Steve Job’s death is currently dominating tech and culture news, and there is no doubt that his extraordinary life was cut short far too soon and that his profound impact on technology design will continue to inspire people for years to come.

boingboing.net's tribute to Steve Jobs

A lot has been written about Jobs in the past two days, but I was quite moved by Mel Gregg‘s article, How Steve taught us to love our Jobs too much, which does a very good job of addressing the affective politics of both his death and an important part of his legacy:

“With the passing of Jobs this week, we are also mourning a man who defined a new kind of worker. The Jobs world-view consecrates the sacrifices of an ambitious, dedicated, and committed professional class that seeks recognition and passion in creative work. The language of love and intimacy is central to this career project. Over the past two decades, IT hardware manufacturers have made fortunes selling products through an association with the fantasy of satisfying, challenging work. [...] Yet this fantasy is – in the classic sense of love – a romantic vision of the contemporary workplace. It neatly avoids acknowledgment of the large majority in a global knowledge economy for whom the prospect of fulfilling work remains, in the words of philosopher Andre Gorz, ‘a bad joke’. When iPads and smartphones function as the signifiers of what it means to live the good life, freedom no longer entails liberation from labour. It is instead to be found in the release of personal productivity, in an ever-growing number of locations, with technology as conduit. As images of mobile devices continue to invade public spaces and airwaves, their middle-class address should not go unnoticed.

In our efforts to understand today’s global knowledge economy, however, we must recognise that the expectations and desires that glamorous technologies harbour are far from equally distributed. Professionals enjoying the benefits of IT design and innovation benefit from an already substantial digital divide in a world that increasingly pivots on the distinction between what theorist Jack Qiu describes as information ‘haves’ and ‘have-less.’ The choice to pursue long hours of volunteer labour in rewarding and enjoyable jobs stands in stark contrast to the forms of coercion and surveillance suffered by many of the world’s poorest workers. These include the legions of employees whose job it is to assemble the devices that deliver flexibility to the wealthy workers of the West. Worker suicides, self-harm and industrial unrest in the factories of Taiwan and southern China indicate the growing dissatisfaction among second- and third-generation migrant workers in high-tech assembly plants, including those for Apple products.

In this context, labour politics can be effectively understood by drawing on Jobs’s analogy, as the conflicting constraints, freedoms, and opportunities of the ‘lovers’ as opposed to the ‘love-less’. Classic definitions of love see the beloved as the only important thing in life, compared to which ‘everything else seems trivial.’ [...] It is this language that best describes the current flood of tributes to Jobs’s work ethic, as head of a company that transformed the work and home lives of millions of consumers. But let us hope that it serves as a reminder of the labours of thousands of workers who build the devices so deified by our culture and who continue to remain nameless.”

I’m in Alexandra right now for the NZ Merino Shearing and Woolhandling Championships (and – wow! – the newly revived Miss Merino Shears Competition).

The drive through hot and sunny Central Otago showcased some pretty stunning landscape, and more sheep and lambs than I’ve ever seen in my life.

In the midst of this pastoral wonderland I was reminded of the following poem, and it has never struck me as so very wrong:

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

- Richard Brautigan (1967)

Now I’ve got a stack of questionnaires to hand out in the next two days which will, hopefully, start to gauge what kinds of agricultural and environmental data people think should be collected and made publically accessible.

But I can’t help but think that the kind of utopianism that reigns in these parts doesn’t involve taking the whole earth digital…

True Blood fans are familiar with the kind of story-telling that comfortably puts vampires, werewolves and witches right in with the rest of us, and over the past few years I’ve read a lot of “urban fantasy,” a sub-genre characterised by the inclusion of fantasy elements in an otherwise recognisable and often contemporary (urban) setting or, as one fan site puts it, the type of story “where para is normal.”

Now I laugh when friends and colleagues tease me about my taste in reading materials–after all, there’s no guilt in my pleasure–but I’m also intellectually captivated by these stories and think that might be worth trying to unpack a bit.

