the weight of the door so that, upon opening it, you don't pull it back onto you head by using to much force. For example the glass, here on the table, without having lifted it I can sort of guess how heavy it is, and this is a combination of experience, having lifted similar glasses in the past. What I was looking for in this particular project was I wanted to do naive electronics. Because electronics for most people is a black box it is not clear how it works. And I wanted to see if a four year old would be able to develop some methods to interact with these objects that were based on a very rapidly generated experience.

Question five [follow up]: Is that the reason why you chose children? Because they can't, they don't know everything.

Anderson: Actually I thought so at the beginning, but one of the conclusions I've had is, I could have done this with anyone. Once you have made the cloths and made some decisions about sizing, I mean that is one of the things. The only reason why I didn't change to adults later is the cloths would need to be different sizes. But I didn't consider that when I chose the children originally. But also the reason to use the four year olds was an experience I had in previous installations, where whenever you are running an interactive installation you are normally in the space making sure everything is working and you get questions. The way it sort of works, while making sweeping generalizations, is that the adults will come in and they'll scratch their imaginary beard, and say to themselves, "hum Bluetooth". They'll then either want to engage in a technical discussion of how you are using the technology or want to know about the technology, and needing a tendency to be clever. That is perfectly fine, but I've had experiences where by accident I happen to have children turn up at installations that weren't made for them. And the way they engaged with the technology was very inspiring to me simply because they didn't think it was anything special. Nor did they think it was very valuable. At that age there is no concept of, "oh my God, this stuff is probably valuable". These kids treated this stuff really roughly. But that is what I want. This is some of the thinking, but in retrospect I could have done it with adults as well, because once you start playing, you play. This is the whole idea of gaming, that once you have suspended your disbelief, once you have decided yes I will play tag anybody will play tag. The issues of course is the step to make someone to take that decision is lower for a four year old than it is for an adult.

Wakeford: What I thought was interesting was that the skirt was valuable to everyone. That is very interesting for me in terms of learning about gender. As you said, the skirt was the item, and presumably very little self-conscious breaking on that process, for instance the boys wanting the skirt just as much.

Anderson: It is actually culturally specific depending on what country I do this in. I did it in England one time in Cambridge. And there was this little girl and she whispered to me, "let's make a pretend event." And I said, "a what?" She had to whisper it about four times and I still had no idea what she wanted. But it turned out she wanted to enact a wedding. So she very effectively sorted out the pieces of clothing into male and female and found the boy that she liked, and he was sort of roped into the act, and since I have a hands-off approach I just let them do it. But left to their own devices most children will just play and the boys will like the skirt as much as anything else. But the skirt has certain magic to it.

Wakeford: I just wonder what would happen if you did shift that to adults from that point of view.

Anderson: That is true, there is a lot more jokey, "hey look I'm wearing a skirt." Funny kind of thing, and that is what happens. More like are taking a photograph of me wearing a skirt sort of thing. You would probably have to find other objects related to adults in order to do the same experiment, but the cloths were originally just thought of as containers.

Wakeford: That reminds me of a project that we did with Ubicom in one of the workshops a couple of years ago where we did a mock up for people having to gain access to WiFi by doing fake breast feeding, because some of the women who'd just given birth felt very embarrassed breast feeding at the Ubicom conference in Seattle. So decided to extrapolate from their experience so anyone that wanted WiFi in our imaginary world would have to pretend they were breast-feeding. And that shifted some of the gender classing.

Anderson: I THINK THAT IS EXCELLENT!

Question six [Michael Murtaugh]: Speaking from a technical background, programmer by training, I find myself rubbed a bit the wrong way by something you said earlier. What got me, and this is for Kristina, I would like to challenge the idea that the guy who is doing the soldering is really not interested in all of the other stuff going on. It also struck me, when you mentioned XML coming into "fashion" and then becoming a dirty buzzword; I was really shaken as someone who holds XML very near to my heart.

[Laughter]

But seriously I find myself getting anxious and I realize that the problem with XML or when it becomes a buzz word is when it is completely divorced from what it actually does and why it might be useful. I was wondering if you have had experience working with technicians not in the five step process, in which the technician is somewhere at the end of the process, which is the thing that gets me very frustrated in my own practice, but instead an experience where the technicians, the solders, the sound technician, are in the process of actually writing the proposal to begin with?

Anderson: Yes. I should say that when I say something like this I am saying it from the point of view of somebody who has the soldering and the hardware happening from the first step. I would say that from my practice having everybody involved throughout the entire process and having very little distinction between the areas of expertise is my normal state of work. I've only seen it go wrong in a situation where particular people didn't want to play. And that example that I used was a reference to that. I am all for having everybody, including technicians, involved from the very beginning.

