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Design Documents, mapping communication in interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary work with media, software and society

This is a full transcription of all presentations and discussion at the Design Documents symposium, Rotterdam, 13th October 2005

How do interdisciplinary teams communicate in media design and electronic art? If they do communicate well, what are the ways that artists, designs, programmers, engineers, and those they work with, such as users, discuss their ideas, clarify problems, and find results that enhance their work?

In the developing area of social software for instance, how could a social network draw up a brief? How does media design itself create tools and materials for such work? Are there new opportunities for the creation of design documents that come out of networked and computational digital media? How do the cultures of open and distributed creativity and production experienced in Free Software and other areas allow us to see other forms of collaboration?

Key to the theme of the symposium is the discussion of boundary objects within projects, devices, documents, sketches, plans, briefs, models, prototypes, mock-ups, experiential accounts and so on. Under the magnifying glass: examining existing design documents; creating typologies; vocabularies, in-project vernaculars; boundary or shared objects such as drawings, diagrams; in-code comments; divisions of labour; designing speculative research; mapping interactions; resisting or working with multiple economies of time and resources.

== Anne Nigten, Opening Remarks ==
Anne Nigten: I am happy to welcome you to the Design Documents seminar. This seminar is a part of a much larger research traject at the V2. We initially started the research at the V2 Lab, simply because we noticed that many collaboration processes were running into the same difficulties, partly because of the confusion, the lack of knowledge and the challenges of communicating among different disciplines. These are the problems we've experienced between people with very different backgrounds and very different work methodologies. Slowly, we have been involved in an ongoing investigation with different partners in various types of research trajectories. The outcome of our investigations, take shape using various formats such as workshops, seminars, and discussions. As a result, this investigation has lead to some beautiful collaborations for which two collaborators are participants of todays seminar, Kristina Anderson and Matthew Fuller. In this collaboration we realized the Worn workshop with students of Matthew Fuller's school, the Piet Zwart Institute, and the hardware and software designers from the V2 Lab. The collaboration strived to create a type of boundary object; technology was used to create a boundary object to enable people from different backgrounds to come together in a type of neutral space. We carried out the collaboration in the context of the Multimedian Project, and this seminar today is also part of the Multimedian Project.

The Multimedian Project is a large research project which centers on the collaboration of people from different research centers in the field of human computer interaction, multi-media producers and scientific research in the field of sound and image recognition. The Multimedian Project is a national project, people interested can look it up online. It is Multi-Med-i-an with a single "n" at the end.

From that research I would like to briefly refer to this visualization; a triangle that we developed that I hope can help people to understand what is happening when we bring together the classical: alpha, beta, and gamma disciplines. In the visualization I very optimistically drew a circle in the middle, because I hope this is where people can meet here in this "in between space". The space which is not a particular discipline, but emerges as something special. The dots that you see represent the traces, or the migration of people coming from different backgrounds. What is intended is a "vanishing point", where all of the colors begin to fuse themselves together showing the process of multi-tasking. Now I would like to hand over the microphone to Matthew Fuller and he will talk a little bit more about collaboration, inter-disciplinary, activity, and interaction. Thank you.

== Matthew Fuller ==
[[Design Documents - Matthew Fuller, Introduction ]]

== Nina Wakeford ==

[[Design Documents - Nina Wakeford]]

Nina Wakeford: Director of INCITE in the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey. Along with colleagues at INCITE she is interested in the ways in which collaborations can be forged between ethnographers and those from other disciplines, such as engineering and computer science. She asks how critical social and cultural theory can play a part in the design process, including the challenges which feminist and queer theories pose to collaborative projects between designers and sociologists, as well as technology studies.
http://incite.surrey.ac.uk/

== Kristina Andersen ==

[[Design Documents - Kristina Andersen]]

http://www.lockergirl.com/
http://www.tinything.com/

== Q AND A, PART ONE ==
[[Design Documents - Q&A 1]]

== McKenzie Wark ==

[[Design Documents - McKenzie Wark]]

McKenzie Wark is Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at Lang College, New School University. He is the author of several books, most recently Dispositions and A Hacker Manifesto.
http://www.ludiccrew.org/

== Victoria Donkersloot ==
[[Design Documents - Victoria Donkersloot]]

Victoria Donkersloot	is a media designer from Rotterdam. She recently worked as the interface designer for the cultural file-sharing application Apnaopus,
http://apnaopus.var.cc/

== Dennis Kaspori / Jeanne van Heeswijk ==

[[Design Documents - Dennis Kaspori & Jeanne van Heeswijk]]

Dennis Kaspori / Jeanne van Heeswijk are collaborators on a unique spatial and social planning project, Face Your World. Using sophisticated custom software, children are engaged in a serious process of social-spatial decision making. Most recently, Face Your World has been a six month project to design a park in the Sloterplaas area of Amsterdam.
http://www.faceyourworld.net/
http://www.themaze.org/

== Q and A WRAP-UP ==
[[Design Documents - Q&A 2]]

== CREDITS ==

Transcriptions by Todd Matsumoto

This event is organized by:
Media Design Research, Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/
http://www.wdka.hro.nl/

and V2_organisation: institute for the unstable media
http://www.v2.nl/