Reflections on the Mediating Modernities conference

The Mediating Modernities conference which took place on 24^th and 25^th Jan’12 brought together various cultural practitioners to discuss how modernity is discussed in the 21^st century. It was a valuable experience given the range of speakers who attended it, from artists to sociologists to film-makers. I particularly found Dr. Asu Aksoy’s presentation very relevant to what my interest’s area.

Asu Aksoy is doing research into the urban and cultural formation dealing with migration, globalization and social change in Istanbul, Turkey. She presented an intriguing article on how the abodes of the slum-dwellers are being extinguished in Istanbul and how the concept of informal urbanization is changing. 

‘…Informal housing is about change. It is not about fixavity. It depends on the location, available resource, skills and the socio-economic context…What dominates informal housing is all about play, attack and projecting all kinds of negativity and situating informality as a pre-modern kind of transitory phase…’

The rise of globalization has led to the simultaneous eradication of the informal housing like road-side shacks, slums et al. It is very similar to what I observe in an Indian city as well. Following are the points that emerged out of her presentation:

·         Poor utilization of local resources as the new buildings are mostly built with the desires of creating a space that will replicate international living; they seldom use local resources and heavily rely on materials that are transported from distant areas.

·         DIY architecture where the owner builds with the help of the community is seen as a chaos by the city planners.

·         Similar to India there is a rather negative public discourse. So what Asu is attempting is to create a new discourse that would say something different about the meaning of modernity.

·         She cited similar argument by Anaya Roy that informal housing is not pre-modern but it is a system of housing that is in fact embedded in the modern relation of market, state regulation and legality, and city culture. The art of this kind of housing arose out of need to accommodate the changing needs of the residents, their respective function and flexibility.

·         Asu pointed out few interesting aspects from the case study of Adil.

Ø  Adil’s shack, as she found out, is not just a social construction or a means for livelihood but it also has an emotional recall. This is in complete contrast to the view endorsed by corporate and governments who find these settings pre-modern. So they do rather eradicate these settings and invest on manufactured spaces like gated communities. The result of which is a complete loss of the social connectivity that led to the formation of the slums in the first place. Thus making the people impoverished and incapacitated. Slums are social enterprises, so it points to the self-worth and self assuredness of the subject.

Ø  The other interesting point is about navigation. Borrowing the philosophy of dérive by the Situationists, she points out how Adil used walking as a tool for engaging with his surroundings though a playful constructive behaviour and awareness of psycho-geographical effects.

Ø  The other thing is to understand the motive behind the creation of the space. It was not build as a dwelling place. The physical structure is not rooted and has no foundation. So it is perishable and that is a very modern attitude. It is transitory by nature. But as it is a dwelling, it uses all the cultural and social capital (what is borrowed from his neighbours).  So it is a community effort and these are social constructions, not individual construction; hence, they are part of social networks.

Asu pointed out that there is new interest in preserving the old Ottoman buildings and with the help of the museums; they are creating a space where the public can engage in constructive debates and discussions. The point to note here is that history is not just about the historical building but it also consists of the informal building like the street side shack. So the question is if we are can really doing justice of preserving our architecture by selecting only specific build spaces? Also how much of documentation do we have of the informal sectors that arise overnight and are bulldozed as soon? Talking about biennale, the question arises on the kind of audience we addressing and how is it going to be approached. These are few things which need to be attempted if we need the community to participate.

A similar philosophy is carried out by Urbz. I will briefly describe a project which was based on the urban village of Khirkee at New Delhi. The problem was much more acute. The problems of migrants along with strong market forces had led the village to dissolve into a informal city that is undergoing tremendous resource crunch to fulfil the needs of a much larger population than it can handle. The concept of urban villages is interesting in the sense that they were villages which were self-sufficient. New state policies led to the inclusion of these villages with the specific state boundaries. Old indigenously built houses are now giving into malls and offices and residential complexes. Making it worse is the outpour of migrants. As they are seen as ‘disorder spaces’, the cost of basic needs are much lower. But due to lack of engagement with the original residents, there is no one to negotiate with the market forces, making the place vulnerable to external influences. Part of the solution might lie in bringing participation based on common interests.

