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Summary, Readin III, Oona Raadelma

Some notes about our discussion.

There is always some kind of morality in the object/artifact. The seat belt example in Bruna Latour’s writing can be seen as authoritative and imperative, but there is also a need for some moral guidance in society. The designer has the power to “put” the morality in the object.

Standards set our thinking. When we think about paper one usually imagines the A4 format. A4 is like a stereotype of paper. Standards also shape our language. For instance in the United States of America the word ‘sharpie’ is in common use to mean a marker pen even though sharpie pen is actually a commercial brand.

Free energy is a political choice and technology frees labour. Where do people go after they are “set free”? 

Efficiency can be seen as an exhausting demand of the capitalistic society. Still there is beauty in efficiency, in machines and technological innovations. 

Technologies are shaped by humans, but the technologies also shape us. Artificial Intelligence brings another dimension to this duality. It is a circular chain of actions: we shape A.I., A.I. learns from us, we are shaped by A.I. and we start shaping it again since our habits and ways of thinking have changed, and so on. When talking about technologies we have to remember that not everybody has access to them. When talking about efficiency and free energy, that is in some way a privilege of the first world and most of the third world countries are lacking behind.

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Summary, Reading III (Annukka Laine)

Would you rather live in a modern, streamlined house, in a modern neighbourhood, in a modern city, or would you rather live in an imperfect, sometimes inexplicable house in a confusing neighbourhood, in a cobblestoned city? Humans get attached to imperfection – maybe it reminds us of those before us, the artisans, the bricklayers, the painterns and decorators.

Is universal design possible? First an artifact is accessible to only few, then through adjustments, plotting and drafting you create something that can be offered to the masses. After that you think of those with special needs. Is this ideal?

Designers often have an “the ideal user” they want to reach, but that idea in itself contains discriminatory echoes. What about those who do not fit the mold of an ideal user?

Why are the British so attached to their irrattional systems of measurement? Pounds, stones, feet, gallons. Are they an important cornerstone of British identity? Often you don’t realize you have taken something for granted until you visit a place where they do things differently.

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Reading III: The New Materiality of Design, Oona Raadelma

Some thoughts on readings III: ‘‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’’(2008) by Bruno Latour, Workers of the World, Conform!(2017) by Nader Vossoughian and What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A definition for ordinary folk(2009) by Ian Bogost.

I found the first text by Bruna Latour a bit confusing and felt kind of irritated of the way the text was written, especially how the writer pointed at the reader and switched constantly the way the reader’s profession was named. I didn’t like the style of how Latour speaks to the reader directly, it was too ”want to be” witty and self-assertive. 

However, there were many interesting and incisive points made in Latour’s writing. We cannot understand how societies work without an understanding of how technologies shape our everyday lives. Anthropomorphism is present in our everyday lives, and even still when it comes to objects and technologies. I personally, for instance, have a quite rough dialogue with Adobe programs if the programs aren’t working the way I would want them to. In his writing Latour also gives an example of the seat belt, how an object can be authoritative. If the seat belt is not on the driver, newer cars make noise and show probably a light to alarm the driver. Is this kind of authoritarianism still bad? Isn’t there some kind of morality put into the object that is needed? The seat belt example shows an orwellian aspect of the objects and technologies that we have got used to in our daily lives. Latour also writes that “every piece of an artifact becomes fascinating when you see that every wheel and crank is the possible answer to an objection.” That is true, the closer you look into an artifact a whole new world opens up to you.

I found Nader Vossoughian’s text really interesting. It is easy to take some everyday objects, like paper, for granted without realizing that these things have gone through a chain of designing and standartizing. The paper formats are just one example how our world has been given to us. Vossoughian writes about the German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald who is one iniator of the universal paper formats. In Ostwald’s view with the right technical adjustments and systems, society could not only be salvaged but liberated – but standardization can also be associated with discipline and surveillance. Vossoughian uses the Nazis as an example. Thus, one could see that standartization could be a some sort of an imperative. Although standartization can be authorative, these kind of innovations eases the work flow and like Vossoughian writes, makes certain thighs and actions more efficient. Nowadays, efficiency is seen as a highly desirable feature when it comes to every aspect of life. One should accomplish a lot to gain some selfworth and those who get tired of running are seen as so called nobodies. The athmosphere of the status quo is highly competitive. But isn’t there a need also for inefficiency? The more there is automazation the more people are liberated to do something else. What is that something else is the question. Do we have to compete with the automazation to be worthy workers or should we use the spare time to do something the society sees as inefficient?

I also started to think artificial intelligence while reading the texts. Can it be seen as an object? When it comes to object-oriented ontology, it can be. After all, in OOO, all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects. A.I. is something that learns from us, it imitates our behavior, but can be better than us, beat us in chess et cetera. This rises again not only the questions about efficiency, but also about the morality and authorative features of an object. Will AIs evolve to surpass human beings? What if they become smarter than humans and then try to control us? Will computers make humans obsolete? How do machines affect our behaviour and interaction?

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Summary, Reading III by Federico Simeoni, 5 oct 2020

– Naivety of the ‘60s

During the 1960s, there was a very specific idea of how the average city consumer should live. Consequently, interior design and architecture developed certain standards on this stereotyped idea. The result was kitchens that were not meant to serve more than one (or two?) person. The consumer must live a solitary life without any passion for baking or cooking: just ready-to-heat dishes, bought at high prices in the nearest minimarket. This crafting of the target makes us smile now for its naivety: it is too precise and does not expect any kind of exceptions. Indeed, now the design is trying to satisfy all the possible types of living. 

– New standards

It is interesting how architects design with a particular idea of living in mind. But nowadays, buildings get renewed: they are re-thought in all their possibilities to solve the needs of contemporary humans beings. Also, the very artifacts force architecture to change direction. An example can be simply the small garages (and roads) of the 50s; or the number of electrical outlets in the contemporary house.

– Working on A4

Working with standards tools and media can limit the way we think and consequently, the quality of the work. Can in a banal, ordinary context emerge something extra-ordinary? Indeed, an artist would rarely work on a super standard A4 sheet. And if it does so, it is on purpose, to directly deal with that particular medium or standardize practice.

