UnParty

A Further UnParty UnConference Idea

In the film Sunshine the crew of the ship have to make a decision:

Mace: It’s a lot of assumptions.
Searle: It is. It’s a risk assessment. The question is: does the risk of a detour outweigh the benefits of an extra payload?
Mace: We’ll have a vote.
Searle: No. No, we won’t. We are not a democracy. We’re a collection of astronauts and scientists, so we’re gonna make the most informed decision available to us.
Mace: Made by you, by any chance?
Kaneda: Made by the person best qualified to understand the complexities of payload delivery: our physicist.

And whilst I do not with to dwell on the line ‘We are not a democracy’ I think the idea that those most qualified to understand the complexities of an issue, or a policy should at least be able to discuss it and give their informed response in a public forum.

So, I would like to suggest that expert organisations hold UpParty UnConferences, discuss the ideas that their domain of expertise touches up and shares their insight with everyone else.

So if you are in such an organisation and feel that this kind of discussion would be good to participate in, take part.

CSM, Lighthouse

Central Saint Martins and Lighthouse Gallery

Just a quick note, about some of the things I am up to at the moment, I am now no longer acting in the role of research fellow in digital design at Central Saint Martins Design Against Crime research centre. I have been working out how to work in academia, investigating research calls, publishing routes and the likes.

Today I am also visiting the Lighthouse gallery in Brighton, where I am starting a two month residency as part of their new studio programme. This is a prototype stage where a small group of us have been invited in to work here, on projects that should feed into the Lighthouse’s future programme.

Both are very exciting and lots of learnings and experiences to be shared. So, sorry if I go on about things here :)

Infrastructure, Open Access Journal, Projects, Stacktivism

The Open Journal of Critical Infrastructure Studies

An awful lot of us live lives wrapped in infrastructure, its what keeps many parts of the world functioning in a modern way.

A number of people have started writing, producing work that attempts to examine this infrastructure with the same critical eye that we cast over other components of our lives and the development of such a critical thinking framework is rapidly and increasingly becoming vital as the new infrastructure of the digital, communications network increasingly affects so many aspect of our lives.

Yet this infrastructure is increasingly invisible, from the fact that it uses electromagnetic radiation to transmit information through to the strategic agendas of corporations who wish to mask the underlying operational methods behind their productised solutions to modern life.

‘It Just Works’ being the mantra from Apple and you as the user of the apple product, do not have to understand how it works, just know that it does. Except that often it doesn’t or doesn’t quite and you won’t know why.

@thejaymo is concept curator at @stacktivism and Paul Graham Raven has created ‘Infrastructure Fiction‘.

Vinay Gupta (@leashless) has created Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps and written extensively on the infrastructure that keeps us alive.

We want to create an open access journal to disseminate the new ideas and thinking in this space. This is a blog post on starting the process and I will keep these going until we have one up and running or have decided that the area is already well served.

To this end we need to:

1. Check the landscape, what are the existing journals on infrastructure (critical or otherwise) and what is their approach? Are they papers on the latest implementation techniques for X technology or are they discussions on the implication of installing such a technology with such and environment and what could be the impact on the population of that environment.
2. Decide a domain to cover, is it about critical infrastructure, or is is critical thinking about infrastructure? Is it urban in scope? What does it encompass and what is outside of its remit?
3. Find a name.
4. Define an editorial process. Who will edit, how will review take place, how often will it publish, will it be online only or print and online?
5. Then launch journal.

(Somewhere in there we will attempt to find funding as well).

Since these discussions are already collaborative, if you have any thoughts on scope or ideas or name or anything, then please take part.

Events, Ideas, UnParty

Scaling the UnParty

It seems slightly odd to write this now, we have yet to hold the first UnParty UnConference but it has been raised in response to the last post, why not deal with Global Politics and thus global citizenship with these UnConference meetings.

To which my initial response is why not, people should and will bring the policies, ideas and issues that affect them, the things that concern them. If that is about an issue that is local then that is fine as it is engaging them and they are participating.

If the issues that concerns the people at the UnConference are issues around climate change or international arms trading then they can bring these concerns to the table.

Everything is recorded digitally and everyone can contribute and discuss online.

So, we could tag everything local or hyperlocal through to global.

When I started LazyGov I thought, a space to share ideas about what government is, what it should do, policy, regulation etc. I was told by some that ideas are what we have plenty off, it was tools and ‘projects’ that we needed.

I would suggest that whilst we may have plenty of ideas what we do not have is the breadth of possible discussion, in an inclusive way as possible. At least, we have some amazing tools online to do clever things and eventually everyone will be online, eventually.

