10 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2017
    1. In addition to moments of the expression of civic imagination, I am attentive to failure — times where conceptual roadblocks were encountered, spectacles failed, and cultural reproduction turned ugly. Being attentive to failure is necessary because civic hackathons tend to be universally celebrated as successes in popular literature. As Anne Balsamo noted in the case of Xerox PARC (p. 55), sites of technological production tend to also be involved in their own hype and myth-making (Also see: Balsamo, 1996). It is necessary to see what is entangled with the fiction.

      ¿Qué es lo que "falla" en el caso de Grafoscopio?¿Cuáles son las tensiones presentes?

      Uno podría pensar que tiene que ver con la velocidad con que la comunidad, en general, adquiere la experticia que le permite poner a diálogar lo simbólico, con lo icónico y lo enactivo. El hecho de que algunos asistentes vengan reiteradamente, pero no transiten caminos que les ayuden a adquirir esa experticia por sí mismos. Dichas tensiones ayudan a mantener el proyecto real, al mismo tiempo que dan cuenta de posibilidades futuras de las que la comunidad se encuentra sembrada. Creo que pueden ir en la tradición de revisar las fallas, como ocurren con los hackerspaces feministas y pueden hacerse más explícitos en futuras ediciones del Data Week.

      Chévere revisar los mitos y ficciones en Xerox PARC.

    2. Dunne and Raby’s (2013) notion of speculative design helps outline how future-oriented thought works at civic hackathons. They suggest that speculative design on “wicked problems” creates “spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p. 2). They find merit in dreaming, as the future is an “aid imaginative thought” (p. 3). Materialities assist development of ideas and approaches to collectively thinking about possible futures. For them, critique has a place in design, particularly humor. Designers can “pull new technological developments into imaginary but believable everyday situations so that we can explore possible consequences before they happen” (p. 57). Speculative design is a helpful bridge to the civic imagination.

      De nuevo, acá hay una tensión sobre cómo el puente entre el presente y dichos futuros se logra. Como he señalado en otras ocasiones, la brecha entre dichos futuros y el presente es llenada por alguna forma de distopia usualmente, como pasó para con la visión Dynabook y los paradigmas actuales de computación.<br> Sin embargo hay que abonar la inmensa diversidad de que esa visión no se lograra (pues era un sistema mono-lenguaje, mono-paradigma). Podrían estas miradas diversas pero de complejidad accidental, hablar con las de los sistemas monolenguaje con complejidades fundamentales? (COLA parece una idea al respecto).

      Grafoscopio transita y propone dichos puentes entre futuros posibles y presente buscando inspiraciones diversas y combinándolas en una materialidad particular.

    1. By integrating feminist legacies of craftwork with the centrality of failure — exposing personal failures and failures to transform hacker cultures — members not only energize new modes of hacking activity but also hack the very ontology of hacking.

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    1. Interactions through things, and perceptions about their potential, were ways to negotiate between seemingly conflicting imperatives of the individualism and communalism (A. L. Toombs, Bardzell, & Bardzell). Members would deliberately design activities that were incomplete to encourage a playful material improvisation. In these ways, the “material sensibilities” of members were particularly important. Similarly, reading a history of craft into software hacking, Lingel and Regan (2014) found that software hackers identified their work with craft as process, embodiment, and community. These sensitive readings of interactions with stuff seemed to more accurately capture the genre of hackerspaces, more so than action was guided by culture.

      La idea de actividades incompletas y un jugueteo material están embebidas en el Data Week y Grafoscopio, así como la identificación de software como artesanía, lo cual dialoga con Aaron y Software craftmanship.

    1. if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.

      So, how, this time, in reimagining the future 40 years ahead, the gap between that future and our current present will be not filled by current dystopia?

    2. If you are lucky, you have the conditions and abilities to work all this through in a long, non-linear process also known as bootstrapping, where you go through many iterations of hacking apart and hacking together, all the while creating fundamentally different ideas about what technologies should do, and could do, matched by a succession of devices and practices that help shape these ideas, and “demo” to yourself and others that some utopias might not be out of reach. This is what radical engineers do.
    3. The black boxes will most likely also contain ideas about the roles of the different types of engineers, programmers, designers, managers, and so on. If you take all this apart, you might look at the elements, throw away a lot of them, twist others, add stuff from elsewhere, and grow some on your own. You will look into different, often historical, technological paradigms, other ideas about what will become technologically possible (and when), different ideas of social order, the good life and problems that need addressing, other books to be read, alternative uses of the forces of media, and different ideas about the kind of people and the nature of their professions or non-professions, who should take charge of all this.
    4. That future is not given, but depends on the medium the group is imagining. It thus depends on the properties of the medium that the group is exploring, selecting, and practicing. On the one hand, technology enables a new medium, which is imagined as shaping the future, on the other hand the future is imagined as shaping the new medium, which then should drive technology.

      This relationship between imagined futures and how they mold the medium, leave out the bridged with the present. If history with Kay's group repeats, what fills the gap between the prototypes of the present and the imagined future, is a form of dystopia.

      Esta relación entre los futuros imaginados y cómo moldean el medio deja por fuera los puentes con el presente. Si la historia con el grupo de Kay se repite, lo que llena la brecha entre el presente de los prototipos y el futuro imaginado es una forma de distopia.

  2. Mar 2017
    1. Some key themes arise from the two NNG reports on iPad usability: App designers should ensure perceived affordances / discoverability There is a lack of consistency between apps, lots of ‘wacky’ interaction methods. Designers should draw upon existing conventions (either OS or web) or users won’t know what to do. These are practical interaction design observations, but from a particular perspective, that of perceptual psychology. These conclusions are arrived at through a linear, rather than lateral process. By giving weight to building upon existing convention, because they are familiar to the user, there is a danger that genuinely new ideas (and the kind of ambition called for by Victor Bret) within tablet design will be suppressed. Kay’s vision of the Dynabook came from lateral thinking, and thinking about how children learn. Shouldn’t the items that we design for this device be generated in the same way?

      The idea of lateral thinking here is the key one. Can informatics be designed by nurturing lateral thinking? That seems related with the Jonas flopology

  3. Aug 2015
    1. A deeper look into the historical record, though, reveals a different story: The web in its current state was by no means inevitable. Not only were there competing visions for how a global knowledge network might work, divided along cultural and philosophical lines, but some of those discarded hypotheses are coming back into focus as researchers start to envision the possibilities of a more structured, less volatile web