I remember wandering around Chapters on Ste Catherine in Montréal, looking for something easy and fun to read. I had just finished watching the entire Buffy series and was in the mood for some more tough-chick ass-kicking, and a young gay salesclerk suggested the Anita Blake series. While I devoured every book on my weekly work commute to Concordia, I had no idea that I would eventually find myself in a multitude of Canadian, American, UK, Australian and New Zealand bookstores joyfully talking with complete strangers about which urban fantasy series had the smartest and strongest heroines, the most brutal fights, the hottest sex. Through these books and conversations I felt connected (like I didn’t know was possible) with the middle-aged mother and housewife who dreamt of being a warrior in epic battles against the forces of evil, with the young MtF transsexual who fell in love with so many fierce and playful shapeshifters. I was amazed that despite our differences, we could find ourselves, and each other, within these narratives. And to this day, these are the only times I’ve actually felt what Maffesoli meant when he wrote about taste and tribes.

But is there anything about these stories that can be put to good research and design use? STS and HCI researchers, futurologists and designers have long shared an interest in science fiction, and I’ve been talking about fantasy fiction. As Joanna Russ suggests:

“Science fiction is not fantasy, for the standards of plausibility of fantasy derive not from science, but from the observation of life as it is.”

I think she meant this to back up her claim that science fiction is superior because of its “truthful” and didactic nature, but it also allows us to consider the possibility that urban fantasy can be appreciated precisely because it seamlessly brings together the natural and supernatural, the mundane and the extraordinary. To be aesthetically successful, it doesn’t have to be scientifically plausible but it does need to be emotionally recognisable and moving–and that has important implications for those of us interested in using speculation rather than simulation to help people navigate possible presents and futures.

Of course, as Charles Elkins noted in 1979:

“The relevant point is not whether these fictions are ‘true’ or ‘false’ but whether they are useful. We must have them because it is only through them that we are able to think or act at all.”

Unlike the rational and predictive models favoured by more positivist futurologists, Elkins points out that science fiction (and I would add speculative design) functions according to a dramatic model:

“Where the rational models of the futurologist might be best described by the paradigm of the classical syllogism ─ ‘if this … then this’ ─ the model for a literary work might be best described within the structure of  ‘what versus what’ or ‘who versus who,’ with its final statement given, not in the form of a conclusion based on valid inference, but in the form of a proverb.”

This may seem a minor, or even obvious point, but when it comes to the relationships amongst fact, fiction, research and design, the ability to move beyond utopias that become boring for their lack of conflict, or dystopias that become boring for their lack of hope, is crucial. This is the difference between actualisation and potentiality. As E.M. Forster famously wrote in Aspects of the Novel, and I try very hard to get my design students to understand:

“‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot … Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say ‘and then?’ If it is in a plot we ask ‘why?’”

A lot of design is very good at stories; far less design is good at plot–and I’m convinced that we need the latter if we want design to serve, as Jack Schulze puts it, as a form of  “cultural invention” instead of problem-solver. And I think that these differences are related to differences between speculative design and design fiction, a point to which I’ll return shortly.

I’m not a huge fan of magical metaphors in technoscience and design, but I do find a few related concepts to be helpful in understanding how we can use speculative design to bring about significant cultural change. For example, utopian futures often use technoscience to enchant, while dystopian futures often use technoscience to disenchant; in both cases, design functions as an incantation of sorts. As Elkins explains,

“[Science fiction] must destroy old beliefs, furnish us with forms of passage from the old to the new, and finally inculcate new values in place of old beliefs. Art does the first through a symbolic process of ‘de-mystification,’ the second by eroding fixity in meaning with metaphors, and the third by ‘consecrating’ the symbols charged with new values and beliefs. This process is not done solely or even primarily through appeals to logic, to reason, or to the ‘hard facts.’ It is done through the communication of specific symbolic forms (parody, satire, ridicule, burlesque, comedy, tragedy, melodrama, etc.), which we all use in communication with each other but which are perfected in art, especially literature. As old beliefs are destroyed, we uphold new beliefs through the artistic presentations of tragedy and comedy and melodrama, through tragic and comic ‘victimizing’ of those who would trespass on our sacred symbols. It is in the dramatic presentations of art that values and beliefs are upheld or destroyed and men [sic] moved to either accept, reject, or doubt the principles which sustain their social order. At the same time, the artist keeps channels open to change through the creation of equivocal, playful, and comic symbols which allow audiences to hypothesize in symbolic action, to rehearse in imagination possible actions and attitudes before they must realize them in irrevocable moments of the complete act. This creation and destruction, this experimentation, while individually shaped, has objective social meaning because the artist must use the socially validated symbols of his [sic] culture.”