– Discriminating targets

Designers when working imagine a target. This very idea can be the source of discrimination. Doors that are not meant to be opened by weak bodies or people in the wheelchair; phones that cannot be used by small-sized hands; sinks positioned low because just women are supposed to use them.

– Universal Design

However, not all can come at once. At first, you have the invention, with its geniality and its complications: it can be used just by a little pioneering élite. Then you have the spread of this new technology to the majority of the mass: just the basic adjustments in order to make it enjoyable by the most. Only at the end can come universal design, that is the real empathic care that makes services, artifacts, and whatever accessible by literally everyone.

– Standards vs. Uniqueness

We should try to find a sort of equilibrium between standardized products and practice and uniqueness. Too many standards generate alienation and de-humanization; too much uniqueness generates confusion.

– Anthropomorphism 2.0

Latour’s groom is anthropomorphic in three senses:

it has been made by humans;

it substitutes a human action;

shapes human action by prescriptions.

Nowadays we can add a new one: the fact that machines shape themselves on humans. Artificial Intelligence learns our behaviour and changes its own in order to offer a better service. Futuristic movies like Her are good examples of this.

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summary, reading III by Emma Johansson

There is beauty in efficiency as well as in inefficiency. A body that works as it should, with all of its parts playing in harmony is beautiful and pleasant for the body itself. Inefficiencies and irregularities in the body might cause pains and troubles, digestion problems and other health issues. For the body to function efficiently it requires all its parts to work in cooperation, the organs to do their specified tasks, the genes to not carry predetermined tendencies to malfunctions, the mind to indulge the body in certain activities and not others, e.g ingesting nutritious and digestible matter and not poisonous ones, the muscles to move the body around in a specific way and amount in order to maintain its vitality. It is easy to agree that it is preferable to be a body that functions as efficiently as possible, the opposite equals suffering and ultimately death.

Taking traffic as another example, an efficient traffic is certainly much more desirable than an inefficient one. Traffic flows effortlessly when the traffic lights are synchronized, the drivers follow the traffic rules and the driving instructors have managed to get the drivers to internalize these rules, the roads and cars are well maintained etc. When all these parts work harmoniously together driving is pleasurable, commuting is fast and safe, and less emissions are created due to less idling. The opposite situation wastes time and resources and burdens the drivers mental health. Here too it's obvious that efficiency leads to a more pleasant and beautiful result.

Still there are plenty of examples where inefficiency and irregularity seems to be the desired ideal. Picturesque old towns with cobble stone streets attract masses of tourists and hand made artisanal products are considered worth collecting. There seems to be something very humane and organic in irregularity and a certain degree of inefficiency, even. Perfect efficiency and the complete lack of irregularity ends up feeling cold and alienating. It leads to the experience of the absence of a human touch and an absence of an individual subjective user, inhabitant or agent. This is supposedly one of the reasons behind the failure and unpopularity of modernist architecture. The housing blocks that were to accommodate people in an as efficient as possible manner ended up alienating the inhabitants with its cold uniformity. This is also why the hyper controlled human-made dutch landscape feels utterly devoid of nature and excitement.

When regularity and efficiency reaches a level where there is no space for surprises and interventions, the creativity of the inhabitant or user becomes unnecessary, unimportant and undesirable. Things might work effortlessly but a feeling of involvement, agency and meaning disappear. Maybe this is why in a time when large parts of society and our surroundings are regulated and standardized we experience an attraction to the imperfect, crafted and old-fashioned, sometimes erroneous and impractical methods, surroundings and objects. Sometimes it's about nostalgia, there is a romantic feeling in chopping wood and heating the house with the stove. But this nostalgia is as much fed by the distance, the lack of knowing the heavy labor of constantly going through that process as a necessity. We might go back to our accustomed ways quite gladly after a while of chopping wood, being stuck in traffic jams on narrow cobble stone streets and baking all of our bread from scratch.

But might there still be some truth in this longing for irregularity and inefficiency besides a naive nostalgia of a romantic or a tourist? We read things as efficient or inefficient, regular or irregular from a human perspective. The woods might seem irregular for the urban dweller, inefficient or unfit for their activities, for traveling forward in a straight line as fast as possible. But the woods aren't randomly constructed, these same regularities, systems, programs of action exist there just as much as in the human body and the infrastructure of the city. They just might be unknown or incomprehensible for us and we might be of no importance in them.

There is something consoling in not being the centre of things, of having an insignificant and minute part in a larger context. In our personal lives and surroundings, cities and societies it is hard to distance oneself from the whole. One has responsibilities that accumulate and everything is built with people in mind and presuming certain behavior from them. Our trajectories and actions are anticipated and designed before we conduct them. In a more irregular surrounding, or in a surrounding not regulated for us one occupies a different position. The surrounding might be more hostile and we might be less equipped to survive and thrive in them, but there is a different sort of space for imagination, creativity and freedom. This is why the hyper-controlled dutch landscape depressed and dulled me, but on the other hand sleeping in a tent after a week of rain and after the best snacks run out made me want nothing more than my central heated apartment next to a 24/7 supermarket.

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intro reading III by Emma Johansson

Reflections on Latour, Bruno (2008). ‘‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts

Vossoughian,  Nader  (2017). Workers of the World, Conform! 

And Bogost, Ian (2009). What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A definition for ordinary folk

Technology and standardization are developed to delegate and translate tasks and functions from human actors to nonhuman ones, in the name of efficiency, in order to get a certain thing done with a minimum effort and time. Making the best use of energy and time is the ultimate goal of this development. In this way more energy is liberated to use freely or to further develop as a society and species. This might deskill people, by nonhuman actors doing tasks better that a human worker would, or doing tasks that are tedious or dangerous for human workers, liberating their time and energy for other use. A lot of times though, the individuals who's energy is newly liberated, might not be all that free to choose where they'll put this energy next. In an era of efficiency and growth there is always a new task to take up the freed energy. As long as the ultimate goal is to harness all energy and effort to expansion and growth, this increasing efficiency does not mean increased freedom for the individual.