Part of the problem of tagging such dwellings ‘disorder’ could be that we tend to look from as the outsider. But these places are actually utilizing public space and they do have order and coherence, just that it is not visible to the outsiders. The question being asked here is how could we change the prevailing discourse of a slum/ build environment as rural and raw in the presence of strong market forces? The current trend is creating conflicts between those who are changing the environment and those facing regeneration. The distribution of profits between the residents and the corporate that are inclined to do regeneration projects has become a major issue now. So maybe what is required is a new political intervention that will introduce a new discourse that will liberate people from the market.

Christian Pagh, who shared his project called PeeBetter brought new perspectives on creating community participation. PeeBetter consists of public urinals which are  enables people to participate, comment and share ideas, involving the users in creating solution that make life easier for people at festival, outdoor parties and events. The urinals are aesthetically designed, easy to install and are hygienic. But the best part is the location. It is meant for festivals and large gathering. By positioning the urinals centrally, it is encouraging the public to rethink if something as basic as a urinal needs to seen as an eyesore. Through the sharing of ideas and experiences, the design becomes more participatory and has the scope of evolving into something more personal.

 

A recurring theme in his projects is the question of time and ownership in cities. How are groups or individuals allowed to influence and alter their physical surroundings in public space? How can the atmospheric, social and cultural qualities of older neighbourhoods be considered and integrated in new urban contexts?

He points out to the lack of proper utilization of public spaces in evolving cities and emphasis the need for the users to engage by providing them the means to create their own spaces.  The PeeBetter project was one such attempt to understand how positive public experience can lead to a change in notions related to urinals.

To conclude, I will quote Asu,

‘… So to conclude, if modernism is a tension between the desire and the momentum for freedom on one hand and the kind of desire and need for order and contentment (freedom), then the forces of order and controlling are minimal and the individuals drive for creativity to make his environment capacitated…’

Learnings from S.Lab

What is design? What is a value in design?

These and many more are the kind of questions that I am encountering these days. I am doing a course called Ideas to Experiences which is part of S.Lab.

The initial brief was to create our concepts surrounding the well being of the elderly or ‘grey nuclei’. After multiple brainstorming, we are now on the final visualization.

The initial work started with interviews of the elderly, their family members and those who live with them. Alongside we tried to understand what well being means, the extended circle of people who are related to the elderly, their stories, emotions and their pain points. We delved on the importance of joint family.

With joint family, we mean to highlight the intangible experiences that help learn a family about each other, start a communication and care for one another, when the members stay as a close-knit family.

After multiple brainstorming, we have finally narrowed our theme on few broad topics which is: Presence and micro-communication among the elderly. We are trying to understand the way an elderly deals with their regular activities and the communications that occurs to facilitate such activities.

Example 1: Take the example of Shree who lives with her son, daughter-in-law and grandkids. Her son and daughter-in-law are a working couple. So in the morning, when her daughter-in-law arranges the house, Shree prefers to just observe. Her daughter-in-law is normally in a rush and directs the maid for all the activities. Shree would sit in the courtyard and follow the hustles.  So the sound of the pressure cooker signals to her that the food is ready while the bangles give her the sense that her daughter-in-law is leaving for office. It is through these mundane signs that we often sense our surroundings.

It has been observed that the elderly are often the inactive group in our society. At times, as few of our interviewees proved, try their best to keep themselves active but new technology; generation gap; lack of company often makes them secluded. 

Example 1: Now what Shree does is look for clues, to grasp the activities surrounding her. This helps her be updated about her family without physically interfering. The need for Shree is markedly different from Lalitha, who stays alone and her sons live abroad. For her the most essential part of her life is spent on gathering updates as minor as the daily temperature where her sons are putting up.

The need for micro-communication arises where the absence of a person leads someone to look for them, often through indirect channels. So it is through these mundane ubiquitous mediums that helps fulfil the goal of learning about someone’s presence.

