User:Colm/RW&RS-project-outline-0.1

First MMDC Project Outline Draft colm

Tentative Title

• Literacy as a dependency
• A continuation on dependencies
• Interface prison
• Digital freedom

Introduction

Observations on how interfaces might be deliberately trying to keep us away from the mechinic / machinic, from the process happening under the hood. With this project I hope to be able to find and explain the line between understanding software and using software. And the network of items that those topics pull in.

What are you working on now?

Collecting examples, and reading about interfaces, discourse networks, and control systems. Thinking about how to formulate this idea. Wondering how to speak about it.

What do you want your first project to be?

A foundation for the rest of my work here at PZI. I'd like to use this first project to go in head first into these questions I've been having, to hopefully manage to explain why I choose the tools I choose and why I think it is a pressing issue for media and design in general.

How do you plan to make it?

I hope to bring together some theoretical background to some writings, and illustrate them with some examples. Ultimately I would like to find a way to illustrate the contradictions and the irony of the issues in a visual manor (?) to slide items out of their context, as a metaphor, or explanation technique.

I'd like to start by acknowledging and making clear that software is exactly like any other cultural object, and that it rarely (never) is unidirectional. It is not innocent, and it lives inside a context that is very politicised so using it innocently is not possible.

Maybe the only thing that is left to us as a self definition method is exposing our day to day choices.

There is no innocence in choice. One is no longer allowed to make a choice blindly.

Why do you want to make it?

Because I feel it's a pressing issue for our little world of practitioners. Because I know I have these ideas, but I've never spent time on trying to express them properly. Because I want to be able to address these items now, and then grow the rest of my projects upon them. Because user friendly (read dumb) interfaces are more and more present in our lives, and that it's important to think about them now, before we get too far into their usage.

Who can help you and how?

Some tutors will have a more direct relation to these topics. Some less. I plan to use my tutorial time with the further removed tutors as people on who to test my ideas on. In a way they are also the people I'm trying to target: users of digital tools, who might not yet have thought of the relations between the choice of a tool and it's outcome.

Relation to previous practice

Relation to previous project in the non acceptance of tools as a finished objects. Relation to a thought process around tools to design communications.

• Drawing curved
• OSP
• http://colm.be/blog/index.php/posts/digital-freedom

Relation to a larger context

The larger context is probably why I think this is going to be a topic for me. I hate the fact that vendors of numeric items, software or hardware, take advantage in the lack of know how of most of their customers. In the distance is a relation to the current hot topic of privacy and the hidden proceeding revealed by Snowden. The same context applies to family members and close friends, who end up committing to branded products because of marketing strategies.

References

http://reader.lgru.net/pages/index/