I am also very sorry I said bad things about XML, and I didn't really mean to. And what you've pointed out is exactly what I am talking about, that you take something that is unrelated, I mean XML is XML it is not necessarily related to a cultural debate. By making something a buzzword you take a word that someone might be working with and then you make it fashionable and that means that in a year they can't talk about their work unless they find different ways of doing so. It is a terrible thing. I am just as offended as anyone when this happens. It also happens to me only with different kinds of words. With certain projects I've made I feel like I can't really talk about them anymore simply because those words have been fashionable and become unfashionable in the meantime and now I have to wait for the words to come back into fashion before I can start talking about this particular area of work.

What I am saying is, I am not really saying anything against the words themselves I am talking about the tendency to make words fashionable without having addressed the word in any sort of thoughtful or thought provoking way at all. So I am saying something bad about the funding process and the structures within which we are supposed to work.

Question six [Michael Murtaugh, follow up]: Sorry, just to follow up, I am not concerned that you are saying bad things about XML, it is the fact that you actually use the word without relating XML to a meaning within the programming culture.

Question seven: Nina this is for you. You gave some good insights and strategies for interventions using boundary processes, I was wondering how what you've done in your work in the last few years has changed your working methodology and the methodology of your institute INCITE as well. It is one thing looking at the process of collaboration and giving insightful strategies for going forward but how has your work affected you wider methodology and research methodology?

Wakeford: Of course it has and one of the infrastructural features of this is; it is amazing how much you can get away with when you have funded research. When I first set up Insight and said I want this space, and I want the space to be configured in such a way, they said sure if you get money, meaning they thought I wasn't going to get it. But then I got the money and then they were like... "Oh". I was expressly told that there was absolutely no way that a person with a feminist and queer agenda would get money from hi-tech corporations and so they didn't think they had to worry about it. Then once it was funded they had to then go with the logic of the funding. In some ways at my most pessimistic moments I worry that without the funding it wouldn't of made any difference.

Since I received the funding, and I am generally an optimist, I think it has shifted things in smaller large ways at different moments within the institution. I think there is a space now for students, who don't feel the role of sociology, is to do social policy, to come and be in a space where more messy collaborations are possible. For students who are looking for places to go or ways of working which have to do with objects or artifacts, students who thought they might have to go to social research institutions to do with government policy, they now have a place where different ideas of collaboration are modeled.

For my own research practice this has drastically changed the way that I think sociology has dealt with technology and that is looking back at the different repertoires sociology has had, which are incredibly narrow for dealing with technology, such as computer cooperative work, and other models where sociologist have come and made specifications that designers have had to follow or take on board. I think the work we are doing at Insight has made me think about how far we are all in the theoretical mess together, and how far sociology as a discipline has to reflect that in its own conversations with itself. Often when I am talking about this work I am talking to interdisciplinary audiences but occasionally I am just talking to sociologist who may not have an investment into interdisciplinary work. I want to feedback the idea of sociology that things don't always end up in text. Perhaps that is a radical move for sociologist to think a bit like Kristina's move about the kind of participation being the practice and the outcome. So, to think, what happens if we collaborate with a design team and the end result for the sociologist would be a mobile phone or a piece of software, or a gallery exhibition. These are things I've been pondering. What happens if you change the tradition of evaluation away from journal articles towards a fine arts practice? Not to gain freedom necessarily but to follow a different logic let say of curatorial practice.

This can be threatening to sociology, and I've had people not show up to workshops I've run because they didn't want to get into "drama stuff" or "theater studies". But the fear and anxiety that is provoked around that also requires intense investigation, without getting too psychoanalytic about it.

Question eight: Hi, this is for Kristina, I was wondering did your objects for the dress up remain the objects, for instance a skirt. Or did it mutate in a way so that it was a skirt with a sensor, or was just a skirt that had a sensor in it? So that it was actually just another application to the device?

Anderson: What the situation is, is that the kids come in and play for an hour. Throughout that hour the experience of the objects change. As they first walk through the door the skirt is a skirt, and they want to wear it because it is fabulous. Then there comes a point where the skirt is a skirt with an odd sound and they want to investigate how that works, and then there comes a stage afterwards where the skirt is an instrument. And that is very interesting stage because if you think about it an hour is a very long time for four year olds. It wouldn't work if there wasn't an instrument stage where they actually play, you know the way you would an instrument. That stage is actually the longest stage. And this is where the age groups come in. The four year olds do not tend to treat the cloths as applications at all, but older children do. For example the skirt can become a very good Superman's cape, if you are will to live with the polka dots, and I would call that a transfer to an application stage, but that happens with much older children.

Anne Nigten: Okay thank you for the questions so far. If you have more questions please note them down and after the afternoon presentations we will have more time for questions and discussion. I would like to thank both Nina and Kristina and Matthew, thank you.