Wow. A more aesthetically-inclined sociology of translation/actor network theory anyone? And is it just me or does this sound more like fantasy than (hard) sf?

As I’ve alluded to, the differences between speculative design and design fiction intrigue me, and the question of what each actually produces is of particular interest to me because my work is motivated by the desire to create not just potential spaces, but spaces of potential. Adam Rothstein defines design fiction as:

“[T]he theory and practice behind conflating design, ‘building things that exist’, with fiction, ‘making up shit that doesn’t exist’. Design-fiction–either through its own limited fictional proposition or on the back of pre-existing works of fiction–links a fictional narrative regarding a proposed object, with some image, shadow, ghost, dream, or otherwise hologrammically-real design of that object.”

This, I believe, positions design fiction firmly within the realm of simulation–which I would associate more with a potential space than a space of potential. Along similar lines, Justin Pickard recently suggested that design fiction is “propositional” but “without framing or labelling, seeded in the real world, such objects and material scenarios blend awkwardly into their surroundings. Fiction passing as truth.”  Interested in the possibility of a “propositional ethics” for these simulations/simulacra, he continued to ask “to what extent is this thing we call design fiction built on deceit? What of consent? Is this even a problem?”

But if the aesthetics of fantasy can be distinguished from the aesthetics of science fiction, it may be worth considering how speculative (i.e. fantastical) design differs from (science) fictional design in terms of its aesthetics and ethics. For example, Carl DiSalvo has explored how design constructs publics and how speculative design can become publically-engaging design, rather than merely fictional design. This relates to concerns I have that the intentions of critical design are quite distinct from its consequences, and if the former is where its strengths lie then we have a problem if we hope to engage in cultural invention.

I recently gave a talk on ethnographic fiction and speculative design in which I used the following quote from Bruno Latour’s essay “A Cautious Prometheus?” (pdf):

“[T]o design is always to redesign. … Designing is the antidote to founding, colonizing, establishing, or breaking with the past. It is an antidote to hubris and to the search for absolute certainty, absolute beginnings, and radical departures.”

Although I have issues with some of the related arguments he raises–a discussion for another day–I think this is a lovely way of understanding design because it shifts our focus to cultural reinvention as well, and that puts us back in the space where plausibility is tied not to science or technology per se, but to the contexts in which they are found. As I’ve long argued, and Matt Jones recently reiterated, “The network is as important to think about as the things.”

But my point is this: when design fiction creates things without context and critical design doesn’t escape the exhibition, I think the best we can achieve is preaching to the converted. More specifically, we won’t be creating new publics that can reinvent culture–and that means that for all the potential spaces we create, we will have missed the opportunity to create spaces of potential.

And, really, I’d like to see more animals at the tea party.

Further reading
Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels Series & The Edge Series
Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson Series & Alpha and Omega Series
Jennifer Estep’s Elemental Assassin Series
Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Series
Nalini Singh’s Psy/Changling Series & Guild Hunter Series
Rachel Vincent’s Shifters Series

And TV Binging
The Holy Trinity: Buffy + Angel + Firefly
HBO: True Blood
Showcase/Syfy: Lost Girl

I’ve always been amazed by Björk. I like how her works combines the old and the new, the natural and the technological.

The Modern Things

All the modern things
Like cars and such
Have always existed
They’ve just been waiting in a mountain
For the right moment
Listening to the irritating noises
Of dinosaurs and people
Dabbling outside

[...]

