digitaldust

The week just gone was quiet, especially compared to the week before. No late nights, family illness and other shenanigans.

Good news that I’ve had another paper accepted.

On Wednesday I had Phil Gyford down for a talk to the Web Design students. I bumped into Phil last year and I was surprised to find he was a UWE graduate (through Bower Ashton, in the days before it was UWE and still the West of England College of Art) so I invited him down for a talk.

Also marked/watched the first presentations from the Play and Games students. I’ve set them a design exercise to come up with a “serious board game.” Which has resulted in four games about global warming, two about the recession and two about somalian piracy, plus half a dozen other ideas. The multi-stage, gateway approach seems to be working already, these guys are much more engaged in their coursework than the students over the last couple of years.

At the end of the week I also did a spot of project debriefing and lessons learnt for Ed at the end of his transition network mega project. Though overall the problems were very small and it seems like he’s put together a cracking little co-op of dedicated webinistas.

The submission for next months Computational Turn workshop was accepted. Will be an interesting event with both Lev Manovich and Katherine Hayles presiding over it.

Analysis Tool or Design Methodology? Is There an Epistemological Basis of Patterns?

The idea of patterns as a means of inquiry seems to be increasing in popularity, in many different ways, across many different disciplines. Partly this has to do with new tools and techniques which allow us to discover, analyse or visualise patterns, and partly from our long history of systems thinking. Though the concept of patterns and pattern recognition are not new and have been strong across the 20th century, from structuralism, through cybernetics and into complex systems theory.

However there is no robust epistemology for justifying what they are, how they are used and in what context they are interpreted. Also there are few comparisons or linkages between different disciplines use of them.

This position paper asks questions about what patterns fundamentally are, whilst also providing a pragmatic epistemological basis for using them founded in the interventionist practice of action research. Problems concerning the abductive reasoning process and apophenic outcomes are also highlighted.

Having spotted week notes recently, via Phil Gyford and Anne Galloway, I thought they would be a worthwhile thing to do for reflecting on teaching and the work I’m doing on my PhD and other research. It seems like a nice way to see some progress in what are otherwise long term and fairly monumental undertakings.

Having thought about it the best crux point to count these weeks from is from the point that I became an, err, ‘academic’, whatever that means. Though it does mean that I’ve been at it for 171 weeks, or just over three years.

On Friday I had a nice chat with Jo Morrison, who is also doing a part time PhD through the DCRC and teaches design at Central St Martins. She’s working on art in public space and drawing on a lot of similar theorists to myself.

One other thing we talked about was an interesting project she set for her design students to explore process. She makes them give themselves five rules that they must stick to. The final product can be anything, but they must strictly follow their rules. This has been keeping me thinking over the last few days about what rules could I put in place to help my process?

Otherwise my week was dominated by finishing my paper exploring the epistemological basis of patterns. Got good feedback on it from the reading group on Thursday, however they did warn me that thinking too much about this would drive me insane and I would end up living out the movie Pi.

Trying to delve into patterns has been interesting and much further reaching than I thought it would be. I think that my central thesis of patterns being an increasingly important way of thinking for the 21st century is generally validated by my research. We’ve gone from the systems theory ideal of trying to model and understand systems to a more instrumental approach to just knowing enough to be able to use systems and effect change. And it is a big subject, as we discussed on Thursday, there is a whole book in this… though a book that would make my brain bleed if I tried to write it.

Went to Denmark to visit Olli, Hanna and Bjarke… and of course to also attend the Ludic Aspects of Everyday Life seminar that Olli and Hanna were organising.

I wanted to go into a bit of detail about Michel de Certeau as I’ve been thinking through his Practice of Everyday Life quite a bit recently. As it emerged from the seminar, so had quite a few other people.

The short version of my argument is that de Certeau is important for understanding games and game-like activity, through his concepts of strategy and tactics. He says that there is an everyday art to the tactics one employs to negotiate the overarching strategies. If so, then I say there is an aesthetic experience of those practices and that aesthetic experience is related to the experience of game play. Hence many everyday practices seem related to games in the personal aesthetic experience of them, i.e. navigating the city, personal relationships, finding a car park, getting a good cup of coffee on the way to work, etc. At the end I also raise a question about the claims made by many that we are living in a Ludic Age, that there has been a Ludic Turn. There is no real proof that we are, besides manifesto style claims by gamers, game researchers and game designers. But if we are, then I think we ought to be re-interpreting de Certeau, who was writing in an era of resistive thinking, rather than in a possible Ludic era.

Slides here

Jaakko Stenros has another brief review of events over on Pervasive Games.

Went to Manchester University and presented at the Play Things post grad conference.

Graeme Kirkpatrick keynoted and touched on many of the same things I did. Sort of felt like he had stolen my thunder, but I had some good feedback on my talk. He’s also thinking about the aesthetics of games and gameplay and pointing out that the physicality of gaming is not considered seriously enough. I think that my application of the Dionysian principle provides some theoretical background to his discussion.