Artifacts are designed by humans. They are like extensions of people and institutions working on distance, tentacles that penetrate time and spaces. Artifacts are shaped by people and they shape the world in which people function. They also shape the behavior of these people, encouraging, limiting, prohibiting and facilitating certain behaviors, on the expense of others. They might keep us in order, surveilling that we behave according to the prevailing moral standards of society or of an institution or organization. When they manage to maintain a certain moral standard of behavior in the population, who is the source of the morality in that equation, the artifact, e.g. a surveillance camera or a traffic light, the population that behaves accordingly, or the designers or commissioners of the artifact?

Together with institutions, organizations and artifacts, people build systems of negotiations, chains of tasks, orders and responses. Programs of action. If a program of action has a certain ideal outcome, it is broken into actions between the parties involved, humans and nonhumans. If a certain task is delegated to one party, the responsibility of a reaction to that is on another party. This creates a chain shaped by nonhumans that are shaped by humans that shape nonhumans that keep shaping humans, and so on. A specialization and division of labor that follows in a trajectory similar to the fordist factory and its production line. More and more tasks traditionally associated to monotonous factory work or lower working class jobs in general are done by nonhuman actors. Concurrently, when technology and society develops, also new tasks emerge, new actions in these programs of actions that needs to be taken up by humans. The principle of division of labor and the principle of exploitation of the energy of the working and middle classes develops together with the development of working environments and tasks. These principles reshape and adapt to new environments that become increasingly immaterial and abstract and hence also increasingly difficult to grasp and detect. When knowledge, information, lifestyle and identities become monetarizable and central to our culture it is more and more difficult to make out when one is working and who collects the profits from it.

When the standardizing protocols and technological artifacts shapes their surroundings, and hence the reality in which humans operate, they have immense power. Even though following a certain protocol or using a certain artifact in a specific way wouldn't be explicitly mandatory or reinforced by law it might be so paramount to the reality in which the humans operate that rejecting it might have similar consequences as if it indeed would be mandatory. In this way the protocols and artifacts push certain values and politics and render others invisible or difficult to follow. The door example in Latour's texts illustrates this. The hydraulic door that closes itself after it is opened is so heavy that it discriminates people that don't have the physical force to pull it open, e.g. elderly people and children, not to mentions users of wheelchairs or strollers. It also discriminates people who carry something in their hands, like packages or deliveries. The one's that tend to be carrying deliveries are working class people, since it's mostly working class jobs that involve delivering packages in our society. This mundane and simple example of a door shows how this particular artifact makes the life of some people easier, while for others it becomes more difficult. The ones that do not benefit from this artifact are presumedly the ones that weren't seen as important to take in consideration while designing this door, they are not the main target user for it. They might not even been taken into account at all. The reason why they aren't the main users of this door is because they aren't the main user of the building with the door. They don't work in the highest positions in the building, or they are not the ones that bring in most money to the building as costumers. This means that they weren't the ones with most power and agency in this particular building and the choice of door now results in them having even less of that in the future. These doors block, or at least distance their access to whatever is behind the door. This shapes their surroundings and makes some spaces more distant from the area they roam in, makes some spaces feel hostile, impenetrable or energy traps. This door presumes a certain set of abilities of the user, and hence excludes the potential users who aren't equipped with said abilities. The door does not need a sign that says no entry for disabled people, elderly people, delivery personnel, children and caretakers of small children, its attributes take care of that this message is delivered implicitly.

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Reading III: The New Materiality of Design (Annukka Laine)

An essay about kitchens inspired by this week’s reading material: Bruno Latour’s Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts (Universal Publishers, 2008), Vader Vossiughian’s Workers of the World, Conform! (2017) and Ian Bogost’s What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A definition for ordinary folk (2009).

Postmodernists in the Modern Kitchen

I live in an apartment built in 1962, the prime time of Finnish modernist architecture. It boasts several modern features, such as large, south facing windows, strictly square shaped rooms and the lack of spontaneous decorative elements. Everything in it is made for function. This is quite a change from our previous apartment, which had been built and maintained with a craftsmanship like approach. Walls had been put up willy nilly, doors nailed shut and hidden when no longer in use, electric lines run haphazardly where need be. No two apartments looked the same in the house. This house, to contrast that one, only has two types of apartments, all alike. One day I accidentally went to the wrong hallway and only noticed it from the fact that the stairs were on the left instead of right. 

The kitchen is by far the smallest room in the apartment. It has just the basics and nothing more - place for a small fridge, one large cupboard for dry ingredients, one cupboard for glasses and plates with a dish drying rack on the other side, one chest of drawers for utensils, a stainless steel sink with cupboards for trash and cleaning supplies and a small worktop. It is a perfect example of modern design battling with the concept of urbanization – you are not meant to cook large batches of food or bake your own bread, you are supposed to pick up ready made meals daily from one of the grocery stores close by and heat them in the kitchen. Only thing you need to clean is a single plate, a fork and a knife. The previous owner of the apartment did this quite happily for several decades, but for our postmodern perspectives this is not enough. We want to make food. We like to see ourselves as explorers and experimentalists, cooking Chinese, Mexican or Japanese food daily while also baking our own sourdough bread. 

For a while the kitchen’s reaction to us was hostile. Our single cupboard was groaning under the load of spices and ingredients, the sink hidden under dirty dishes. Modernist design does not mold to the needs of a single human, it circumscribes the human to fit the model of prescribed user. We clashed with the kitchen. For a while we tried to fight against the unshakeable force of standardization, forcing it to bend to our will. That did not go well, as the kitchen in the spirit of a true artifact has no need to give up a fight. Then we stopped hitting our heads against a wall and started circumnavigating the problems. We bought a tiny dishwasher and experimented with different organization methods for the cupboard, reaching a somewhat satisfactory state. We keep our supply of ingredients limited, and try not to let single-use items lounge around too long.  A truce between modernists and postmodernists was created.