All the modern things
Have always existed
They’ve just been waiting
To come out
And multiply
And take over
It’s their turn now

(Post, 1995)

But Björk latest project, Biophilia, involves some epic multimedia art and service design that I suspect doesn’t just preach to the converted, and might actually create some new critical and creative publics.

The project

“Biophilia consists of  ‘a studio album, apps, a new website, custom-made musical instruments, live shows and educational workshops,’ not to mention a documentary film. Over the next three years, she plans to play six-week residencies in eight cities, all at intimate venues, to audiences of less than 2,000.” [src]

The apps

“Biophilia for iPad will include around 10 separate apps, all housed within one ‘mother’ app. Each of the smaller apps will relate to a different track from the album, allowing people to explore and interact with the song’s themes or even make a completely new version. It will also be an evolving entity that will grow as and when the album’s release schedule dictates, with new elements added. Scott Snibbe, an interactive artist who was commissioned by Björk last summer to produce the app, as well as the images for the live shows (which will combine his visuals with National Geographic imagery, mixed live from iPads on the stage), describes how Björk saw the possibilities of using apps, not as separate to the music, but as a vital component of the whole project. “Björk’s put herself way at the forefront here by saying, ‘We’ll release this album and these apps at the same time and they’re all part of the same story.’ The app is an expression of the music, the story and the idea.” For one song, Virus, the app will feature a close-up study of cells being attacked by a virus to represent what Snibbe calls: “A kind of a love story between a virus and a cell. And of course the virus loves the cell so much that it destroys it.” The interactive game challenges the user to halt the attack of the virus, although the result is that the song will stop if you succeed. In order to hear the rest of the song, you have to let the virus take its course. Using some artistic license, the cells will also mouth along to the chorus.” [src]

Björk’s Biophilia 1.1 featuring Virus, Crystalline, and Cosmogony apps

The instruments

“For these shows, Björk has commissioned the creation of a number of new music instruments. Says the press release, ‘Among these creations are four 10-foot pendulum-harps, in which the swinging motion plucks the strings and illustrates the songs’ gravitational subject matter. There is also a unique 10-foot pin barrel harp called the Sharpsichord, a midi-controlled pipe organ and celeste (re-fitted with bronze gamelan bars), twin musical tesla coils, a hang player and an award-winning 24-piece Icelandic female choir’.” [src]

“Another of Björk’s Biophilia cohorts was an Icelandic organ maker called Björgvin Tómasson, who received a call from her last summer. Following a meeting in Iceland, Tómasson was given the job of creating two brand new instruments: one, a small organ controlled via MIDI equipment, allowing Björk to play it using a computer; the other, an old celeste that was rebuilt to incorporate the sounds of a traditional gamelan (Björk refers to this new hybrid instrument as a ‘gameleste’). ‘Prior to this experience, I would never have thought of the possibility of doing anything like this to a 100-year-old instrument,’ Tómasson says. ‘A new instrument was created in that moment’.” [src]

The Gameleste – a custom instrument for Björk

The workshops

“At these performances, she’ll use the apps to perform Biophilia in full twice a week. During her residencies, the venues will also collaborate with local schools to host music-education workshops.” [src]

“So, with the songs for this project, I try to address scales, chords, rhythm, different time signatures. A lot of things that are meant to be 3D are going through a revolution with touch screens right now, including music teaching– it’s perfect for all the algorithms. In each city that we visit for this tour, we are going to have classes for kids where they can try out the instruments and the iPad and write songs and take them home. And they’ll be teachers showing them the basics of musicology and showing them how, for instance, the viruses on the ‘Virus’ app move in similar ways as the music.” [src]

And last, but definitely not least, here’s the new video for Crystalline, directed by Michel Gondry:

Gorgeous.

The NZ Farmers Weekly: Merinos go multi-purpose

“Substantial increases in prices are being offered to farmers by New Zealand Merino in two and three-year contracts for fine wool, soon to be followed by Merino meat contracts at attractive prices. The higher contract terms flowed on from the extraordinary increases in market prices for wool and lamb during the past 12 months, said NZ Merino chief executive John Brakenridge.

