Ben Kraal's New Now Know How - Books

Everything bad is good for you

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 04:11:58 +0200

I picked up Steven Johnson’s Everthing bad is good for you on Thursday from the library and finished it over the weekend.

It certainly presented an interesting argument that I now see running as a thread through several blogs that I’ve been reading for a while now. And it also led me back to Deluze’s work which I’ve been vacilating between engaging with, because it’s so interesting, and putting aside, because it’s so damn hard and I have work to do.

The basic argument of Everthing bad is good for you is that pop culture has gotten more complex as a result of several factors, not the least of which is the tendency for television shows to be replayed more than once. Where earlier TV was almost a one-shot medium, TV now rewards repeated viewing. Johnson’s examples of modern TV are dramas like The Sopranos and The West Wing and comedies like Seinfeld and The Simpsons. He’s even upbeat on “reality” TV, though he prefers complex relationship style shows like The Apprentice over schlock and gore like Fear Factor (and I’d include Jackass in that category). These style of TV are more complex than in the past because they make use of byzantine plots and many more characters than in previous eras. The argument extends to computer games as well as film and the internet.

In short: watching Big Brother is exercising parts of your brain that watching “quality” television probably isn’t.

And in yet more connected coindicence, this interview with Steven Johnson and this article about the the making of Grand Theft Auto (a game that Johnson thinks is good for you) appeared on my radar this morning.

Space and sociality

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 02:09:08 +0200

Recently I’ve been reading a lot about space. Not the Final Frontier kind but the just-outside-the-door kind. Urban space.

It may have started with Stewart Brand‘s How Buildings Learn, which is just wonderful. Brand shows how buildings aren’t usually designed with a view to their use but instead are often designed to look good in architecture magazines. He argues for space that can be adapted by it’s inhabitants, space that can be changed to reflect the changing needs of it’s users. This is usabilty writ large and with a time-scale of years and decades not hours.

I think I then read William H Whyte‘s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces which is about parks and plazas in New york city and also about people and what they do in public and how they do it and how to watch them. Whyte shows that people do the darndest things like having conversations in the middle of busy throughfares. The thing is that people do this, not because they’re stupid or inconsiderate, but because they like being part of the bustle of the people around them. Like the best research, the things presented in Social Life are so amazingly obvious that you are shocked when you see how often they’re done wrong. Whyte’s main contribution is the wonderfully, head-slappingly, obvious insight that the best way to make a space inviting to people is to give them somewhere to sit. If that place to sit is out of the cold breeze and in the sun with a view of the passing crowd, so much the better. For example, Canberra’s dismal mall in Civic is so cold and lifeless on most days because it’s just a wind tunnel, especially towards the Garema place end.

From there I read Edward T Hall‘s The Hidden Dimension. It’s an exploration and explanation of how different cultures percieve space, particularly personal space. Hall is credited with coining the term proxemics. There’s a lot to ponder in The Hidden Dimension, particularly with regard to how people experience and manage cross-cultural interactions.

And I’ve just finished Paco Underhill’s two books on shopping, Why We Buy and The Call of the Mall which are about retail geography. Why We Buy is better.

And now, having read Adam Greenfield’s latest entry, I’m hanging out to find out more on the “New Ludic Urbanism”.

Understanding Computers and Cognition

nospam@example.com (Ben Kraal) — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 02:53:08 +0200

Is this the best computer-science (perhaps HCI) text ever?

Winograd and Flores show that hard AI isn’t possible (ever!) and that the concept of being-in-the-world should be the basis of computer system design. Most of the argument is based on Heidigger’s philosophy of being.

Though Understanding Computers and Cognition was published in 1986, it resonates today with the increasing push to get computers off the desktop and into the world. This is despite it being out several years before Mark Weiser’s work on ubiquitous computing. The argument they make is, to me, the basis for much of the work in CSCW and in particular the resurgence of ethnomethodological investigations into people using tools and technology as a way to inform design, though Winograd and Flores never explicitly endore such a method.

Winograd and Flores make the argument for ontological designing, design(ing) that is concerned with transformation of what is possible, with opening up new spaces for interaction that is “both reflective and political, looking backwards towards the tradition that has formed us and forwards to as-yet-uncreated transformations of our lives together”.

Through the emergence of new tools, we come to a changing awareness of human nature and human action, which in turn leads to new technological development. The designing process is part of this ‘dance’ in which our strucutre of possibilities is generated.

The book closes with this statement:

In ontological designing we are doing more than asking what can be built. We are engaging in a philosophical discourse about the self — about what we can do and what we can be. Tools are fundamental to action, and through our actions we generate the world. The transformation we are concerned with is not a technical one, but a continuing evolution of how we understand our surroundings and ourselves — of how we continue becoming the beings that we are.

That last part “of how we continue becoming the beings that we are”, indeed the whole quote, reminded be of Deleuze (who I am only beginning to explore, let alone understand) though there’s no reference to Deleuze in the book. I could, of course, be on entirely the wrong track with this Deleuze thing. Hmm…

Onwards! To continuing becoming!