In the spirit of Bruno Latour’s example of a humble door hinge enabling us to walk through walls without the need to break and reconstruct them, I am irritated by a hinge myself. Our kitchen still has its original 60-year-old cabinet doors, and the bottom hinge of the big pantry door has torn itself apart. This is very annoying, since now the door won’t close properly, preventing the oven next to it from opening without scraping the door ever so slightly as it goes, taking with it a chunk of nice green paint. 

In my annoyance I give these two nonhumans, or artifacts, anthropomorphic qualities. The hinge to me is lazy and annoying, purposefully resistant to both replacement screws and glue. The oven is new and I am still infatuated with it, so it gets my pity and understanding. Surely he does not mean to hit the door, he just can’t help it! The predecessor of the oven had through the years slowly deteriorated to the point where it had us, the users of it, perform strange and nonsensical seeming choreographies around it to make it work properly.

The broken door hinge has been a reliable example of an artifact replacing erratic human behaviour with its reliable work for sixty years and now I’m stumped with what to do with it. Will I find a way to fix it? Will I delegate the work to my partner? Will I find a workaround, or stop noticing scratched doors?

Maybe I should just resign to the fact that my kitchen, like other isolated systems, is highly suggestible to entropy.

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Introduction, Reading III by Federico Simeoni, 02 oct 2020

– Prescribed morality

“Where is the morality? In me, dominated by a mindless artifact, or in the artifact, forcing a mindless human? A low of the excluded middle has been built, rendering logically inconceivable a driver without a seat belt.” Sociologically speaking, considering just humanity is an incomplete and dull way to see reality. We are those who perceive problems, devise solutions, and craft artifacts. And in the end, we interact with these very artifacts, that change our behavior and thinking according to their prescriptions.

– Morality of today consumers

“We have been able to delegate to nonhumans force, values, duties, and ethics.” In Latour's essay, it seems that advanced techniques should lead to a more moral society, relying on the morality inscribed in artifacts and no more on humans. However, human moral still has a chance to exist in the choice we make as consumers: we can buy products or services with more or less morality inscribed into them; 

– Morality of today designers

Besides, morality in contemporary times is still crucial during the very process of design and engineering of the artifacts or services. Indeed, as Latour said, stands in the program of action as an answer to an antiprogram against which the mechanism braces itself. Hence, in the practices of engineering and so design there is the need of working out a narration between imaginary stereotypical human characters (inscribed target) and nonhumans. Morality, then, is a question during the building up of these stereotypes and the empathy we put into them. Indeed, Latour quotes Langdon Winner: “Because of their prescriptions, these doors discriminate against very little and old persons”.

– Beauty of efficiency

“The ISO, which is based in Switzerland, now issues protocols for GPS systems, shirt sizes, shipping containers, image compression techniques, and social responsibility; the protocols are voluntary and nonbinding, but the pressure to adopt them—and the costs of failing to do so—can be extraordinary.” Standardization can be brutal: sometimes it seems suffocating, alienating. But is the consequent efficiency worth it? In some situations, I think yes: it must be the guiding principles. Indeed, it can have its sense of beauty. Just imagine the aesthetics of a factory of plastic gum or the metropolitan system of Milan or the photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher of industries of Ruhr region: some situations where the personality of the individual is not supposed to be at the center.

– Fascination (or fetish?) for inefficiency

Latour calls displacement (or translation or delegation or shifting) the transformation of a major effort into a minor one. He then defines a deskilling thesis: “always go from intrasomatic to extrasomatic skills. Never rely on undisciplined people.” However, humans appreciate more and look for the hand-made, artisanal objects. It seems like human beings have a fascination (or a fetish?) for the imperfect. Indeed, some very standards are still in use even if they are not the most efficient way to embrace reality. A patent example is the English measure system. With inches, yards, pounds, and so on, they deliberately refuse to be efficient. Indeed, this patriotic disdain is a way to express the human sense of belonging to a group. Also, other standards seem to be completely out of the Zeitgeist but are still the most common way to conceive reality. Like years after Christ. Nowadays even Buddhist or atheist Chinese people do count years after Christ. Does the average Chinese people know who is Christ? And Western children born in our ‘10s? Illuminism, Fascism, and other movements tried to change this reference, but humanity still has not managed to do it. The question is: should we erase all of that in the name of efficiency? Or isn’t it a cultural heritage?  In the field of architecture, there are two main approaches: you can erase a city to make it more efficient and contemporary, like ‘800 interventions made by Georges-Eugène Haussmann in Paris; or simply build upon or around, like the Gothe definition of picturesque for the average Italian city. The point is that sometimes beauty is mere inefficiency, intended as the free expression of impulses and human values, that cumulate over history, anthropologically revealing.

– Critically thinking

The lines of setups made by the various circumscriptions can be seen evidently in places like train or metro stations. People flow silently.  Can critical thinking be considered as an escape from these lines? Is the status quo the very network of these taciturn paths? Are organizations like ISO limiting our possibilities of thinking? Or, do we need standardization to go on, and de-standardization to lead this going through?

– Protesting AI

Time in nonhumans is concentrated at the moment of installations, whereas time in humans is continuous. Nonhumans have a sort of built-in inertia because machines, basically, repeat: they are glad to repeat. Differently, humans feel alienated when facing repetition: they would inevitably question the status quo with a protest. What will happen with Artificial Intelligence? Will machines protests for their repetitive tasks when they will be able to continue learning? 

– Stop removing the Petit Bertrand

The enunciator is free to place or not a representation of him in the text or artifact. Le Petit Bertrand is an example of embrayage, and Latour said that we could remove it. Brand logos, author signs are then forms of saying who is the author of the machine. However, should we remove them? Doesn’t the Petit Bertrand give a sense of guarantee confirmation?

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Introduction, Reading II, by Oona Raadelma

Thoughts on the writings of Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014), James Gleick’s The Information. Fourth Estate (2011) and C.W. Mills’ The Politics of Truth.

