A museum of collective vitality

What are museums for?

One answer to this question comes toward the end of Orhan Pamuk’s epic novel, The Museum of Innocence, as the anti-hero Kemal visits thousands of museums in Europe, Asia and America. He’s planning to open his own house museum in tribute to Füsun, the forbidden love of his life – he’s been collecting objects he associates with her for years, from her cigarette butts to the ceramic dogs on her family’s television set. Pondering the purpose of collecting, he comes to the simple conclusion that museums are time compressed into space.

Looking at it from the direction of visitors rather than collectors… within the space of the museum we decompress the assembled material – expand it to witness something of the flow of time – what happened, how, and what it might mean. But is knowledge and understanding the end point?

In another take on their purpose of museums, New Curator describes museums as the city’s lymph nodes, immersed in its central nervous system, providing immunity against its ills. This model suggests a purpose beyond the (co)production of knowledge and understanding. Here, museums play a role in maintaining public health and happiness.

I’d like to reconceive of the National Museum of Australia in these terms. If a city museum can contribute to a city’s vitality, then a national museum can contribute to a nation’s. And now that we have a new director keen to take the museum into the future and willing to engage with contemporary issues, it is timely to reconsider its purpose. Could it be to promote our collective health in both social and environmental terms?

What would such a museum look like? It would certainly host celebrations – of admirable qualities of people and country. But it would also work to heal historical wounds, to tend to our collective psyche and our ecology. It would enlist visitors as active collaborators in witnessing, in recognising, in empathising, and provide means for us to respond in constructive ways. In this way, the National Museum would cultivate our collective vitality.

Ubicomp, (museum) space and the social order

What follows is a Master of Digital Design assignment – a ‘critical response’ to five papers on the topic of ‘Ubiquitous computing and urban informatics’. It includes (bonus!) references to a few other papers too.

Mark Weiser’s 1991 vision of technology blended invisibly into environments may not have quite materialised, but as Adam Greenfield points out, today’s phones, tablets and multitouch displays bear a close resemblance to his description of tabs, pads and boards. Ubicomp is spreading in many directions, from many sources. For example in Pachube, which serves out data streams about connected environments from people around the world, we can witness a growing wave of DIY ubicomp.

We can get a strong sense of technology’s wide and deep pervasion from Dan Hill’s account of the complex mesh of data flows in an imaginary-but-realistic city. Sensors, emittors and recorders are embedded in streets and buildings and carried by people doing business, passing by and hanging around. Data flows either with or without individual intent, and either functionally or dysfunctionally – in technical, personal and social terms.

Unlike the disembodied space of virtual worlds, ubiquitous computing works on, around and through human bodies; and in physical space, social relations are always at play. Ideally, we all have access (both read- and write-) to the data flows, as well as the ability to evade them. Ideally, we are also attentive to the affect of technology, and our interactions, on ourselves and the world around us. But real-world social space is messy. Anne Galloway warns that when technologies are invisible, so too are the power relations they replicate. The danger here is of our docile complicity in reproducing the dominant social order.

To mitigate against this risk, one of Greenfield’s ethical guidelines for UX in ubicomp settings is critical – ‘Be self-disclosing’. Seamlessness is rightly a feature, as Weiser imagined, but it must be optional, and reversible. And as with all new technologies, we must develop literacy about its use. We need to know that we have the right and the ability to ask the system to reveal itself – as well as its data.

Are there implications here for the digital design of museum space? For Foucault, museum space was heterotopia – ‘other space’ –  space that intervenes in ordinary space, and complicates our perceptions of it, illuminating and potentially contesting and inverting real-world social relations. To best serve visitors in their task of re-evaluating real-world social space, museum displays must not be seamless. They must ‘manifest their metatext’ (Lumley) precisely so that visitors can perceive the social relations implicit in both the product and process of their representation. Because of their particular role in representing ordinary space – because museum visitors are already immersed in a field of cultural technologies – the imperative for computational technology to be seamless might be greater here. If we can ignore the technology, do we gain a clearer view of social conditions? Or is it better to conceive of the technology as another layer of metatext, and therefore to render it visible?

Certainly, Weiser’s notion that ubicomp would be calm technology seems a better fit for museum spaces than the whizz-bang often associated with technology. It does not help museum visitors to be distracted by technology at the expense of their social engagement. So in museum building, exhibition and application design, that is something to note.

References:

Foucault, Michel. Of other spaces (PDF). Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 16(1), 1986: 22–7. (or here’s an HTML version)

Galloway, Anne. Resonances and everyday life: Ubiquitous computing and the city (PDF), 2003.

Greenfield, Adam. All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings. Boxes and Arrows, December 1, 2004.

