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I sometimes feel like I see definition and classification in everything.
Sort of in the way Kathryn Shulz thought she was turning into the "crazy wrongness lady" as described in her TED talk, On Being Wrong
Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
I sometimes feel like I see definition and classification in everything.
Sort of in the way Kathryn Shulz thought she was turning into the "crazy wrongness lady" as described in her TED talk, On Being Wrong
The recently opened Adobe Museum of Digital Media — an entirely online institution — has now begun to feature exhibitions that highlight the impact of digital media on culture and design. Soon to open is an exhibit from John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, featuring Arts + Bits = the neue Craft (ABC) an exploration of how relationships between the physical and the digital can create art.
During an exhibition preview shown within the virtual museum, Maeda explained that:
Computers let us imagine digitally what we once could only validate by handcraft in physical form [...] the infinite malleability and reusability of bits have forever changed the creative process. But […] digital tools have relied on many of the original tools and media used by artists in the pre-digital world.
Hosted by a leading thinker in the design world, the experience of viewing this kind of exhibit is supposed to make us think further about what it means to place in a work in a museum, virtual or not, and what that positioning will mean as designers begin to craft digital experiences rather than physical ones. We would normally embed a video preview here in this post, but there’s something to be said for having the imposed limitation of having to experience this exhibit within a specific online space — just as though you were actually walking through the delineated space a real building. It’s a bit counterintuitive in a world where links and videos are shared and distributed freely. But perhaps it’s the classification itself of the experience as a museum exhibition that gives the designers a framework for creating new kinds of digital experiences and social meeting grounds.
[via designboom]
A bit of expanded thought on the above:
I grew up with the idea burned into my head that you can't force anyone to think anything, that ultimately people are responsible for themselves. The subtext of the idea is that try as you might, if someone is making a bad decision, you have to let them make it, and they will learn from it.
On a certain level that's something I still believe, but I've since revised the scope of the idea to something like "you can't *directly* make people think anything." I've started to understand that what you *can* do instead is create environments within which only certain kinds of decisions are made.
A quick lateral jump: some of you may be familiar with the National Forensic League's policy/cross-examination debate, most known to those familiar with high school debate competitions. Within these structured debates, of the handful of methods of attack that one may employ against their opponent, the point of definition is generally considered the most base and least substantive. I get the sense this sentiment carries to the public in general ("you're just arguing over semantics").
I say all that because I consider classification to be one of the key methods of creating cognitive environments. Which is an abstract way of saying that names and definitions are seemingly superfluous but in fact they change everything. They have the power to shatter cultural conventions, as I allude to in the article above, drawing on the way people think about the difference between websites and museums.
A few months ago Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay, was asked, by a prosecutor no less, when he first met someone IRL (In Real Life). The answer was both funny and insightful. Sunde said:
“We don’t like the expression ‘In Real Life‘.
We say ‘Away From keyboard‘.
We think that the internet is real.
Sorting Things Out
Classification and Its Consequences
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification—the scaffolding of information infrastructures.
In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.
The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.
About the Authors
Geoffrey C. Bowker is Regis and Dianne McKenna Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University.
In a world of data and information, I sometimes think the most valuable people will be those who know how to define and organize it. "Ontologists" maybe, or "librarians," perhaps, probably a blend of similar things.
Tattoo parlor owners must be salivating. An assertion in a Minneapolis Star Tribune article that our understanding of the zodiac is off by about a month - and that therefore people have been identifying themselves with the wrong sign - caught fire on the internet Thursday, and many folks are in an absolute panic on social media.
"If my zodiac symbol has been changed to a Libra, what am I supposed to do with my Scorpio tattoo?!?!," read one tweet Thursday.
Some vowed to get their tats removed. Others groaned about losing the sign with which they’ve identified themselves for years. The zodiac and related terms - including Ophiuchus, said to be a 13th and neglected sign - were trending Twitter topics much of Thursday
But before astrology fans scrape the ink from their arms because they think they're now a Virgo instead of a Libra, they should consider this: If they adhered to the tropical zodiac - which, if they're a Westerner, they probably did – absolutely nothing has changed for them.
That's worth rephrasing: If you considered yourself a Cancer under the tropical zodiac last week, you're still a Cancer under the same zodiac this week.