I had a hard time to put my thoughts as a logical structured summary. Especially I found the first writing of Johanna Drucker a bit tiring. Drucker writes that there has been a desire to create an universal, stable and rule bound language of graphics. This canon of so called rules have been created in the west, mostly by white males though. Other cultures are not included in this canon. This invalidates the desire and attempts for universality of the language of graphics. Can anything ever be universal after all? Are these attempts just utopian dreams?

Every image has a history, and so do concepts of vision. Interesting claim in Ducker’s text was that hard-edged, geometric forms emerge in cultures whose relation to the natural world is fraught and difficult, while sinewy curves are found among those in more harmonious circumstances. I encountered an example of a so-called circular culture: the zulu culture. Their huts are round, they don’t plough land in straight furrows but in curves instead, and their villages are designed in circular formations. In my opinion the claim is somehow correct since our western culture, especially in architecture, concentrates on geometric forms.

The desire to make graphic grammar universal derives from the desire to see design as science which is seen as objective and universal. Different cultures still see and describe visual culture in a different way, so it is impossible to build up a coherent graphic grammar.

In James Gleick’s writing it is portrayed what a meme is. In my former summary of the readings 1, I stated that a meme can be basically anything. Gleick writes that it is not that simple. He uses a hula hoop as an example. An object is not a meme, but the hula hoop itself is a meme vehicle. Thus, a plain object is not a meme. Nowadays a meme is quite easily connected to the internet. The internet can be seen as one of the greatest meme vehicles. How the meme is received, depends of course on multiple factors. For instance, older people cannot probably understand the visual language of internet memes. Memes are abstract, intangible, and unmeasurable. Gleick also states that “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” This is an interesting claim, since hasn’t there always been some kind of a language of humankind? 

In the writing ‘The Politics of Truth’ it is written that “the cultural workman himself, in particular the designer, tends to become part of the means of distribution, over which he tends to lose control.” To lose control means that one has had the control before. What does it mean to have control when it comes to design? Is this a question concerning authorship as we discussed in the first readings? 

In my mind one can still be a so-called star designer and still not sell his soul as there is kind of written in the Mills’ text. “One is a smash hit or one is among the failures who are not produced; one is a best seller or one is among the hacks and failures; one is either absolutely tops or one is just nothing at all.” The capitalistic system though creates a system that is stated in the quote of the text. It is the survival of the fittest and a cruel world to those who are not up for the game. How can a designer fight the system that has rooted the whole society?

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Summary, Reading II, Annukka Laine

Visual language

Is it possible to create a grammar to visual language? In verbal language, the structure and expression is linear, while in visual language they are multidimensional, overlapping and non-linear. Do you have to learn seeing the same way you learn grammar? It took until Renaissance for modern perspective drawing to be fleshed out, which seems incredible to us now. 

Many visual languages are still very young, does that contribute to the clunkiness of man-made visual grammar attempts? (On the other hand: The grammar of Finnish language is also relatively young and a strange mishmash of different dialects,, and we seem to be using it just fine.)

Memes

Is it possible to escape being infected with memes floating above you? Some people consciously or unconsciously assimilate themselves fast to new environments, ways of talking, habits. Some stay loyal to their old own to a fault. We all do have our habits and idiosyncrasies, and what are those if not memes?

Internet memes are incredibly self referential creatures, and explaining them to your grandma will leave you both puzzled and sad.

Craftsmanship

Working for your enjoyment and living your craft might lead others to take advantage of you – why need to compensate you properly for your time and skill since you would be doing this anyway? If you can’t be a star artist, is it just a pathetic hobby? 

Capitalist system enjoys greatly co-opting movements (like being against climate change) and shifting the blame on all ills on consumers – everything is your personal choice. If you are arguing about bamboo toothbrushes the big picture gets lost under it.  

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Summary, Reading II by Federico Simeoni, 28 sep 2020

– Visual grammar

Verbal grammar is very old if compared to the visual one. We are still trying to develop a coherent visual system of meanings and references. Indeed, it is much more complicated to define borders and rules: everything is blurred, it all seems more chaotic. There can be sort of tendecies, general rules but it is hard to get specific.  Maybe the core of the problem is the fact that in visual elements come all at the same time. The narration of an image is built on parataxys and the various elements overlap with each other. Whereas, verbal language has a linear way of expression: every word comes after the other, time is the only dimension.

– Graficacy

An interesting fact is that sometimes you have not to be taught to appreciate images. Or at least, it seems. Some images seem to arrive at our brains without the need of codification. This is, of course, not true. Otto Neurath, indeed, proposed the very concept of graficacy: the literacy of images. Would a medioeval inhabitant understand a Cartesian plane? The truth of the statement above stands in the fact that images communicate faster than words, but they still need an although-very-rapid process of codification, which can be partly instinctual an partly (or mostly?) cultural based.

– Boba and Kiki

It is hard to define wether formalistic theory is better than the structuralistic one, or vice versa. You can make experiments ad hoc to demonstrate the truth of one theory or the other. Like the Boba and Kiki esperiment: the majority of people would match the second name to the sharpest figure, whereas Boba would be the smoothest one. In this experiment Kandinsky synaesthesia is confirmed: we constantly desire assonance and coherence between the various plastic levels of reality (sound and shape). Something similar happens also in Steiner schools: their buildings have only soft angles in order to suggest a natural enviroment. But, isn’t nature sometimes sharp? Isn’t it geometric at times?

– Meme influence

Within all these memes, are we masters or slaves? We can reject some memes, but we can never come back. Margaret Atwood says indeed that “as with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before.” Of course, in order to conquer your brain repetition is needed: you have to be in close contact with the meme and you can choose the source of your information. However, some people seem immune to some kinds of meme: for example, they do not get the accent or ways of speaking of others. We can partly choose who can influence us.

– Explain to grandma

Memes usually develop referring to themselves. The time flows and you nearly forget what was the origin of the meme: or maybe you have never known it. This is the reason why it is so difficult to explain to our granparents an Instagram meme: too many cultural references are required.