LazyGov only worked if you had your own weblog, James’s OpenPolitics manifesto only works once you understand how Git/GitHub works, we need better interfaces into the digital space we are creating to record, shape and disseminate these ideas on policy and issues and governance.

The simplest interface to this digital world is talking.

Returning back to the global point that was the start of this response, I would expect within an UnConference that ideas would be raised that addressed local issues and some would be global in scope.

The trick is to look at each from both ends, to examine a local issue and pick out the points that can be abstracted to a global guidance and within a global idea look at the issues that would allow its local implementation.

If we reduce things down to rules (algorithms for global governance) then problems will arise, instead if we work along the idea of case law, case studies, examination and recording. One size does not fit all.

Of course there is nothing to stop someone running an UnParty UnConference and suggesting that for that meeting they look at Global Ideas.

Events, Ideas, UnParty

holding an UnParty UnConference

Have you heard Mark Thomas’ The Manifesto? Its been on Radio 4. The set up is simple, Mark visits various parts of the country and people are invited to submit their ideas to join the Peoples Manifesto. Some are very funny, some are a bit odd and others are very interesting. Mark will do research on some of the ideas, asking experts for their opinion etc.

You might also have seen a project by James Smith (@floppy) The Open Politics Manifesto hosted over on GitHub. Using the tools developers use to record, edit and ‘discuss’ manifesto ideas.

Yes, you do need a GitHub account and know how to use it a bit, James has written notes on how to participate but it can be seen as a hurdle.

Of course, participation in the Mark Thomas project is also limited, in fact I am not sure if it is still running,

Years ago I started a site called LazyGov.org, which was based on the code that was written by Ben Hammersley to run a site he owned called LazyWeb.org, which in turn was based on an idea by Matt Jones. The idea was simple, using trackback you could post something on your weblog and it would get reflected on the lazyweb/gov page, linking to your post.

Again it was a digital tool when, in reality the number of us online was still low. It is not totally inclusive.

So the next intervention I propose is to hold an UnParty UnConference, or a lot of them all over the country and as often as needed.

Basically,

  • Find A Venue
  • Tell people about it
  • Get policy ideas recorded online for discussion
  • Someone to facilitate the meeting
  • Hold the meeting, discuss and record

The only rule should be that you need to be non-partisan. This is not ideology lead, it should be a space to discuss ideas rationally and calmly. Use the tools of deliberation, debate, research. Encourage people to go out and find and present the facts to support or not an idea, be willing to compromise.

Once your meeting is over, record and share the conversations online, update the policy ideas.

Yes, there are plenty of steps to take next, from ideas though to action. This is just a stepping stone.

Uncategorized

Design and Protest

At Improving Reality 2013 in Brighton, during a panel session, one of the speakers, Tobias Revell briefly mentioned the ideas that design can be an antagonistic platform and the possibility that design could be a protest movement.

A flurry of tweets on the backchannel around this idea appeared and as I am involved in a college of art and design and I am interested in protest, activism and action I thought that this might be worthy of some further investigation.

An antagonistic platform is something I consider a space to investigate the tensions and conflicts between two or more actors. Through scenarios, provocations and role playing it should be possible to investigate and document the potential antagonisms and use this information, either in working towards resolution, evidence against one actor or another etc.

Something missed in the tweets that surrounded Tobias comment was a follow up for him, that this antagonistic space could be safe. This of course follows from a lot of the work that was presented on the day, these were design fictions and as such had yet to permeate into everybody’s everyday life.

Using the toolkit of design and the creation of fictions and scenarios and associated interventions you could explore certain antagonisms between actors in a safer space than ‘in the wild’

The artist and researcher Christian Nold presented a piece of work on Noise at the recent Participation In Science conference, held recently in London as a part of the Royal Geographic Societies annual conference. For the work, he has been working with local communities around Heathrow Airport, working to record the sound levels due to aircraft usage of the Airport. This is a politically charged issue, the expansion of Heathrow has a lot of investment attached to it but it would also greatly affect a large number of people who live in the area, with increased noise and the associated loss on the value of property that they own.

The work, as part of UCL’s Extreme Citizen Science research project is looking at ways of engaging the public in recording data, data that needs to be gathered to form part of a report on the proposed expansion.

Whilst developing tools and practiced to involve the community in collecting the data on their environment, Christian also developed a set of ‘interventions’, objects that use and respond to the data and provoke questions. For example, a simple receipt printer attached to a sound monitor, a receipt printed each time it recorded a sound above a preset limit. In a future could such receipts be used to clam compensation for sound pollution.

What was interesting was, at the conference, there were questions about the place of such parts of the work in the project. Science is supposed to be objective and not involved in the politics of the situation, yet these objects are imbued with the situation and political dialogue and work to provoke and question within that space, based on the underlying data collected in the ‘science part’ of the project.