That's because the tropical zodiac – which is fixed to seasons, and which Western astrology adheres to – differs from the sidereal zodiac – which is fixed to constellations and is followed more in the East, and is the type of zodiac to which the Star Tribune article ultimately refers.
Two zodiacs. That's nothing new.
"This story is born periodically as if someone has discovered some truth. It's not news," said Jeff Jawer, astrologer with Tarot.com.
The hubbub started with Sunday's Star Tribune article, which said the following: "The ancient Babylonians based zodiac signs on the constellation the sun was 'in' on the day a person was born. During the ensuing millenniums, the moon’s gravitational pull has made the Earth 'wobble' around its axis, creating about a one-month bump in the stars' alignment."
"When [astrologers] say that the sun is in Pisces, it’s really not in Pisces," Parke Kunkle, a board member of the Minnesota Planetarium Society, told the Star Tribune.
"Indeed," the article continued, "most horoscope readers who consider themselves Pisces are actually Aquarians." The article also asserts Scorpio's window lasts only seven days, and that a 13th constellation, Ophiuchus, used to be counted between Scorpio and Sagittarius but was discarded by the Babylonians because they wanted 12 signs per year.
True enough, Jawer says, the sun doesn't align with constellations at the same time of year that it did millennia ago. But that’s irrelevant for the tropical zodiac, codified for Western astrology by Ptolemy in the second century, he says.
In the tropical zodiac, the start of Aries is fixed to one equinox, and Libra the other.
"When we look at the astrology used in the Western world, the seasonally based astrology has not changed, was never oriented to the constellations, and stands as … has been stated for two millenniums," Jawer said.
People who put stock in astrology can ask whether they should adhere to the tropical zodiac or the sidereal zodiac. Jawer argues for the tropical.
"Astrology is geocentric. It relates life on Earth to the Earth’s environment, and seasons are the most dramatic effect, which is why we use the tropical zodiac," he said.
An objective meaning - that is, one which is inherent within the universe or dependent upon external agencies - would, frankly, leave me cold. It would not be mine... I, for one, am glad that the universe has no meaning, for thereby is man all the more glorious. I willingly accept the fact that external meaning is non-existent... for this leaves me free to forge my own meaning.
If you were a sophisticated and up-to-the-minute science buff in 17th century Europe, you knew that there was only one properly scientific way to explain anything: "the direct contact-action of matter pushing on matter," (as Peter Dear puts it The Intelligibility of Nature). Superstitious hayseeds thought that one object could influence another without a chain of physical contact, but that was so last century by 1680. Medieval physics had been rife with such notions; modern thought had cast those demons out. To you, then, Newton's theory of gravity looked like a step backwards. It held that the sun influenced the Earth without touching it, even via other objects. At the time, that just sounded less "sciencey" than the theories it eventually replaced.
This came to mind the other day because, over at Edge.org, Richard H. Thaler asked people to nominate examples of "wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods." He also asked us to suggest a reason that our nominee held sway for too long.
My nominee was that notion that only physically touching objects were allowed in legitimate scientific explanations. It endured because in the context of recent history, it looked more serious and rigorous than what came before. A lot of theories have hung on like that—because their rivals look old-fashioned or naive or simply chaotic. More than once I've heard people defend the old rational-economic-man paradigm on the grounds that, flawed though it be, it's rigorous and formal and lets people think clearly. Another example of how the science-ish is the enemy of actual science? Time will tell.
Anyway, there are many interesting candidates over there (I liked, for example, the notion that the brain had nothing to do with thought or feeling, and the notion that we understand the interactions we call "nature and nurture
Nadia is an aesthetics inference camera developed by Andrew Kupresanin and has the ability to infer the quality of the photo before shooting it and send it to the photographer as a feedback. The camera doesn’t have a display, but constantly sends updated messages about the aesthetic quality of the image as the photographer moves the camera around the object to be captured, helping judge when to snap the photo.