To design is not just about solving a problem but also to recognize that we are dealing with real individuals and not just a user in a statistical graph. It is about empathizing that people have emotions, desires and stories. So the challenge is not so much as to solve or create a product but to create mediums that can be integrated into one’s life.

This brings me to the next question, what kind of values are we creating, and what exactly does one mean by value? Also when we design, are we questioning the ground on which the design process is itself based? Do we take the very brief for granted or do we cross-question and redefine the brief?

I think that it is all about asking the right question. Empathizing is the primary need without which it will only solve a very mechanical task, but might not really give any value to the people. The work of Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1978, acknowledges that the world we inhabit is increasingly artificial, created by human beings. For Simon (1981), design was not restricted to making material artefacts, but was a fundamental professional competence extending to policy-making and practices of many kinds and on many levels:

‘Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all professional training; it is the principal mark that distinguishes the professions from the sciences.’ (p.129)

Economics, he stated, works on three levels, those of the individual; the market; and the entire economy (p. 31). The centre of interest in traditional economics, however, it is markets and not individuals or businesses (p. 37). A serious problem is thereby raised at the outset: two important considerations relating to design—how goods and services are developed for the market place and how they are used—receive scant attention.

As I read through multiple philosophers, I am a flux. I am trying to multiple things: understand context, the value of insights and the difference between insight and observation; how to understand a brief, where and when do we question the brief itself; how to pick up the specific elements to solve a design problem, and when to know where to stop etc.

Understanding Presence management and Micro-interaction through real life interactions

Few recent incidents made me think on the need for presence management. The first one was when a close friend who stays abroad was going through a stressful situation and could not be contacted for a long period. I kept thinking how to help the friend without intruding into her life or asking too many questions. Surprisingly there were hardly people who even knew that she is stressed. The second observation is based on gated communities in urban areas where neighbours are unaware of each other's presence and sort of live an isolated life.

I am assuming that a lot of us wants privacy, specially when we want to live independently without any lifestyle restrictions. But what does privacy means? Is there a difference between not being communicated to versus not being intruded into?

My project with S.Lab uses the essence of joint family and brings it back into the lives of family members who are living physically away from each other, with special focus on the elderly. What I see from the above two observations is that presence management is not just necessary among family members but also urban gated communities. We may not want the neighbours to peek into our lives, but we definitely want the assurance that if, and only if something goes wrong, we have someone beside us who 'might' be able to around, who would do something. But for that to happen we need to know who stays beside us. And then we need to know their general well-being, so that we know when to approach.

First of all the 'who' is difficult to find. How do we filter people who completely wants to live isolated?
Secondly, 'where' will these interaction take place? Could there be indirect channels that will help build conversations?
And the most important is 'how'.

Just some thoughts/insights: most gated communities already have community parks, blocks etc. But I can say from my personal experience that it is left for each individual to start a conversation, to be heard, to be seen. The culture of a small town/rural area where houses are closely knitted and leave space for others to have a general overview without the need to poke into another's life or even talking to them. It is this the missing link in the big multi storeyed buildings. Plus many of these residents have a tight schedule due to which they have very limited social interactions at the community level.
With community I mean housing colonies specially gated societies and the people living in it.

The question in my mind right now is how to approach these communities. What I mean is that the environment of a gated society is very closed for interaction. The community halls and parks serve very limited role. They let people mingle and converse. But what I am looking into right now is a place where can one gets introduced. The point is not to speak, but have the knowledge of someone's existence and well-being without trespassing their privacy.

There are works going on that is just dealing with presence management. There is funf.org that is more inito the development side of the story but very similar to what we are doing at S.Labs in terms of scope. There has not been much research into this aspect nor sufficient user studies to fall back on.

If future predictions of computing is to be believed, then research points at ubiquitous computing-wherein everything can theoretically be embedded with computer chips. But then what are the implications of being digitized to that extent? Still probing....

What is a good Idea?- Workshop with Kathrine Winkelhorn

What makes a good idea?

Is there something called a good idea?

How do you present it?

How to convince people in your idea?

Can we write a proposal without researching?

How to ensure that we get maximum response from a proposal?

-These and many more are the kind of questions we tried to understand in this workshop with Katherine. It was intense. The two and a half day just flew by till we all wrote something nice.