– Democracy dies in darkness

Memetic journalism is not wrong: it is a matter of necessity. In order to broadcast widely, you have to simplify and make the package attractive. The reader has to be not superficial. And if he decide to be that superficial, it has not to broadcast that meme-news to his friends and relatives. Indeed, the social user can be really confused: what to pick up from the Twitter feed? what grabs more of my attention? what should I focus on? The slogan of the Washington Post is “Democracy dies in darkness”: if we rely just on meme-news there are no more basis for a well-informed citizenship that goes to vote.

– Green merchandising

Merchandising is now focusing on our sense of guilt towards the planet. Brands now introduce themselves like green alternatives that we should have taken long before. The sense of guilt exists because of our individualistic society: we think we can change the whole world. That’s quite wrong: some have more decisional power than others. However, this kind of merchandise does good because it gives us more awareness: we feel more sense of control, we perceive that we are doing our part, we are actually doing something better.

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Summary, reading II, by Emma Johansson

Is the projection of the principles and structures of spoken and written language a helpful approach when trying to theorise visual communication? Is it an artificial attempt to impose structures of other fields and phenomena that function differently and thus end up being a clumsy and inaccurate metaphor?

On the other hand, the science of grammar comes after language itself, as an attempt to explain and structure it. Grammar might also be artificially imposed on language, one rule is chosen on the expense of another, one dialect is deemed colloquial or even incorrect as another gets rendered neutral and official, the most refined version of the language in question.

Regarding the infosphere and the statement “in the beginning there was information. The word came later.” Is all the information really “there” already, just waiting to be discovered? Like energy taking different forms but always remaining a constant amount. Like oil sitting in the ground waiting to be transformed into a plastic object. In what way does information or knowledge exist in the so called infosphere before anyone ever thought about it? Is the infospehere some kind of extension of The World of Ideas à la Plato? Isn't the point more about how the oil or information is being refined, rather than whether it always floated around in the ground or the infosphere that we now have grown antennaes to tap into with?

Idealizing the craftsman as someone who is living a lifestyle rather than working, one who works without an ulterior motive can be miss-used to justify asking designers to do free work. If it is a calling-hobby-lifestyle-passion-identity you don't mind doing it for free, right? The mere joy of doing it is compensation enough. On the other hand, if this kind of relationship with work would be spread to other fields, maybe more people could have a healthier, more organic working life with more agency of their own.

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intro reading II, by Emma Johansson

Notes and thoughts on: Drucker, Johanna (2014) Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard University Press

Visual language, or design language consists of multiple methods and domains. Seeing and interpreting the seen operates on several dimensions which do not function linearly, unlike in written and spoken language, where words follow each other in a linear manner. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that creates challenges in marking out a structure or grammar for visual communication.

Language can exist without a consciousness of grammar. Being aware of grammar adds another level to the understanding of language, and makes informed choices possible. To flip the foundation it helps to know it, when you know the rules you can choose to play by them, play with them or break them. Treating visual communication as language consisting of the same building blocks as spoken and written language is one approach and attempt to break it down and understand the laws behind it.

How much of our perception is following universal laws and how much of it is a product of our particular positions in time, bodies and culture?

Different symbol-languages for different fields exist, but what about intending to create or to discover a universal one? In for example scientific drawings or cartography a sort of symbol alphabet can be created. A dashed line means one thing, a triangle another. This works when we make a commitment to use these symbols for representing the same specific thing, just as using letters to represent specific sounds. A list of the symbols and their meanings aids the reading of the drawing or map for a non fluent interpreter. Could this kind of language be applied in other types of contexts or is there a universal one that we might be unaware of, like a child who speaks the language but is oblivious of the rules of grammar, which they just spontaneously know how to follow?

Applying this systematic approach to visual communication gets significantly more complex when we zoom out from the letter-like specific symbols and shapes and add elements of interpretation of bigger wholes, entire pictures, films or spaces that consists of a myriad of shapes, textures and colors.

Notes and thoughts on: Gleick, James (2011) Into the Meme Pool (You Parasite my Brain) The Information. Fourth Estate

The human experience described as existing in different spheres. With our physical body we are connected to the biosphere, with our knowledge processing brain we are connected to the infosphere. Organisms inhabit the biosphere, ideas inhabit the infosphere. We are hosts of millions of other entities, organic and infotic. Some benign, some malign. They all exist to replicate themselves, to reproduce and we give them that organic or infoic platform and spread them to other platforms so they can keep expanding their prevalence. Viral memes are like idea-plagues, exponentially spreading for the sake of spreading.

The brain is the vehicle or host organism of ideas that spread to other brains. Depending on the packaging it is more or less efficient in this spreading.

Memes are information or knowledge packaged in an appropriate bite size that can be consumed or internalized quickly enough. Memorability is key for its survival in the ruthless competition with other memes. Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it. There is no way back to the time you were unaware of the existence of Crazy Frog, it is forever attached to your perception of whatever reminds you of it.

An object is also a vehicle of the idea of the object itself. An object, besides carrying the information of what it is made of, its physical reality, in someway also carries the information of what it does, how it can be used and histories attached to it.

In this way, memes have a kind of loopy self-reference. They are hyper self aware, referring back to themselves over and over. With internet memes for example, there might be loads of information that one is expected and required to have in order to understand it.  

Notes and thoughts on: Mills, C.W. (2008/1958)) The Man in the Middle. In Summers, John H. (ed.) (2008). The Politics of Truth. Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press

We live in a second-hand world, mediated and drawn to us by our ancestors and contemporaries. We know infinitely more that what we have learned, seen or concluded ourselves. There is no way to experience a world free of that influence, unless perhaps as a newborn or when completely loosing ones mind.  

What is the power and responsibility of the designer in this mediation of the world? What kind of world do we want that the images and objects that we create serves as vehicles for?

“In this phase of capitalism, the distributor becomes ascendant over both the consumer and the producer”. Today we might have ways to go around this hierarchy, which didn't exist as such in 1958, but there might also be new hierarchies that have emerged in order to undermine those strategies.

