The Theory of Nevolution

The salty wisdom of the crowd

Without wanting to get into the complete and utter fail that was iSnack 2.0, ABC's By Design has a fascinating segment on the nature of Crowd sourcing. Despite the objectively horrible name, one thing I hadn't realised was the lack of consumer consultation with the final choice. That the backlash wasn't just a result of a poor name, but a lack of continuing conversation with the audience. Meanwhile, Kraft have realised the error of their way, and fielded 6 other names which were taken to a vote. The final choice has ended up being Cheesybite; a relatively uninspired name but at least the audience has spoken.

Parameters of Play

After much community protest a new multifunction community centre was built in Carnegie, the suburb where I grew up. The library and the senior citizens RSL club moved into a multi-storey multifunction purpose built building, that some feared would destroy the skyline (quite a ridiculous complaint considering Carnegie has never been known for it's skyline). In the process a playground was demolished to make way for the community centre. It was an old park, usually empty, and I only frequented it in my teenage years to engage in delinquent tomfoolery. 

The building and surrounding spaces has been a resounding success. Everyone seems to be happy about the solution and main street has a lovely civic run off that contains a lovely spot of public space; something that was lacking in hindsight. And no one really worries or cares about the skyline. While the park is gone, the designers created a small playground for children to play in; connecting an open plaza and the library. 

Mildly amused at what appeared to be a different aesthetic for a children's playground, I walked on over for a closer inspection. What began as giddy excitement at the sight of a terminal quickly turned into disappointment and anger. Not because some of the keys didn't work, nor because it was almost impossible to read the dot matrix text because of the glare. What disturbed me most was the set of instructions next to the keyboard. I initially dismissed this as poor design on the part of the designers. But the further I thought about it, following these instructions (with faulty technology), I wondered what the purpose of this was. It was mildly amusing before the novelty wore off, pressing all of these buttons, seeing eyes light up and sounds coming out of the worms. But why did the playground designers see fit to create a closed system in a playground? 

A playground should be an open environment, allowing children to explore various models of their universe. And the model of the universe that this playground creates is a poor one. A universe where the imagination has been take out of the equation; relegated instead to priming children for a lifetime of instructions and button pressing. I'm not angered by the use of technology, I'm angered by the particular use of it here. It's a lack of imagination on the designers behalf and a desire to create novelty that does nothing to nourish the mind of the child.

It took me some time to notice a wall mural (not shown) with these worms, reading books. Bookworms. Next to a library. I get it. But is it necessary? Which bureaucrat in the Glen Eira council wanted to create some low level branding of their library with these characters? A playground should not be a place of narrative. It should be a place of play.

The view from the terminal doesn't suggest this at all. It presents the experience less as a personal and group adventure to an observational viewpoint. It reinforces the idea in children that fun can only be had by playing in front of a keyboard or control pad (I had to check myself there and not write joystick - I haven't touched one in years). It feels needy on the designers part to create a space for play and include a rather limiting tool for participating in a shallow and useless cast of bland characters. I'm tempted to say that this space and viewpoint reinforces children as passive spectators, but there is a low level of interactivity. But the level of interactivity reminds me of the heady days of the early web when I spent my days looking up photoshop tutorials for button rollovers and thinking that was interactive.

Thankfully the playground isn't just restricted to a simple electric call and response. The space shines here, with climbing equipment, bright colours and paths; all in an imaginative manner. Which shows that the designers of the playground are aware of the responsibility of designing play equipment. But it is a shame that they elected to create an unnecessary sense of narrative where none was needed.

The use of CCTV cameras didn't instil me with confidence though.

Towards the Third Culture

      
 A quick recap. Fifty years ago the British Scientist and novelist CP Snow gave a lecture titled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution looking at the cultural divide between the Sciences and the Humanities. That the chasm between both sides was not only doing harm, but was also one sided: 

They give me a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English Literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling.

Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

How far have come since then? Do we still live with an impoverishing division between the two? I'd say yes. The chasm between the two sides serves neither. It prevents either from waking up from the slumber of specialisation and looking at the range of ideas the other has to offer. But the essay wasn't just about the divide. It was about the need for scientists to take their rightful place as academics alongside the humanities. 

Some time ago I stumbled across a map of science, based on the reading and browsing habits of academic literature. Meanwhile, they produced another map by colour coding the enquiries based on journal classifications. Split into the two cultures (natural sciences in blue and the humanities and social sciences in yellow). While it does a marvellous job of showing the distinctions and differences between the two, it also highlights how intertwined they are as part of the same system. It's rather illuminating that having the social sciences so highly intertwined, connected and possibly insular, while the natural sciences is much more spread out and evenly distributed. 