Last June, Chris Anderson of the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price spoke at the RSA (video here) with notions that on a surface level seemed like an exploration of "free" but were in fact an exploration of value. An exploration of 'quality' is captured in paraphrase below, taken from Chris' response to a comment on how the impossible triumvirate of "free, perfect, and now" (the old maxim being that you can have only two) reflect the desire for cost, quality and time:
"Perfect is one of those words that I'm not so sure what it means anymore. I struggle with semantics - the word 'free' has changed, semantically. The same with words like 'news.' It used to that news meant content created by professional journalists. Now it's something that is relevant and worth repeating. And now you have this word 'quality.' I tell this story in the book: my children are allowed two hours of screen time per weekend. One weekend we said to them that for this weekend's two hours you can have two hours of Star Wars. You can either have two hours of Star Wars DVDs - upscale, high production, surround sound, big screen, and popcorn. Or, you can go on YouTube, and watch Star Wars videos created by 7-year-olds of stop motion animation with Lego figures. And instantly they're like: YOUTUBE. They didn't hesitate for a moment. If you look at these videos created by 7-year-olds you would say that the quality, by standards of Hollywood definition, is not good. They put their fingers in the screen. The lighting is not great. The voiceovers are exactly what you would expect from 7-year-olds. So it fails every traditional definition of quality - except for one, which is relevance. That it is exactly what those kids wanted. And in fact it's not even the quality of the story that George Lucas created that's a factor here - they would actually much rather watch toy soldier animations made by 7-year-olds instead of Star Wars animations. I say all this because I don't know what quality means anymore."It's something that I find important to consider whenever thinking about the value of 'quality.' In the inference camera example above, the term quality is misleading - quality in this case is a measure of relevance, as defined entirely by the developer Andrew's sense of relevance. This definition may in fact be useful - you may be a photographer who needs to shoot photos of the nature that Andrew has defined as quality, and get value out of sharing these photos with people who find Andrew's sense of relevance closely in line with their own. But when thinking about value, its worth considering whether any particularly defined relevance does in fact capture the relevance that is valuable to you (or anyone you hope to share a photo/anything else with).
Today’s idea: In a way, blogging isn’t all that new, a historian says. Informal writing combining pithiness with provocation stirred up the politics of Renaissance Italy and prerevolutionary France. And in light of the Web, it deserves more study.
[from "In Search of Time," on various cultures' adoption of lunar-solar calendars]
Eat the Big Fish is getting a second edition, looking at some of the changes in his thinking of the last ten years since it was written, and one areas he is looking to explore is "opportunity".
"Do you know who invented the Cheeseburger?" asks Morgan. It was JWT in the 1930s, on behalf of Kraft slices who wanted to encourage the American population to increase their consumption of cheese slices.
JWT suggested that they attach them as an ingredient to the most popular meal in America - the hamburger. They created something out of nothing."
I love this story - the idea that an agency helped create a new usage occasion, a new reason to buy a product, and forever changed American culture - just by taking two existing things and putting them together.
Another reason I love this story is that it's almost certainly not true.
As far as Wikipedia knows, the Cheeseburger was invented in 1924 by a 16 year old fry cook called Lionel Sternberger [what are the odds?] at a sandwich shop in Pasadena, California.
I very much doubt that this was the first time anyone added cheese to a burger, but it's the first recorded, [and as we know nothing is real until it has been recorded] and it certainly predates the 1930s.
Assuming the Kraft/JWT story is at all true - I can find no evidence online, but that's not conclusive either way - what's way more likely is that some inspiring young Mad Man saw, heard or indeed ate a cheeseburger, stole the idea, and then, perhaps, the agency and the brand helped it spread.
Stories are often more compelling than facts.
No idea comes from nowhere.
You may have heard me say that the problem with claiming "firsts" is (like most things) a problem of definition. I'll surely talk about this more later, but here Faris gives three excellent concepts to consider:
Nothing is real until it has been recorded
No idea comes from nowhere
Stories are often more compelling than facts
Hello friends and collaborators. I deal in innovation, working to build fantastic experiences enabled by the digital world. As part of this I track cultural change, primarily through observations guided by models and filters calibrated over years to sort out the cream.
These pieces of thoughts here reflect concepts that are elements of those models: ecosystem thinking, long-term value, information filters, and pattern recognition.
("How to break anything" is an abstract notion that reflects my background in observation and analysis. Rules are meant to be broken, but only through understanding the rules - observing them with an empathetic eye - can they be broken constructively.
So how to break anything? Observe everything.
[You can't observe everything so how do you know what to observe? That's another project that I call Filter Theory - see the About link above.])
