Testing Interface

Hey Patty!

MONDAY MINUTES: 17 Dec.

Today marked our last class meeting before the new year and the new semester. It was another emotionally draining Monday.

My thesis topic has many facets, each as interesting and important as the others. It's been a constant struggle to do my project justice both breadth-wise and depth-wise; invariably I can only present a partial picture.

My goal for the break is to pare the topic and the scope of the intervention down to something more manageable. In so doing, I hope that my voice and my 'design vehicle' will emerge.

OF INTEREST: Living with Things

LIVING WITH THINGS
headphones
Monika Hoinkis

Excerpt of Designer’s Statement:

‘Living With Things is a series of seven everyday objects, modified in their functionality. They explore how and to what degree an object can be subjectified by a person’s imagination and emotions, and how intimate moments can be created between a human and an object. Through using the objects you create a symbiotic relationship - they need you as much as you need them.’

www.livingwiththings.org

Thanks to: CFS

PODSPOTTING

Would that it weren't so.

From Wei Lieh Lee and Kevin O'Callaghan, via www.podcastingnews.com.

Thanks to: CLS

OBSERVATIONS: Overwhelming Choice, Part II

This is a continuation of yesterday's post. Click here for Part I.

We take for granted that the iPod is a music player. Its value proposition is more as a music storer. A music recaller. Again, the critical moment in the iPod scenario is in the selection of a song, as opposed to the moment of listening to it - the actual playback of the song more like contrails fading behind an overwhelming choice. Here is the official press release for the Fourth Generation iPod. Not once does it extol the quality of the sound (listening). What are instead promoted are the ‘Click Wheel’ and five push buttons, and, of course, the storage capacity (selecting).

Granting that the value of the iPod lies in its ability to store and recall songs one-handedly, the iPod is only valuable when it is useful in these terms, that is, when it permits the user to listen to a song that suits his mood at the instant it suits him, wherever it suits him. Like the example of the barren bookshelves in Observations: The iPod in Consumer Culture, the iPod is validated, that is, made useful, by continually uploading new songs to it, as this seems the only recourse in the face of overwhelming choice.

Whether these psychological devices are ‘built into’ the iPod is somewhat inconsequential. We cannot deny, however, that the iPod is designed as a choice machine. Early psychological studies of choice suggest that the presence of alternatives increases the consumer’s motivation and sense of control. But, consumers are actually more driven by the knowledge that alternatives exist than by having to make a choice among them. The study by Iyengar and Lepper alluded to above concludes ‘that extensive-choice contexts may be more appealing, but are subsequently more likely to hamper people’s intrinsic motivation.’*

*Iyengar, Sheena S. & Lepper, Mark. "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: 79, 995-1006, 2000.

DIVERSION #1

I was craving stew, miso soup, and Japanese curry all at once.

OBSERVATIONS: Overwhelming Choice, Part I

http://www.createphotocards.com/ (above)

Our iPods, our playlists, our ‘libraries,’ allow us to externalize our consumerist capriciousness. Consequently, our collections are eternally deficient. Over the course of the last few months, and for the few years before that, I have often heard iPod users describing that they are ‘sick of all their music.’ I, too, am sick of all my music, having only uploaded about 1000 songs to my iPod. How, though, can I have 1000 songs and not want to listen to one?

I am not weary of these 1000 songs as they sit, dormant, on my desk, nor when they bounce latently in my pocket. No, only at the critical moment when I must choose a single song to play do these songs, by way of projection, become inadequate. In fact, with such an overwhelming choice to make, the act of selecting a song becomes at least as important as listening to it.

If we generalize that expendable income and alternatives (here ‘songs’) increase proportionately, it would seem an abundance of alternatives would be desirable and motivating. Ironically, we find that too many options - an overwhelming choice - is demotivating. In other words, instead of ‘How can I have 1000 songs and not want to listen to one?’ perhaps the better question is: How can I have 1000 songs and pick just one? With so many options, iPod users must rely on heuristics or ‘elimination strategies’ to narrow the field.

An emerging corpus of psychological study investigates the overwhelming choices with which consumers are perpetually confronted. Authors give this phenomenon different names - the ‘tyranny of choice,’ ‘choice overload,’ etc. - but their findings tend to confirm each other. Citing various works, Iyengar and Lepper write:

To begin with, research has shown that as the attractiveness of alternatives rises individuals experience conflict and, as a result, tend to defer decision, search for new alternatives, choose the default option, or simply opt not to choose (emphasis added).*

My observation reveals this to be all too true among personal stereo users. The simplest way to alleviate weariness is to add new songs to a collection. But while these supplements might serve as a stopgap, they ultimately contribute to a logarithmic redoubling of the effect. In this respect, typical iPod use is not unlike a substance addiction.

Click here for Part II.

*Iyengar, Sheena S. & Lepper, Mark. "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: 79, 995-1006, 2000.

Was Robin Hood a nom de guerre?

