<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV><DIV>On Oct 2, 2006, at 4:03 AM, Simon Biggs wrote:</DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">It is politics at this level that we might be more profitably engaging with,</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">seeking to understand what makes people tick and how their knowledge and</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">technological systems are part of that, both conditioning and being a</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">function of that human condition. This deeper understanding in turn can then</FONT></P> <P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><FONT face="Helvetica" size="3" style="font: 12.0px Helvetica">be applied to the interpretation of more current events and developments.</FONT></P> </BLOCKQUOTE><BR></DIV><DIV>I wanted to chime in with thanks to Steve for bringing up this interesting point. With what Simon is speaking about, and in some of the work that I'm beginning to look at, I want to look at the personal, individual interaction with these "technological systems". For example, I'm interested in how people perceive "agency" in computational artifacts: what is the process of concept formation, how do people deal with an inanimate object that is now animate, etc. (Perhaps agency is too loaded of a term, but it's the best that I have at the moment.) In some early interviews with people who play traditional acoustic musical instruments, I've seen some interesting traces of a kind of attribution of agency to the object: harpsichords that change their tuning without notice, and the consequent need to make sense of that result by conceiving of the instrument as more than simply a passive "thing". I think much of our interaction with complex objects can be read in this way, and I'm beginning to think that it's going to be a useful way to examine interactions with computational objects as well.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I agree that much of this will draw on understandings of animism and the immanence of space that Steve originally mentioned--not as a demeaning re-appropriation of "tribal" concepts, but rather a connection to a tradition of wonder and acknowledgment of the unknowable. Many critiques of ubicomp call for more transparency--transparency in function, in data collection, in mechanism. Perhaps transparency in the end, however, is not the be-all, end-all of our critique. Not that I am suggesting we dispense with encouraging people to understand how things work; rather, we acknowledge that people _will not_ know all of the inner details of their devices, as a practical matter, and an understanding of _how_ they form conceptions of these translucent black boxes is a increasingly important component of our design and development practice. With their Placebo Project, Dunne and Raby interviewed a family that kept a "GPS Table" for a month: the table had an embedded screen that displayed the table's GPS coordinates, or "lost" if it couldn't make a connection to the satellites. The responses are fascinating [1], attributing feelings to the table and worrying when it read "lost". If you read the entirety of the interview in the Design Noir book, you can see how the members of the family "know" how GPS works; the system is transparent enough for them to understand the mechanism. Yet they still respond to the object in an affective manner, obviating rationality for a personal response.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>My point in bringing this up is to show that we're already seeing personal reactions to (in this case, an admittedly contrived) new types of objects that doesn't fit in simple categories of "rational" or "response to component of military/industrial/corporate/political complex". To me, the reactions to the objects described by Dunne and Raby are more interesting than an external critique: people's means of dealing with a new situation, and the process of creating their own explanations for the object's mechanism and for their own behavior (but perhaps that is simply the ANT in me speaking...). It seems necessary then to connect to the tradition of anthropology to see in what ways our new reactions reflect or modify older understandings, drawing on topics such as animism, ritual practice, mythology, etc.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This is, like Steve mentioned in his original post, not a condemnation of the deconstructive approach, which is indeed a necessary, but not sufficient, _component_. But it remains merely a component of a multi-faced process, a continual process of deconstruction and reconstruction, of reaction and proaction. Indeed, many of us on this list recognize the need for both types of practice (and practices that find themselves in between), yet it also seems important to raise the proactive possibilities after an extended period of questioning.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>nick</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>[1] <A href="http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/designing/placebo/placebo_bottom.html">http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/designing/placebo/placebo_bottom.html</A></DIV></BODY></HTML>