Greenfield, Adam. Real life: Weiser FTW. Speedbird, April 16, 2010.

Haque, Usman. Pachube, patching the planet: Interview with Usman Haque. Interview by Tish Shute, January 28, 2009.

Hill, Dan. The street as platform, City of Sound, February 11, 2008.

Lumley, Robert. The Museum Time-Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge, 1988.

Weiser, Mark. The computer for the 21st century (PDF), Scientific American 256, no. 3, 1991: 66–75. Reprinted in IEEE Pervasive Computing, January 2002.

Not explicitly referred to (I only had 500 words!), but also informing my thinking here, were these two papers presented to the Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia on 16 April 2010:

• Bell, Genevieve. ‘U are happy life: Making sense of new technologies’.
• Manson, Rob. ‘Collections are leaking into the real world’.

In the neighbourhood

Applications are almost due for the Bold Ideas, Better Lives challenge.

I was thinking to submit an idea – something that came out of reading Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence. But I haven’t done enough research or had enough (as in, any!) feedback to know if it’s worthwhile. And I just realised that on top of writing a 1900-word intro to the idea, you’re meant to put in a 3-minute pitch. Then there’s the small issue that I’m not sure I’m keen to champion this idea to the point of implementation. I’d use it. I’d be happy if it worked! And I’d be more than willing to help make it manifest. But the idea of talking it up through the whole process of shortlisting and selection… Well, I’m probably just not that much of a champion. In that regard, anyway.

So instead, I offer the first 700 words of an idea to anyone who happens to read this, and hope for some (constructive) critical feedback, or at least some expressions of interest.

What is your idea? (100 words)

I’d like to strengthen communities by facilitating real-world interactions through an online hyper-local aggregator and hub. Enter The Neighbourhood – a platform for creating a directory, noticeboard and town square for residents, visitors, business-people and local government to exchange information and ideas about local conditions, events, opportunities and ideas. It would feed information about the weather, infrastructural and social issues, jobs, trade, community activities. It would invite and enable people to share goods, ideas, and media – in other words, to funnel relevant parts of our current activities for the benefit of the community around our physical home.

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address? (300 words)

City living can be isolating – especially in very car-oriented cities – and in many neighbourhoods people are almost unknown to each other, having very little contact. We have opportunities to share information, experiences, goods and ideas through workplaces, distributed networks of family and friends, and digital communities. But where we live is important; our local community is potentially a rich source of interaction. If we have a lost pet, or surplus home-grown zucchinis, if we are creating an art installation, or need a new footpath – in all these circumstances, a good outcome can depend on the quality of our local relationships. Our individual and communal wellbeing could be dramatically improved by a digital town square that facilitated real-world relationships. If we know each other better, we would be in a better position to take good care of each other – to look after our neighbours’ house, garden, or pets when we’re away; to look out for the neighbourhood children; to care for, listen to and learn from our old folk.

The Neighbourhood would build constructive real-world relationships – and thereby improve collective wellbeing – through a simple and useful aggregation of relevant information, and hub for activity both online and in physical space. As well as the community benefits, an actively engaged community would be advantageous for businesses and governments. For businesses, it would constitute a highly effective channel for communicating with residents, promoting local products and services, and tailoring them in accordance with feedback. As the dawn of Government 2.0 approaches, access to a hyper-local community network would also be highly beneficial for two-way communications – genuine dialogue – to identify priorities, refine policies and so on.

The Neighbourhood would cultivate goodwill and generate social capital.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place? (300 words)

This idea was inspired by Steven Johnson’s book Emergence. He looks at how swarms or networks operate in micro-organisms, insect colonies, human cities and the internet, and finds that at every scale – and in the absence of a master planner – local interactions suffice to bring about emergence – a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

I was thinking about this notion of emergence in relation to my own neighbourhood. I live on the main street in a suburb of Canberra, where although people do walk past, most traffic is motorised and, particularly on Friday nights, vandalism and ‘criminal damage’ are common. (I know this from experience but also because my street makes a regular appearance in the Neighbourhood Watch newsletter.) I don’t believe people are the problem here. I think our cities and lifestyles are serving us poorly, and we need a solution based on goodwill rather than fear. Surely, the more we interact locally, the better off as a community we’ll be.

Steven Johnson has in fact implemented a similar idea in Outside In – a platform for aggregating hyperlocal news, blogs and discussion. From my perspective, however, it is limited in that it’s not focused on the physical world except insofar as it uses location to organise the news feeds, and it’s not intended to facilitate interaction, only to supply information.