Yesterday (as i write this) the iPhone 5s was launched, complete with fingerprint scanner and thus a mechanism for the everyday normalisation of biometric collection and use was released. This is though the post Snowden moment and whilst the theatre of techno-fetishism around the launch continued, the criticism behind the agenda of such technology was more noticeable. How long will this continue?

We are now working in a much more accelerated space. What is interesting is if design, art, critique on technology and practices can get out fast, so that by the time the technology is embedding itself into our everyday infrastructure we are already more conversant in how it works, why it does what it does and way it means to us in our lives.

I do not think that design is or will be a protest movement of itself, but it is part of the landscape on how we interact with each other and our environments, that protest ideas should make use of the tools of design and that design projects should be able to present the conflicts and hi light the issues, problems and conflicts in systems, processes, ideas and technologies.

Design can make the more abstract philosophies and ideas more accessible, more tangible and therefore more questionable and prod-able. Systems and methods of agency can be examined and questioned in a more accessible way. By developing the dialogues inside the safer space of the design space we can examine and extract and develop the ideas that are positive, that do make life better whilst retaining a record on the dialogue and process that lead to that decision.

I am thinking about hosting a one day conference on this, geekyoto style, if you might be interested the please fill in this form.

Uncategorized

notes on: The Preferable Future Research Unit

The Preferable Future Research Unit

I want to look at two terms that I have been using recently, both are just ways of framing how I am trying to think about things at the moment but they might be useful, including how I map these onto existing frameworks and ways of thinking.

These are terms that I have been thinking about to explore a grander project, to create a better world. Whilst I fear that we now run a risk of becoming numbed to the word Future we do need to peg a vision somewhere.

The terms are ‘Preferable Future/s’ and ‘Accelerated Now’. I do not think that they obfuscate what I am trying to communicate with them too much, no clever wordplay here. Lets take each one in turn.

‘Preferable Future/s’

If you have been following geekyoto for a while this will be familiar to you, it originates for me, from the geekyoto conference where Richard Sandford gave an amazing talk on how we talk about the future and our possible nihilistic obsession with the dark, pessimistic futures. If that is how we communicate our imagination to our children how will be give them the tools and the aims for thinking beyond that.

Richard Sandford at geekyoto 2008 from Mark Simpkins on Vimeo.

Richard Sandford tells us something about the Beyond Current Horizons research project that is happening at Futurelab.

http://www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/

Maybe it is a nostalgia. There are a generation of us on the internet now whose future was, when children, described by the visions of space colonies and exploration, Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds and the whole gamut of ‘Rescue Fiction’ where engineers, scientists and brave thinking people solved problems and saved lives. This was our future.

Cyberpunk critiqued this, whilst we were looking at the space colonies of the future the world was going through a complex neo-liberalisation that reinforced existing power structures. We were not going to get those futures we had hoped for, instead we had to return to an examination of economics and power. Instead, though, of taking the critique and mapping the positive paths through this to a better, preferable future many became seduced by the spectacle presented by the critique.

Preferable Future/s is the project to re-invigorate the critical role in examining the possible futures that we can see developing from now and map the paths through that does take us though to a preferable state in the future. If we obsess over our eventual destruction then we are more than capable of making that so. On the other hand we can focus our critical skills on the reality that we are continually creating and manipulating and pick out the preferable paths, the options and suggestions for a brighter, better world.


‘Accelerated Now’

This is simply the condition we are in now, processing the changes and developments as they happen. Science Fiction after cyberpunk did not lose its way but the critical thinking had to leap back to a previous time of accelerated change and re-imagine an industrial revolution with the communication and information density of now.

The economic collapse and the dearth of new ideological thinking has left us flailing, quickly latching onto whatever structure might just ‘float’ at the moment without a depth of critical thought or analysis. We thus possibly enable the new brokers of power almost unwittingly.

‘Accelerated Now’ is like Future Shock but possibly more manageable as we have become better able to address the densities of information that are now available. Yes, we still need more people to understand ‘how it all works’, understanding that code gives ideas agency within a computational culture is vital, being able to understand that code is useful.

The Preferable Future Research Unit

The goal of Preferable Future research is to enable critical thinking and collaboration across disciplines and to generate the tools, dialogues and objects that allow us to manage the accelerated now and move towards the future that we would prefer to see.

Working on projects that create projects and methods that allow us to sharpen our decisions towards preferable goals, working with those that are examining possible futures and helping gauge the best routes though them. The PFRU should be as much a path finding mission, explorers in the space of possibilities, developing the new maps for these territories.