But to continue to view the world through such a binary serves no one either. Snow himself envisaged a third culture, a group of non-scientists who could bridge the gap between the two. John Brockman wrote an article in 1992 (seemingly at the height of the debate between the Post Modernists and the Scientific Establishment) titled The Third Culture:

In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. Although i borrow Snow's phrase, it does not describe the third culture he predicted. Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists. Scientists are communicating with the general public.

But that was in 1992. His 2002 essay The New Humanists seems more mature, as well as from a victorious perspective. I recommend reading it, not just for the article, but for the highly informative replies, mostly by the new humanists he refers to.

Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that calls into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in physics, electricity, genetics, neurobiology, engineering, the chemistry of materials–all are challenging basic assumptions of who and what we are, of what it means to be human. The arts and science are again joining together as one culture, the third culture. Those involved in this effort – scientists, science-based humanities scholars, writers – are at the center of today's intellectual action.

Which what makes the Seed videos so interesting. They're charming, and well spoken, and by some key thinkers. But it's what I've come to expect from Seed magazine. It's much more exciting (and better looking) than any design magazine I've come across. Which perhaps is the most important thing to take away from this.

Do You Remember the Future?

I remember the future well. Jetpacks, Mars and food capsules. It used to be so much fun. The promise of plastics just over the horizon and a helpful robot in every home. Say what you will about those times, but at least the future meant something in those days: Progress. You knew where you stood and our enlightened little selves could never do any wrong.

But then some of us started venturing off into the night like moths to a neon green flame. It was getting dark and we didn't really have a choice. Besides, Mars was getting boring and we needed something grittier than what our streamlined lives could give us. The first time you jacked into cyberspace with it's glowing grids of unfolding information you forgot how painful getting those damn chips inserted into your brain was. And oh the parties; throbbing music, lasers and reflective fluoro clothes were such a distracting novelty at the time. But we'd all become fragmented cynical beings and whimpering moral relativists. So much so that we didn't realise the robots had started turning against us until it was nearly too late. I mean, who were we to judge their value system? Thank god for the millennium bug is all I can say. Who knew that little bit of errant code would shut them down? 

But where to now? It's been nine years since we've been really living in the future and everyone seems to be taking it for granted. We've been sampling the past for so long that everyone's forgotten how to look forward and come up with something new. I thought progress was supposed to be a linear function of time? People just don't seem to want to live in the future anymore. Sure, we have personal communication devices but how boring is that? Speaking of boring, have you been to the suburbs lately? There's not a cantilevered helipad in sight. And what's with all the cheap neo-Edwardian facades? That's not how I remember the future. They're pretty much raising their finger to any notion of futurity, aesthetic or otherwise. Hell, I'll even sheepishly admit to turning my back on the future. I've had a beard for the past few years and nothing says dismissal of the future like scruffy unshaven facial hair. Who saw that trend coming a few years back?

But as much as I miss my jetpack I don't really want it to be part of my future today. I don't have a nostalgia for the absolute and I'm certainly not sentimental about the impotent haze of moral relativism. So where does that leave us? It seems people are just getting on with it and being pragmatic about the whole thing. It's not like we have a choice these days. Sure there's movement, but it just seems to be too informal at this point. Everyone seems to be so process orientated and participatory; but I'll happily accept that this seems to be the point.

But If you want a taste of what it's going to look like, trawl through some architectural renderings. Big shiny impossible ones. The crazy stuff seems to be coming from students and the big studios.  You can't start with the future until we have a general consensus of what the city should look like. If any of those urban concepts intertwine with a global mega-slum as their backdrop then you know you've found something. 

When your done glossing your eyeballs with pretty pictures go read some good old fashioned Science. The mind bending stuff. Anything that does a good job of melding complexity theory, relational generative networks and biotech is a good place to start. As long as you're running far away from Reductionist and Post Structuralist theory. And if you don't understand it yet, just keep on going until your nose bleeds. Those scientists never give up on progress, whatever the political climate. It's in their blood to keep on pushing the boundaries of what's appropriate. We'll worry about navigating microtopian ideologies later on, if at all.

Were not there yet, but we'll know when we move back into the future. We'll know because it will be weird, achingly weird. If it's both familiar and unrecognisable but it smacks you in the face with progress then you'll know you've found it. Even if it happens to have a damn jetpack.

The Singularity

Charming isn't it. Mankind opening up new horizons, new vistas of possibility. Men and women, white and blue collar. To a world unmistakably changed from before. The point in the future in which change happens so quickly, with such severity, that previous predictions are unreliable. I'll bet these poor bastards never saw the sixties coming. 