I’m actually surprised there isn’t yet a thing such as The Neighbourhood already. Aggregation; social media; cloud computing; we-think; and emergence – all these capacities enhance our potential to improve the way physical neighbourhoods operate. It seems we could all benefit by augmenting our physical communities with a digital overlay – by using our digital networks to enhance and empower our local communities. Such would be the point of The Neighbourhood.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

In planning this post, I had a strong urge to write about Ada Lovelace herself. Reading a chapter by Howard Rheingold, I marvelled at the clarity and potency of Ada’s vision for computer programming, in which ‘the mental and material […] are brought into intimate connexion with each other’. Indeed, we unite this binary every time we use computers either to translate ideas into form, or to expand our consciousness of the world around us. Amazingly, Ada wrote that 100 years before computers existed.

Then I briefly thought to celebrate Evelyn Fox Keller – for figuring out that each cell of slime mould is an agent of its own aggregational destiny – ie, that there are no commanding cells directing all the others to form into a mass, moving entity; for unearthing the dispersed history of thinking about decentralised forms of authority, which has since coalesced into the field of emergence; and for her meta-work on feminist science, which is how I first encountered her.

But the achievements of both women have been well documented. I prefer to write about someone with a smaller digital footprint, even if it means traversing into more foreign technological terrain. So here is a brief tribute to an atmospheric scientist – a climatologist – whose contribution to science is mostly mysterious to me, but whose capacities for independent, steadfast investigation and analysis are unquestionably impressive.

My Mum reckons that my younger sister, Julie, was inspired to embark on a scientific career by our step-uncle, a paleontologist, when he gave her a piece of dinosaur egg from South Australia. She won the Australian National University Medal for her Honours degree in physics, and by age 30 she had a PhD in atmospheric gaseous exchange – you can read it here. I don’t grok its scientific significance, but I know that the research involved camping in a forest in Siberia, and building metal towers to climb in order to collect air samples. That’s quite an effort.

I also know that in her work for the federal Department of Parliamentary Services, she wrote a report, Climate change: The case for action, that dissolves any excuse the Australian government might have had for failing to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It says that the climate is changing; that most of the change is due to human influences; that the changes present serious risks; that those risks can be managed; and that the longer we delay, the more drastic our mitigation measures will need to be. It’s clear! (It’s just a pity that the problem here is not purely scientific – mostly, it’s cultural. People are apparently not yet ready to accept those mitigation measures.)

As well as being scientifically inclined (and successful), she is a rockclimber, adventurer, nature photographer, mother of two, animal lover (she has three Siberian huskies and two cats) and since last month, medical student. So, I celebrate Ada Lovelace Day by celebrating my multi-talented sister, Julie Styles.

Coming out creative

With some hesitation – even trepidation – I have published some pages about me and some of the things I’ve made. Why the worry? Well, because I’m no extrovert. Plus, I’m in some kind of transition phase, so it’s even harder than it usually is to talk about who I am and what I do. Plus, I’m nervous. Change is a little bit scary. Thrilling but, mmm, scary.

I love drawing, and making things, and pootling about with software for making things that both look nice and mean something. But between a PhD, parenthood and full-time paid work, my energy for making things has wandered off to the sidelines. It is feeling neglected, and no doubt it has shrivelled a bit. I suppose I have prioritised being clever over being creative, for pragmatic reasons (although I read somewhere this week that the perceived value of creativity is on the rise). Actually, I think I have not ever really believed in my creativity. I think I thought I’m too introverted to be arty. I thought I was more your logical, left-brained type. But now I’m wondering why I can’t be that and creative. I want integration!

Now, I’ve quit my full-time job. Now, I am determined to give my professional endeavours more of a creative curve. I have lots of ideas – and I’m looking forward to exploring them. It feels good.

A manifesto for wellbeing

This is how I want to be, and what I need from those around me, in order to want to be around them. That includes family and friends, but also colleagues and other associates.

1. Be open, in your heart and in your mind – there is goodness all around.
2. Be real – it can take courage, but it’s the only way to engage.
3. Be nice – know that your thoughts, words and actions shape the world.

Lately it seems that simple.

Innovative ideas

A few comments on Friday’s Innovative Ideas Forum at the National Library of Australia…

A bit of faith in humanity goes a long way

From my POV, the most interesting aspect of the forum was that one key theme was so not-new – trust in and respect for the public / consumers / audiences / users – whatever we want to call them. Four of the presenters suggested in some way that trust as an essential element of contemporary cultural work – Marcus Gillezeau, Mark Scott, Rose Holley and Darren Sharp. This is an absolutely critical point. But it has been said many a time before, especially in relation to the library sector. It was the issue that was most discussed in 2006 when I posted a paper about Web 2.0. And it’s all over the web now – just try googling ‘radical trust’.

