User:Colm/RW

Position restatement

context

This text serves to restate my position within the themes of my research here at the Piet Zwart institute. These themes have been up to now: interfacings, tool access, craftsmanship, digital crafts, services - tooling & consequential products, need - services / specialists - responses, software issues, end user, modes of address, vendors, downstream, upstream, expertise, good practices. Establishing a position from which to be able to speak about these themes has been tricky. A lot of the debates included in these themes concern large demographics, groups of people that are refered to as 'the users', meaning pretty much everybody. I have felt somewhat uncomfortable about issuing comments on how I think these themes should engage with the general public because of this broad reach, and it's direct inclusion of general culture, general knowledge, and politics.

research field

Broadly speaking I am concerned about the propagation of digital/numerical cultures and practices in the impersonal top down mode of address they employ. More specifically, on our computers we now deal more and more with services, not programs. We have apps, not tools. In part I fear for the loss and appreciation of crafts, but mainly I fear that the opaque nature of the computer's proceedings ultimately means that the knowledge and doings of out machines becomes more elite than they should really be. I fear that —on a bigger scale than day to day computer use— it is dangerous to indulge in current practices of usability, user experience and user interface, because they put productivity first, but visibility of the behind the scenes actions last. If we, the common users, never are exposed to the ways the machines and programs work to effectuate the tasks we ask of them, we will be agnostic to the systems in place, ultimately making us blindly dependent of and on them.

position restatement

Over the summer break, I took on projects and comissions for which I had roles I knew from before joining the school program. Being a service provider for peoples digital/numerical needs or desires. The themes mentioned above are related, but my navigation though them has been intuitive and non structured (which may have been a reason for the difficulty of placing myself in relative discourse positions) and it has been necessary for me to revisit this position of providing a service to someone to see that this makes me the software vendor that I have so many issues with. I provide people with bundled tools and interface for them to accomplish the task they need to do, with the upmost productivity. I have, and maybe still am, contributing to making computers less understandable to people, by taking the position of an expert.

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