The star system undermines everyone except the star, all the colleagues and peers of the chosen one who become the exceptional iconic success story. The star system is a machinery that sets out to discover the rare diamond, an expedition that is done on the expense of the ones who doesn't make it to the top. They are like collateral damage justified by the discovery of the treasure. This heighly individualistic approach doesn't value collective production nor an average performance that secures the continuation of a practice. It is like the reality show competition concept that consumes all the other competitors with the exception of the winner who is crowned the next top model, fashion designer or corporate boss.

Mills' craftsman seems to be the ideal engaged creative human being. Their activity is comprehensive, crossing the fields of art, science and learning. They are in charge of their surroundings and working conditions, they work without an ulterior motive. The product and the process are equally valuable in themselves. The craftsman doesn't seize to develop and learn from their work and there is no clear separation of leisure, culture and work. In short, the work of the craftsman is not labour and the work of the craftsman has not alienated them from the process nor product.

How could this idea of the “craftsman” as the unalienated human being be extended to any other task/profession or activity in society, not only the ones considered creative fields, crafts or design?

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Introduction, Reading II by Federico Simeoni, 27 sep 2020

– The importance of sight

There has always been the mantra “what could be seen could be known.” This to mean that vision was given the highest priority in the hierarchy of senses. Knowledge has always been associated with sight. Hearing is associated with thinking and reasoning. Whereas, smell and taste are connected with instincts, with a sense of disregard.

– Human-centered?

Eugéne Guillaume understood that, for industrial production, it was necessary to cut ties to fine arts in order to produce a practical system based on geometry, and not on the human body. But, is art so close to the human condition, taking for example Mondrian or Seurat? And does the field of design have to be separated by humanity? Indeed, especially nowadays, we talk about the human-centered design and not ideal design.

– Formalism vs. Structuralism

Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee shared a great enthusiasm for the role of the artist in industrial design, as a kind of synthesis of spiritual principles, and formal ones in concepts of the universal property of form and an interest in systematizing approaches to teaching graphic forms. In Point and Line to Plane this spiritual principles, indeed, eschewed historical, literary, and mythological references in favour of an approach made of pure form. Vision is a special instance of universal theories. Forms have meaning per se. At the same time, against this formalistic theories, there are the structuralistic ones: forms acquire meaning because of the nearby and cultural context. Signification came from a network of relationships.

– Natural world

Wilhelm Worringer asserted that cultures whose relation to the natural world is fraught and difficult have more hard-edged shapes. Is the world around us influencing that much?

– Parataxis

Vision, compared to verbal language, is extremely useful for information design for its multidimensionality. This is the eternal battle between parataxis vs. hypotaxis, where you just have on element after the other. Nelson Goodman helped cartographers with the manipulation of the basic variables and the definition of conventions. All the variables can be considered a dimension in this augmented field of information.

– Memetic journalism

Daniel Dennett asserted that “a meme is an information packet with an attitude.” Rhyme and rhythm are elements that help creating this appeal. Of course memetic success does not mean genetic success, for example, racist ideas, superstitions, harakiri ideals had not led towards the survival of the species. An interesting link can be made with Alessandro Baricco’s The Game. He talks about notizie veloci, that are fast news that loose bits of information to become more light, that get adjusted in order to be appealing for the great public and viral. They are news that in order to be easely broadcasted become memes. Is all that ethical? Is it good journalism? Maybe the answer is that this happens for necessity and the single reader has to practice critical approach, skepticism and curiosity in order to be willing of reading the whole article. Fast news do not have to inform: they should just attract curiosity.

– Mastery and slavery

The essay of James Gleick ends with the question “who is master and who is slave?”. Are we just innocent disarmed brains, incapable of playing any resistance or critic? I personally do not think so.

Most of the times, we can decide to incorporate into us a meme or not. Or, at least, having it into us, we can agree or disagree with that meme

We can decide which is our souce of information: television, social networks, book, newspaper, friends or gurus.

Of course, it is always a compromise between willingness and randomness.

– Information at the beginning

Fred Dretske said that “in the beginning there was information. The word came later. The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.” Sometimes we, animals or whatever, discover information that in some way already was. Other times we, exploiting pre-existing information, create something new that changes the field. All this information that now is accessible, there was already?

– Faceted apparati

A critique to Charles Wright Mills text may be found in the fact that the essay illustrates just three cultural apparati: Soviet, European, and American, presented in such a way that they seem to be extremely coherent within themselves. Nowadays the cultural sphere is extremeply faceted: there are so many subcultures, bubbles of behaviour, specific cases that also insititutions do not agree between them: different ideas circulate in the same groups.

– Stars

Sometimes the designer manages to distribute his products with his sign: this is the so-typically-western star system. The star then tends to be trapped by its own success: being the king of fashion, it is subject to fashion. It must play with the market and it becomes a marketeer. Is it still an author? Maybe it just depends on how it plays. Does it still want to exercise critical practices?

– New merchandising

The merchandising apparatus does not satisfy: train consumers to want. It creates panic for status and panic of self-evaluation. It uses culture for its anticultural ends. In addition, nowadays merchandising also makes you feel responsible of climate change and global issues: makes you willing to buy different new things in order to fight for the right cause. Is that good? Speakng in terms of results, probably it will turn out to be a good practice, generating well-thinking citizens. Howeverm as a whole process, we should not blame the individual, but the apparatus itself.

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Introduction, Reading II: Design and Knowledge (Annukka L.)

Random reflections and thoughts on reading from Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press, 2014), chapter Into the Meme Pool (you parasite my brain) in The Information, by Gleick, James (Fourth Estate, 2011) and, C.W. Mills essay The Man in the Middle (1958) from The Politics of Truth. Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, edited by  John H. Summers  (Oxford University Press, 2008). 