Slides are on slideshare.

Paper presented at the Philosophy of Computer Games 2009 conference.

download link

Roger Caillois’ Man, Play and Games is a seminal book in Game Studies and his taxonomy of play and games has framed much of the debate while the field has been active. However
this book was published half a century ago and does not provide much help in understanding computer games. A number of academics have raised the point that computer games are significantly different from traditional gaming or real world play activity and should be treated differently.

According to Caillois play and games fall on a continuum between what he terms ludus, rule
bound games and paidia, anarchic playing. Computer games can be seen as heavily rule bound in that the limits of a participant’s actions are controlled by a codified simulation. But am I playing a game when I sight-see in GTA4, dance with friends in World of Warcraft, or chase someone through SecondLife?

In this paper I argue that Caillois’ approach is mistakenly essentialist and that the aesthetic experience must be given pre-eminence. Based on this I propose two related points. Firstly that there is no continuum between the experiences of gaming and playing; these are two separate aesthetic qualities. Secondly, I explore these aesthetic experiences along Apollonian and Dionysian lines, using Nietzsche’s work in The Birth of Tragedy. In the process particular care is paid to applying the terms playing and gaming and this leads to a basis for a philosophical reinterpretation of gameplay as an experience.

Video of my talk

Slideshare of the presentation slides

Basically I argue that a higher level socio-technical pattern language is required and that just using something like interface patterns doesn’t cut it for designing social tools. For example, designing at the level of tag clouds is useless if you haven’t designed the human-computational manner in which the folksonomy works.

Pattern Languages for Computer Mediated Communication Design

Three decades ago the concept of pattern languages were introduced in the field of architecture and they have since become widely used in object-oriented programming and HCI. However their use in computing is divergent from Alexander’s original goals on two main points. Firstly, they were largely intended to describe the spaces formed by or for human activities and events. Secondly, they were intended as a way for profession-als and lay people to communicate whilst designing buildings. This chapter suggests that the socio-technical design of social software should rediscover both these principles, firstly in a fuller appreciation of the wider human angle, and secondly in the participative design approach. Indeed, a pattern language approach within a socio-technical framework seems the ideal way to design the next generation of computer-mediated communication applications, as it will do so in a social context and in partnership with end users.

Wow. It was over year and a half ago that I committed myself to writing a chapter for this and now it is finally published. As always there is an excitingly random selection of pages available on google book search. I don’t recommend you run out and buy it. At a staggering 1000+ pages it is longer than a Neil Stephenson epic and the £300 price tag is also a little steep.

Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking

Press Release for:
Whitworth, B., & DeMoor, A. (Eds.). (2009). Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. Hershey PA: Information Science Reference.

A state-of-the-art summary of knowledge in an evolving, multi-disciplinary field, distinctive in its depth and breadth of scholarship, variety of international authors, and combination of practical and theoretical views.

Socio-technical systems have both social and technical aspects. Examples include Wikipedia, e-mail, chat, text-messages, instant messages, social networks (Facebook), online learning (Moodle), job markets (Monster), blogs, twitter, social bookmarks (Digg), online multi-player games (World of Warcraft), online simulations (Second Life), bit-torrent media sharing, online voting, online news, reputation systems, recommender systems, collaborative writing, and many other forms. The socio-technical evolution has massively changed the Internet as we know it.

This book is a breakthrough. Not just social factors in technology settings, or the effect of technology on society, the Handbook of Socio-Technical Design goes a step further. It asks how social ideas can inspire new technology forms, and how technology can empower new social forms. While common approaches are social or technical, the socio-technical vision is that people and computers are more than people or computers. Social and technical are separate domains with different ideologies, but they must work together for higher performance synergies.

This book is multi-disciplinary. The socio-technical approach is not an easy path, as it needs people with both social and technical knowledge and skills. Yet it is the only way for society and technology to move forward successfully. A society that rejects technology will fall behind. A technology that ignores social values will run rampant. Only their combination can succeed.

This book is timely. The Internet was initially coded as a technical system. Today it is increasingly a social system. E-mail spam is what happens when technical systems ignore social needs – in this case the right to privacy. The socio-technical gap, between what computers do and what society wants, is why some argue we need a new Internet, as this one is “broken” (see www.nytimes.com).
We need to replace current technical designs by socio-technical designs.

This book is important. In the socio-technical vision, social values must enclose technical power. Just as atom bomb technology made us choose world peace over mutually assured destruction (MAD), so social applications ask us to choose social good. The Internet can be for freedom or state control, can benefit millions or cheat them. Unless social values like privacy and democracy are explicit, technology cannot support them online, where “code is law”. Technology advances force us to choose our future, and this book is about making informed choices in the new global information society.