So I had a lot of assumptions on how a proposal is written,  many of those myths got broken. For one, writing a proposal is definitely not a day's job. Research is as much a necessary component before the  proposal is written as it is required after the proposal is written. My English doesn't needs to be great to write a strong proposal. But what is required is a clear understanding of where and why I am sending the proposal. A clear topic with a compact body of content is 1000 times better than writing a huge para that is difficult to understand.

And the biggest discovery, you can convince complete strangers and get started on your dream project irrespective of how challenging the idea is. A good proposal is that strong. Katherine showed us how she organized an event by sending a well written proposal to the necessary stakeholders. It was inspiring.

The biggest assumption is that writing proposal may not be a cakewalk, but it is definitely possible. It takes time, but it help you reach few inches closer to your dream project. It's a skill that is essential to anyone who wants to achieve ideas that needs some convincing. So sitting in the class and listening to everyone's idea was very inspiring.

This is what I wrote. It may sound weird. But part of me believes that it is achievable. Maybe someday I will take this up. Feel free to drop in your suggestions :)

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Working title:

To create a map with the objective of exploring the intangible experiences in a city.

Introduction:

To objective is to create a city specific map that gives us the experience of a place and may just not depend on the geographical features, but explore nodes formed in a city/locality.

Design process for static maps already exists. But these techniques fail when dynamic information is considered. There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are continually changing. To approach these problems, this thesis introduces a visualization process titled Organic Information Design. The resulting systems employ simulated organic properties in an interactive, visually refined environment to glean qualitative facts from large bodies of quantitative data generated by dynamic information sources.

Tendril by Ben Fry.

Ben uses organic forms to explore the relation

Target audience:

This project is meant to give an alternative to the conventional maps. And it should be able to create more awareness of where they are.

So the target group could be anyone, but more focussed on planners and policy makers.

It will be based on a locality in Bangalore called Basavanagudi.

  Observations:

 My research from Basavanagudi led to the following observations:

·         The boundary has been shifted few times.

·         What has been mentioned as ‘green’ is subjective. Old pictures pointed towards a more airy and tree lined locality than what it is now. Currently, the narrow lanes are stuffed with houses and trees are concentrated only in the garden. This is similar to how one keeps few strands of flowers in a pot. It seems like a pleasure which is enjoyed but not divulged in.

·         The initial planning was made mainly for the housing of Brahmins. But now it has wider demography.

Content:

·         A map is more than just cartography. From an artistic perspective, it is also a medium to learn about where we are and how we see a place.

·         City planning need not just depend on the geographical features.

·         Cities are similar to the hypertext one sees in the internet, one thing embedded within another.

·         Though open source maps help the participation of the masses, it still lacks the space to create the layers that a city stands consists of.

Objectives and aims:

·         Can maps help us experience a place than just help us navigation.

·         To be able to create a new process on which maps are based.

·         To understand the shift in philosophies that motivated the creation of maps in the earlier days to present day. Also the need to understand what kind of hidden intentions or the experiences that they wanted to offer?

·         What are the various layers/characters that make a city?

·         We don’t really question the premise on which such maps have been made. Can maps help us create new forms of seeing where we are?

·         To be able to explore the change in relation of a place over time.

      

      Challenges:

·         The biggest challenge right now is how to create an appropriate representation.

·         It could be digital. But that may not be accessible to the public. The other option is to have a physical form. But it would be a challenge to create something like this physically. But it will be a new experience.

Extra notes on the aspect of a city: The adoption of ubiquitous computing, mobile devices, and rich sources of data are changing how we live, work, and play in urban environments. Increasingly, a digital landscape overlays our physical world and is expanding to offer ever-richer experiences that augment—and in some cases, replace—the physical experience: “The city is the platform, the network, the sensors, and the interface,” as frog creative director Rob McIntosh put it in a recent talk. To celebrate the New Cities Summit where frog hosted a workshop on the Meta-City, design mind presents a special digital issue exclusively on the future of the city and live coverage from the event.

Ref: http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/the-future-of-cities.html