This came to me via Timo's del.icio.us links, and to him via Matt. The original is here and should be read in full. It's by Rob van Kranenburg. These passages struck me:
… ubiquitous computing will enable something fundamentally new, and the main question is : to what extent does it have designerly agency? In places where computational processes have disappeared into the background, into everyday objects - both the real and the subject become contested in concrete daily situations and activities. The environment becomes the interface. What is the role and place of design in these information spaces that are mediated with computational processes that generate not data (linked to other data) – the kind of communicative process that we are familiar with - but information (linked to other information)? The main challenge in design education lies in confronting this move from interaction as a key term to resonance. That refers most aptly to the way we relate to things, people, ideas in a connected environment. Interaction presupposes an ideal setting, agency and response. But mediation (the core business of interaction) is no longer a relationship. It has become the default position. …
This then is the fundamental change and challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology. …
The main question from a design educational point of view concerns the kind of skills and kind of literacies that a designer needs to function. And these turn out to be those that are most foreign to an educational practice today, as this new situation needs designers that can assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance – not interaction – as the key producer of causalities. For such a designer the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’. …
The working notion of research, however in current academies is deeply infested with a sterile theory-practice dichotomy that functioned in a mechanistic worldview, but is hardly productive in a ubicomp world. We face the challenge of rethinking research as a performative practice based on creating applications for societal benefit. There are very few ubicomp applications at the moment that do not focus on control or surveillance issues. That there is a great need for applications that empower users in dealing with uncertain situations …
The educational design challenge in implementing digital connectivity in an analogue environment lies in creating a working concept of corporal literacy that will inform a design for all the senses. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods, says Mark Weiser, than in any computer system, “yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”
… we must not aim to define, alter or transform practices, processes, places or people. The aim should be to define a vision. A vision that should be able to inspire and empower designers in their concrete experience of agency in this seemingly undesignerly new world, towards a humanistic and optimistic positive attitude in the role, function and leadership of the designer in his and her capability to make sense, to work within an uncertain framework of unforeseen consequences, unintended uses, and procedural breakdown.
Three basic ideas underlie this vision: a concept of life and living as slow becoming, as in Eugène Minkowsky’s idea that the essence of life is not “ a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.” … a concept of slow money, to focus on the design process and sustainability of design products, and a working concept of our notion of control, as slow resonance.
I've quoted Claus Dahl's comment before:
Maybe it would be less taxing on the human biology if we didn't have so many tools we had to know how to use but just better surroundings. This involves turning information into a living thing embodied in the spime around us and simply stop thinking of all this data as something we have to know. We can just live in it. I think this idea fits very nicely into the ideas about which of our senses actually afford which abilities. Culturally produced information is just too constrained to live in our focal view all the time, whereas we're effortlessly consuming naturally produced information in much greater quantities through the use of the rest of our senses.
I read Sterling's Shaping Things a couple of months back: many resonances here.
And a challenge for schools: 'assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance … the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’'.
Technorati tags: ubiquitous computing, ubicomp, education
