digitaldust

Started the week by going to this month’s Sandpit as a kind of kick off for my DCRC funded research project, Attitudes to Pervasive Gaming. Wow! It was busy. It almost seemed like there were more people there than at Hide and Seek.

Although I’ve not started data collection for the project I used the occasion to do a bit of observation and collect some participants for later phone interviews. My initial plan of trying to interview people at the sandpit isn’t going to work. It is just too hectic at the event. So I think I’m going to drop back to fewer face-to-face, and more phone interviews. But the good news I think is the project is starting to take shape.

Also had Tom Burton, Beef’s Technical Director in this week for our industry talk. Again a dismal turn out from the students, but that meant it was more informal and we chatted about Tom’s path from university to running his own business, alongside how to use technology in creative ways.

Otherwise there was much marking going on, I finished my share of the Play and Games essays. Which, I have to say, have largely been better than last years. There is some truly outstanding work, and far fewer that made my eyes spin trying to understand them. I think our rigorous tutorial plan last semester to tie the students down and make them think seems to have paid off.

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.