I've always been curious - in part because I myself have reactionary tendencies - as to which comes first: the rebel or the cause.

For my thesis class at Parsons, we were asked to read selections from David Bornstein's book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.

You might say there is a trend to be followed. For example, the first instance of 'nonprofit' recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1961. The term 'not-for-profit,' though appearing as early as 1919, did not obtain its modern or substantive usage until some time later. 'Not-for-profit' is probably more accurate, but it also serves to polarize institutions into 'for-profits' and 'not-for-profits.' Pretty loaded, no? But the label is also empowering, elevating what might be imagined as ramshackle charities ('They don't even turn a profit!') to two-can-play-at-this-game status.

Yet Bornstein, Dees, and others are fiddling with the nomenclature once again, preferring the term 'social enterprise.' The word 'entrepreneur' summons for me images of 1980's boardrooms, pyramid schemers, and the types you try to ignore at bars and cocktail parties. American Dreamers. But that's just me.

What's more remarkable in this new term is the contemporary ME-ME-ME fascination. Welfare is no longer an institutional priority - it is rather the heroic undertaking of an individual. Below, I excerpt from my response to Bornstein's text:

Bornstein claims that the sheer number of social outfits and the resulting competition have required these organizations to 'demonstrate their efficacy.' The author has not as yet suggested any real rubric to measure this effectiveness, except to propose that 'business as usual' doesn't cut it any more.
[...]
So the question remains - why doesn't 'business as usual' cut it? What is wrong, to cite the old adage, with if it ain't broke, don't fix it? [...] He suggests that many citizen sector efforts are spearheaded by a 'single entrepreneurial author,' described several times as 'obsessive' [...] the social entrepreneur is a maverick who swaggers in and smites society with a Nietzschean hammer.
[...]
According to Bornstein, with the rise of citizen sector activity, with the concentration of NFP's, there exists competition among them - and that this is somehow desirable. The author's evaluation is no doubt colored by traditional capitalism (Adam Smith's invisible hand, for example), but the analogy is somewhat problematic.
Competition in the corporate sector is regarded as an incentive to produce quality goods and services at the right price. Two corporations in a similar niche will compete for capital. How does this analogy manifest itself in social enterprises? According to Bornstein, competition likewise improves output in the citizen sector, but the organizations, I argue, are competing for the social wellbeing of their clients instead of their capital. It is not unlike two parents quarreling over what is best for the child, effectively enacting what is worst for the child.
[...]
Bornstein discusses the 'driving' forces of the trend [i.e., increased activity in the citizen sector]. He credits the spread of democracy. Is this the case? Certainly it plays a part, but the spread of capitalism is a more likely cause. After all, the social entrepreneur cannot subvert capitalistic paradigms if they aren't first there for the subverting. Moreover, the author himself points to governmental (democratic) 'impotence' against economic (capitalistic) power.
Unfettered capitalism is both the root and the medium of social enterprise. For example, Bornstein names 'surplus wealth in the economy' as another impetus for the expansion of the citizen sector. In this case, the people who have profited from the very system that perpetuates inequality are the ones making contributions to these 'corrective' outfits. The NFP is thus dependent precisely on the institution from which it seeks independence.

OF INTEREST: Dis-Armor

Dis-Armor
Krzysztof Wodiczko, et al.

Artists' Statement:

‘Dis-Armor is the newest in a series of psychocultural prosthetic equipment designed to meet the communicative need of the alienated, traumatized, and silenced residents of today’s cities. It connects contemporary research in two fields: wearable communication technology and prosthetics. In doing so, it counters the dichotomy of the present explosion in communication technology and rampant cultural miscommunication.

‘Dis-Armor offers an opportunity for indirect, mediated communication by allowing its users to speak through their backs. LCD screens, worn on the back, display live images of the wearer’s eyes transmitted from cameras installed in the helmet covering the face. A speaker positioned below the LCD screens amplifies the user’s voice. Attached to the helmet is a rearview mirror, alternatively, a rearview video camera, monitor, microphone, and headphone. These permit the user to see the face and hear the words of the spectator/interlocutor standing behind. Wireless video equipment installed in the helmet further allows two users to work in tandem, showing each other the other’s eyes and broadcasting to each the other’s voice.

‘Specifically, Dis-Armor is an instrument designed to focus on the psychological difficulties of Japanese high school students and “school refusers,” who live in silence and lack facial expression. It uses the ancient traditions of arms making to conceive of a playful alternative to intimidating face-to-face communication. It is designed for particular individuals among urban youth who have survived overwhelming life events (violence, neglect, and abuse) and who now wish to overcome their false sense of shame, to break their silence, and to communicate their experience in public space.

‘The Dis-Armor instruments are part of the permanent collection of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in Hiroshima, Japan.’

web.mit.edu/idg/disarmor.html

Thanks to: JWJ

OBSERVATIONS: The iPod in Consumer Culture

The latest iPod ‘classic’ with a storage capacity of roughly 160 gigabytes - by comparison the first iPod, debuting in October 2001, allowed a maximum 10 GB of music - is advertised as storing as many as 40,000 songs. That’s more than 66 times the number prolific songwriter Dolly Parton has published.