For him, after 15 years of unrelenting effort to create premium markets for Merino products, the latest surge repositions the sheep as a multi-purpose animal.

It was also a wonderful springboard for the $36 million Primary Growth Partnership (PGP) with the government, which was the first of its kind, signed in May 2010.

“It gives farmers and NZ Merino a lot more fuel in the tank, as it is important for the country that we don’t put all our hopes on milk,” he said.

“We think sheep still have enormous potential for this country, in wool, meat, lanolin, leather, nutriceuticals and other product streams.”

Brakenridge said those products tended to be exported as commodities, whereas the PGP aimed to investigate ways of adding value and creating brands.

“We break it down into niche markets and look at the intrinsic values and stories for each of these potential products,” he said.

The Leather and Shoe Research Association is working on ribby pelts, while AgResearch is working on nutriceuticals and various aspects of sheep production, including cross-breeding trials.

Brakenridge said the PGP was “amplifying” the existing NZ Merino fibre programmes, as well as looking at marketing and communication trends.

A brand-partner summit held in California recently discussed new products and the promotion of these on social media.

The Silver Fern Farms Merino meat partnership is positioning fine sheep meat with niche placement in premium world markets, with brand market research, chef training and communication back to farmers.

A new Merino meat brand would be launched in the next couple of months, he said.

Brakenridge said the wool and fibre contracts gave price certainty to farmers faced with genetic or management changes to make to broaden their production base in the future.

He agreed that the purchase by Merino Growers Investment Ltd of the rest of NZ Merino from PGG Wrightson did have the potential to unify the Merino industry.

However, intending suppliers to NZ Merino still had to believe that it was working in their interests and that they philosophically supported a grower-owned broker and marketer, Brakenridge said.

NZ Merino handles about 80% of the Merino clip and 50% of the mid-micron clip and about half of the fibre volume goes into longer-term contracts rather than through the auctions in Melbourne.

Brand partners include SmartWool and Ibex in the United States, John Smedley, Südwolle, Howies and Reda in Europe, Nikke in Japan and Icebreaker, Mokopuna and Designer Textiles in New Zealand.

The huge disruption of the Christchurch earthquake had made the scheduling of an annual NZ Merino conference this year very difficult, Brakenridge said.”

See also:

Country Wide: Capturing added value

Ars Electronica: Temporary tattoos fitted with electronics make flexible, ultrathin sensors

“New research published in Science describes technology that allows electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements. These devices connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and can even be attached via temporary tattoo.

[...]

The authors suggest there are a huge number of applications for this technology, including remote medical monitoring, biological/chemical sensing, human-machine interface, and covert communications. There are a couple areas where further development is needed, however: RF communication frequencies change when the circuits are stretched, and dead skin and sweat have to be dealt with during long-term use. These aren’t insurmountable complications, though, so we’ll be interested in following this as further work is done (the unclassified work, at least).”

Nature:’Electronic skin’ could replace bulky electrodes

“The device is thin enough to stick to skin using only the short-range van der Waals forces that hold molecules together, as the forces that threaten to detach it are 10 million times weaker than they would be for a chip a millimetre thick. The circuits are fashioned as a net of narrow S-shaped filaments, so they can stretch and contract without breaking.

[...]

One major downside is that the continual shedding of skin cells means that the patch falls off after a few days. The researchers are looking for ways around this, so they can be worn for months at a time. The electronic skin is also expensive to make, but Rogers hopes that the patches could eventually be mass-produced. ‘We’re building on existing technology rather than reinventing it, so I think the technical hurdles to commercial manufacture are lower than you’d ordinarily see’.”

This is interesting and important on so many levels my brain hurts.

But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, GECKO PHYSICS FTW!

I love this new Kiwi TV advert so much that I’m willing to overlook that it’s a bank advert and just focus on how sweet a story it tells about a boy and his sheep:

The moral of the story: You don’t have to kill your sheep to get a Nintendo DS. (Also, females of all species are fickle.)

Or, as Ben says, “Teach a boy to kill a sheep, he has a DS. Teach a boy to shear a sheep, he has a new game every growing season.”