The PFRU should be cross discipline and cross institutional. It’s home is in the network, with the nodes that can make an surface within the projects, models and thinking of the creators and explorers working now to pull us all through to a better world.

Ideas

elegance and seams

The thing with a well made, elegant suit or dress is that, when you look you can see how the parts go together, the workmanship in making it, the adding of resilience to the components that see the most wear and tear.

And a well made suit should stay with you for a very long time, because it is well made and strong in a lot of places, but can also be repaired or modified as you change.

The seams may not be obvious but they are certainly not invisible.

Code, Ideas, New Systems, Projects

Introducing the researchAgenda

I want to research how being more public and open about the subjects that you wish to research affects that research, does it make for a richer outcome? Does it mean that you start competing with others to get your results out sooner once you know that you and twenty others are working on similar topics? Or do you collaborate, maybe publish more, your own work plus work written together?

I sat down and hit the paralysis that I wrote about before, I want to change the world in these ways and right now I have no idea how to take the next step. Which idea is worth spending time on? which one not?

Of course, rather than just pick one work out the plan for it, then if it failed quickly move onto the next I decided to create another idea to address the problem.

researchAgenda is a simple site, simple because part of it is really me practicing my coding again after too many years just managing projects.

Using twitter, you sign in, and create a simple post, a title and a small block of text. Describe quickly what you are thinking of researching.

This can then be tweeted to your followers, who can, if they are interested visit the site, give you a positive vote if you think the idea is worth looking at, maybe leave a comment or maybe they know a reference you should be aware of, a paper on the web, or in a journal or another project by someone.

Each idea has its own view, so you can see all the comments, the suggested references and if it was your idea, you can press a button to start the project. What does this do? It clones a standard, default project in GitHub, creates a set of folders for data, documentation, references etc and a readme and contributor list that is based on the people who have added comments and references to your idea on researchAgenda.

Think of it as similar to HelpMeWrite for research.

At the moment there is nothing about the institution, nothing about how the project is reviewed or funded, or even a necessity to document what the outcome would be. It is currently just a space to write down the fact that you are interested in investigating further X. Maybe after feedback you get to refine what it is, maybe its a short project, you are going to spend a week just using a new technology and your outcome will be a blog post on what you found, good learning references etc.

Maybe though the outcome is more going to be more substantial. Can you take the input and form it into a proposal to go before one of the research councils, are you attached to an Institution that can manage the funding from such?

Of course, longer term this is, in itself a stake in the ground about creating a more public discourse about research, knowledge acquisition, generation and dissemination. Can you shape a research proposal an perform the primary work without being attached to a usual Institution? How are the outcomes of your work reviewed and published and how can the current models of academia bend to accept such work? Can they?

This does also tie into my previous posts, one on how to affect change, having a simple way to put a message ‘I want to do X’ that you can point to and ask for feedback is nice. Yes you can write a blogpost, or a facebook post or any number of other places but there is also something about the idea of a communal space, this is creating an simple ‘UnAcademia’ (ok, I’m not sure that is really the term to use, I could be quickly using up my valid excuses to use the Un- prefix). The other the Arts UnCouncil on alternative funding for arts and cultural activity.

I think as this stands, it would work for ideas around the arts and humanities, as well as for people who already operate outside the usual academic institutions. They can use the interest in a proposed research problem to help support trying to get funding for doing the work, for example. Would the idea work in other areas of research? Would bioscientists use such a platform to start staking out what they were interested in and maybe finding interest / collaborators outside their usual field/lab of interest?

There is nothing to say that you have to use the GitHub project, or you have to keep it open, maybe it can integrate into other online tools, maybe you can use this to help start parts of a research project that involve crowd sourcing of participation for microtasks?

researchAgenda will launch shortly in alpha, it is just a sketch in code but if you are interested in trying it out drop me a line and I’ll make sure you know when its live.

Art

The Arts UnCouncil – The Provocations

To further the discussion on The Arts UnCouncil I want to come up with a series of provocations, statements, notes and ideas that are coming up when talking about this. These are just starting points for the discussion, a few small entries on the great grid that is the UnCouncil.

Provocation 1

‘I already pay my taxes, haven’t I already funded this kind of activity?’

Provocation 2

‘In doing this are we showing that there is an appetite for arts and cultural activity with the public?’

‘Is this a way of showing that funding by central government and local government need to, or are at least justified in spending money on this and the cuts that have been made should be re-assessed?’

Provocation 3

‘By doing this we show that funding by central government is unnecessary, as we are funding the activity that we want, so they can make further cuts?’

Provocation 4

‘But what actually is art, what counts as cultural activity, where are the lines drawn, if we draw them at all and who decides?’

design for everyday life