Logic tells us that the capacity of the iPod will continue to grow with subsequent ‘generations’. If Moore’s Law applies here, we would expect the next iteration of the iPod to hold 80,000 songs, the next on the order of 160,000, and so on. For perspective, the iTunes Store launched with ‘only’ 200,000 songs.*

To fill this latest iPod to capacity - legally - would cost $39,600 at the iTunes Store, roughly the Median Household Income of Montana.**

I am reminded of a childhood friend, whose parents had custom floor-to-ceiling bookshelves installed in the living room. Suddenly, the same stretch of wall that was once humble and unremarkable appeared glaringly barren and lacking. His parents made a special excursion to buy books to fill the shelves. The books and shelves were reciprocally validated and validating.

Likewise, the iPod is validated by filling it with songs. In turn the iPod validates, in a material sort of way, the songs it holds. It makes them precious.

*www.apple.com/pr
**www.census.gov

THE WIRE: "Love Thy Blackberry, Love Thy Kids"

Nancy Gibbs for Time Magazine
15 November 2007

I've been thinking a lot lately about my relationship with my gizmos. The little ones, not the adult systems all grown up and trailing wires everywhere, the big-screen TVs and stereos and desktops. I'm talking about the cell phones and pagers and Treos and BlackBerrys, with which we are much more intimate. We carry them everywhere, so that any time they twitch we feel it on our hip. Because they have no wires, they depend on us to feed them their juice every other night or so.

[...]

Given all the disruption, all the crowding of bosses who can track us down anywhere, anytime, the fears that our gadgets may make us ruder and dumber and more easily distracted, it's a natural temptation to abandon technology, or at least vacation from it occasionally. First-time--and best-selling--author Timothy Ferriss has become a Silicon Valley darling by pushing his low-information diet as the secret to achieving The 4-Hour Workweek, which among other things involves checking e-mail no more than twice a day. Maybe it's worth taking the test: Do our devices really make us more efficient or less so? Do they bind us--or isolate us, becoming screens against intimacy and contact, zoom lenses that let us operate from a safe distance so that we seem closer than we really are? One suspects that trying to cut back may only teach us how attached we've become, at least to our gizmos. Like our children, they are little miracles, whose workings we can't really understand, as they make our lives bigger in surprising ways and keep us from ever feeling like we're all alone.

Love Thy Blackberry, Love Thy Kids (navigates away)

Thanks to: CLS

PODSPOTTING

‘Transform your photos into custom iPopified images. Only $19.95.’

www.ipopmyphoto.com

OBSERVATIONS: On Music

Music has the capacity to unite and to divide. For example, a national anthem is used to summon collective pride, while simultaneously risking nationalistic pride - a sort of ‘über alles’ effect. This capacity is parodied by Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat (2006):

Kazakhstan, greatest country in the world
All other countries are run by little girls
Kazakhstan is number-one exporter of potassium
Other Central Asian countries have inferior potassium

My suspicions about this feature of music were somewhat validated by early surveying, where respondents were asked to react to number-one hits dating from 1957 to present. While the survey was intended to test the emotive qualities of popular songs, the responses revealed a strong sense of ownership; that is, songs ‘belong’ to people, or perhaps people feel they belong to the spirit of a song, in the respect that music captures the Zeitgeist. At the same time, the responses betrayed a strong sense of detachment: ‘I am too old for this,’ wrote one participant. ‘Corny, fake 1950’s that people have decided were the perfect era,’ wrote another. (Given that the variable in the survey samples was the year each reached the number-one spot, it is not surprising that age and time were rubrics for dismissing or embracing music.)

In Musicophilia, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks writes:

Anthony Storr, in his excellent book Music and the Mind, stresses that in all societies, a primary function of music is collective and communal, to bring and bind people together. People sing and dance together in every culture, and one can imagine them having done so around the first fires, a hundred thousand years ago. [...] In such a situation, music is a communal experience, and there seems to be, in some sense, an actual binding or “marriage” of nervous systems, a “neurogamy.”

My next round of surveying asked respondents to discuss community, music, and their respective roles. The results were fairly inconclusive, but there was a fluky recurrence of the word ‘iPod,’ which piqued my curiosity. How, for example, do we reconcile the citation of Oliver Sacks above with the reality of the iPod? What happens when singing becomes internalized and dancing a performance of the individual silhouetted by a bright field of nothingness?

Matisse 'La danse' (1909) | ubiquitous iPod ad

Why am I blogging?

I have decided to start a log of ideas, meetings, happenings, and so forth as a way of organizing this process and of sharing my progress with others.

Up to now, my thesis has been a very personal, cerebral exploration, but the time has come to put my work 'out there' to see how people respond. Your comments and feedback will be greatly appreciated.