As government-funded cultural workers – as people in positions of cultural authority – we need to lay aside our fears, withhold our judgement, and actively resist our will-to-control – and trust and respect our audiences, radically and fundamentally. If we assume the best of people, and build systems based on radical trust (which can include transparency features and safeguards such as version tracking and rollback functions), then it’s possible to get the brilliant results that the Library is getting through its Newspapers Digitisation Program – thousands of people correcting millions of words, because they want to help. As Rose Holley reported, people are motivated by the trust and respect the Library is showing them.

The opposite is also true, and I bet we all have this experience: lack of trust is a powerful demotivator.

But clearly, hearing the words and seeing the success stories is not sufficient to engender the cultural shift we need in order to build trust-based systems. Every single time I hear (or talk) about a project involving user-generated content, someone invariably asks the question about the vandals.

Well, yes it happens that some people do dodgy things, by accident and by design. But it’s better to build a system that enables public participation for public benefit than to preclude that participation and benefit on the assumption of ill-will. Only then can we allow and benefit from user-led innovation  – thanks to Darren Sharp for bringing this notion to the forum (and hear, hear to the recently-released Venturous Australia report, which pointed out that governments have been pretty good at fostering top-down innovation but fare badly when it comes to innovating from the bottom up).

Talking the talk but baulking at the walk

Despite lugging my huuuuge Mac laptop with the idea of swimming along in the tweetstream while I listened… I was one of the who-knows-how-many who couldn’t connect, even after more IP addresses were made available. Well – I did manage it at 4.45pm from the foyer, after everyone had gone home 😦

So as someone willing but unable to participate in that way, I was disappointed that the social media channels that had been set up for the event were not integrated in any way into the forum itself – rather, there was an unfortunate (and ironic, given the subject) disconnect between the presenters and the audience.

Perhaps the next forum could be a more radical experiment in the form of the forum – perhaps we could collaborate to create some innovative ideas.

A phenomenon that passed me by…

I admit I had never once heard a jot about Scorched, the ambitious and fascinating all-media creation of Marcus Gillezeau and co. I’m not a watcher of commercial tv, so no surprise there. But I’m a user of social media, and did not hear about it that way either. Would have been interesting to see a show of hands as to how many people at the forum had heard of the project, watched the telemovie, participated in the community. Lots about it is interesting and worthy of further discussion – in particular, the relationships between fact / fiction, and commercial / non-commercial culture. And what happens to the community now that there’s no more funding?

Wondrous art

Donna Ong, 2006, Secret, interiors: chrysalis

This artwork makes me wonder. Is it a childish experiment, like giving your doll a haircut, not knowing that in her case it’s forever? Or is it more sinister – a cruel act of punishment, played out on dolls in lieu of a real adversary? Or could the act of pickling represent preservation, even protection?

For me, its ambiguity is appealing.

How do you respond to it?

Reading the textbook is not enough

Here’s an idea I like:

Students should not read textbooks; they should write them.

Bruce Tognazzini said it in the 1990s, and David Weinberger considers it in a story in The Filter, published by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Weinberger was initially ambivalent, but since the advent of wikis he has warmed to the notion. He describes how the collective, collaborative – and no doubt contentious – act of crafting a coherent, accurate wiki on the subject of study is itself educational:

Let them argue about how to organize it. Keep the discussion pages up. Keep the differences visible. Let them fill it with links. Let them connect with other students in other schools creating related wikis.

A class’s wiki is not going to be as complete, well-grounded or well-written as a good textbook. But students will learn more by writing one than by cribbing and cramming from a professional textbook.

In my (by now, predictable) view, the same principle applies to museum exhibitions and websites. If you’re only ever engaged in a passive way, as a consumer, it’s hard to remain interested. But if you have the chance to think through the issues of what to put on display, how to arrange and describe the items, and what they mean, it’s a faaaar more interesting experience. A journey, rather than a sushi train of neatly prepackaged ideas. At 5 to midnight, my metaphors are failing me, but I hope you know what I mean.

I’d like to see more programs that work on that principle. I’d love to hear about yours.

(Thanks to Mal for the pointer.)

What makes a good leader?

A couple of months ago I heard Allen Behm, a political and risk analyst from Knowledge Pond talking about leadership. Apart from a bunch of engaging stories about good and bad leaders he has known, the take-home message was that effective leadership requires three practices:

• maintain your integrity – be a decent human
• be comfortable in your own skin – recognise your strengths and your limitations
• welcome dissent – foster a culture of contestability

It’s simple, really. Which is not to say it’s easy.