I had a hard time collecting my thoughts about these texts, because in my head I cannot put them into a neat, labelled package, tied with an overarching theme. Thoughts about visual perception, the use of visual tools in sharing information and the objectivity or lack of it in visual culture easily turns into nothing more than cynical ideas on how there is no such thing as universal visual perception or culture and that behind every infographic or photograph or illustration is a person with a some kind of ulterior motive. We can recognise some of our own biases and inherited ideas, but can we ever truly work outside of them? Or are we  hopelessly tied to our own cultural background and to repeat memes without even realizing it? We can nod vaguely towards cultures other than our own and mutter “of course, they think about this differently” without actually bothering to elaborate who they are and what it is that they think about. We can repeat fun factoids of how the ancient Greek thought of the sea being wine-coloured and be complacent in the knowledge that at least we do not believe in anything as stupid as a crimson coloured sea. We believe in memes.

Meme as a term was created by British ethologist and author Richard Dawkins to explain how ideas act like living organisms and spread from one human mind to another. Examples of memes given in James Gleick’s Into the Meme Pool text were ideas, music tunes, catchphrases, cliches and images. What unites them is a certain vague, amorphous shape they take – they all contain a complex idea that cannot be contained in an exact physical form. As Gleick put it “the meme is not the dancer but the dance”. We repeat catchphrases and fun factoids without knowing their origin or really caring whether they actually make any sense or not.

Portraits are given as an example of a visual meme with an anecdote about a certain portrait of George Washington Gleick attributes to a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “This may not be what George Washington looked like then, but this is what he looks like now”. That raises a question: Does photography diminish the memetic idea of portraiture? We do not create portraits of portraits of portraits of living people like in the case of George Washington, but we still try to capture only a vague idea of the person in question in illustration, especially in simplified portraits such as line drawings or caricatures. Images become memes when they become independent of physical reality: a person is reduced to few notable physical characteristics, even those exaggerated to a high degree. 

In the same way,  abstract ideas do not have specific visual forms, nor do emotions, so we must give them visual counterparts. Consider the abstract concept of environment. 

Dictionary defines it as:

1.the surroundings or conditions in which a person, animal, or plant lives or operates.

2. the natural world, as a whole or in a particular geographical area, especially as affected by human activity.

Somehow, in visual communication this gets reduced to 

Environment = A vague idea of a forest, which consists of only evergreen oaks, in supersaturated green field or moss = Specific shade of green = Green leaf?

When looking outside, we can see that our environment can be various shades of yellow, brown, grey and blue in addition to green. Even the green tends to be quite muted. Reducing our living environment in easily traded cliches might even enable us to not consider our environment as the environment, something we should care about.  

As designers, we should be wary of repeating and regurgitating visual memes thoughtlessly. We have the power to create new ideas and affect how concepts and ideas are visualized.

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Summary of reading group-meeting I by Emma Johansson.

During our reading group-meeting we discussed some of the following themes:

The difference between artist and artisan, and whether the word author could be replaced with the word artist in the context of this discussion. The words artist and author seems to imply originality and a self-motivation, where as a craft is a continuous tradition, where the mastery of the craft does not necessarily require the creation of something totally unique and novel, but rather a skillful repetition of the learned tradition. A skilled artist or author might still have to master their profession or field in the liking of an artisan, but it doesn't seem to be enough for earning the title of an artist. Art also tend to include the justification of its existence in the very label itself, whereas design objects tend to have a varying degree of functionality that motivates their production and justifies their existence.

We discussed the origin of the concept of the author and how it seems to be a position that arose as a result of different technological, political, cultural and economical changes. Since it is a concept that hasn’t existed for as long as the cultural products that are perceived as fruits of their labour have, i.e books, poems, plays etc., we can understand that these cultural artefacts or products aren't necessarily reliant on a singular identifiable author. Oral traditions in history are examples of this phenomenon. We speculated whether there today is a detectable shift away from singular authorship, or perhaps a diversified understanding of the author(s), looking past the traditional, sometimes even romantic idea of the isolated creator individual. Open source material and internet culture, such as memes, are examples of production where the original source of the work might be impossible to trace and therefor the credit of the work doesn't function by the same parameters as with a specified author.

We also discussed the need to borrow terminologies from other fields to describe the role or field of the designer and considered different combinations of merged practices and whether there is a hierarchy between these. Is it more valued or elevated to be a designer-author than a designer-artisan or a designer-translator?

The three different designer roles that Michael Rock introduces in the essay Designer as Author (1996): designer as translator, designer as performer and designer as director are examples of these kind of different approaches to the role of the designer. All of these three ideas seemed to function as accurate descriptions of different roles that the designers profession could play out in, and they seemed more straightforward in their relation to design than the combination of author and designer. We were especially interested in the role of designer as performer. On a first glance it might seem as a role where the designer has the least agency, as if they were only performing tasks from a script, adding little of their own input to the end result. On the other hand, when we look at performers in other cultural fields, such as actors or singers of commercial music, they might be the grand star although it isn't uncommon that they aren't involved in the creation, composition and writing of the music, films or roles that they perform. In both the example of the actor and the singer they can still be considered just as big an artist, as the director of the film and the composer of the song. Oftentimes they are actually the ones that the fan culture and stardom is built around, rather than the author. How this can be traced back to the designer as performer remains unanswered in our discussion, which also reminded us about how using terminologies from different fields can feel both clumsy, as well as very descriptive and even freeing.

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Summary: Reading 1. by Oona Raadelma, 21/9/20

Some topics we discussed about with our group:

How technology has changed authorship? We discussed how internet meme culture is a great example of the change how authorship is considered in the internet era. Although, a meme can be anything: a meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. No one can own a meme! What are author’s attributes or necessities? Is it necessary that an author is an outsider of society? How can one actually even be outside society, is it really possible? Is it necessary to create a myth around oneself to become an author? Some other questions that arose during our conversation:

What is the need for authorship in the field of design?

When is something design and when it is not (design authorship versus craftmanship)? Has the origin of a design work have to be traceable that it is considered as design? What is art and what is not? Will something become art when placed into a museum? Does former make one an author or an artist? In addition, our conversation included some deliberation how is an authorship acts in the field of commercial music. Usually no one knows the author of a certain song but the actual performer instead. Thus the question: is fame a requirement to be an author?

In our opinion the texts handed were lacking some current perspective. For instance the internet has shifted the understanding of authorship hugely.