Remembering those lost to Y2K

Remember Y2K? Do you remember the daily trembling and fear that coursed through your veins knowing that by the end of the year the whole world would be dead? That everything would collapse all because of a few stray date stamps. Some people prepared for it: buying up cases and cases of canned food, going to a cabin in the woods and waiting out the panic and chaos that was to ensue. They were the lucky ones. We all thought it was a bit of a joke. We were scared that something could happen, but trusted that those in charge would make sure that all of the code would be fixed. 

How wrong we were. The next few years of scavenging food and hiding from the hordes of gangs still echo in my mind. I lost a few friends in the initial mayhem and I still hear their voices at night. Losing most of the old USSR to America's stray nukes was horrible, made only worse by the fact that it took some weeks before the news trickled down. Thankfully, their weapons system shut off completely at the stroke of midnight and weren't able to strike back. To call it a bug would be a dangerous under estimation of the damage it caused. Only now are we beginning to rub our eyes and get back on with this thing called civilisation. 

Welcome to my bedroom, approximately ten years ago. Sorry, I'll open a window. Teenagers tend to sweat somewhat; which says nothing of their general hygiene. But check out the near wall to wall posters. I was so fascinated by the idea of futurity at that point in my life. Looking back, I tend to cycle between being fascinated by the future and the past. When I started this blog, I was definitely fascinated with the past. Go back to the first posts and you'll notice a love of all things 19th century. But I don't think I've posted about that aesthetic for quite some time. I seem to be swinging back to the future; I feel like I've been there for a while now that I think about it. It could be a desire to look forward as an individual or as a society, but I definitely feel that we're in a forward looking trend. The end of Post Modernism seems to be a minor consensus, we just haven't decided on what we're in right now (better than playing with the ashes of the old guard). 

But back to my room. I was so proud of what I deemed to be the coolest room ever. Covered in old rave flyers, Matrix posters, robots, video game characters, Mind Grenades, future loving magazine spreads and any other post eighties cyberpunk paraphernalia I could get my hands on. I still have the stack of posters that I carefully pulled down hiding in a box somewhere. Everywhere you looked in those days was a heady mix of technofear and utopianism. Hell, I think somewhere in that mess was some spreads from a Herald Sun (don't hate me) pull-out that looked at the way we were going to live. I was so very much prepared to live in this world of towering skyscrapers, household robotics, GE foods, and computer chipped body modification and constantly being jacked into the internet. Wait, I guess we're there, kinda. 

Kinda. Ten years ago and things haven't really changed that much. Kinda. Things haven't changed in the way we expected them to. The imagined post Y2K aesthetic never really happened in the time frame it was supposed to. It happened alright, but in the nineties, not in the naughties. Rave clothes, with all their forward looking reflector strips and plastic fabrics pretty much died out into obscurity; they look pretty laughable now. We all rejected the idea of slickness and reverted to more handmade methods of creating imagery. Hell, who saw beards as being a trend? Nothing says dismissal of the future like scruffy unshaven facial hair. 

Remember the stroke of midnight? It came and went and nothing much happened. Nothing really changed considering it's nearing the end of the naughties already. 

Evidence that I did clean my room up now and again.

This is a mental public health issue

Some time back, I blogged about the 2007 Freeplay conference as part of the Next Wave conference. One of the more interesting things I took away from it was the keynote talk by Jonathan Blow, who apart from talking about his new game Braid, touched on a few ethical issues of video games. A quick side note: I haven't played is game Braid yet but we got to see a few scenes from it. I really badly want to though. Namely, it's a side scrolling platform game where you manipulate the flow of time, presented in a gorgeous painterly style, and from what I can gather a storyline that touches you not just through the narrative but through the gameplay. 

Back to my point. One of the things that stuck in mind about the more ethical and philosophical aspects points he brought up was how game designers are using evolutionary needs for rewards and goals to cheapen the game playing experience. If there were no golden coins to collect, or princesses to solve, would the game still be playable? He made a big point about comparing the simple and addictive (yet ultimately empty) rewards based system of World of Warcraft to gorging on fast food. I'd always wanted to hear him delve deeper into this, and read the odd interview where he did so but they never provided the meaty discussion I was hoping for. Thankfully, I found an audio of a lecture he gave at the 2007 Montreal International Games Conference and it was all I'd hoped. Thoughtful, detailed and insightful. Clicking on the link also gives you a powerpoint presentation of the lecture as well, so you're really getting a two-for in that package. 

The video was made by the one man team SuperBrothers who by describing his work as rustic 21st century minimalism has just received my vote for best new aesthetic title, like, ever. So, on top of his SuperBrothers outfit, he also runs The 1 Console. A quite refreshing look at the games industry - the site is drop dead gorgeous as well - and is trying to further Blow's ideas and create some sort of a dialogue regarding all of this. I highly agree with this and looking forward to see how this pans out, across the internet and eventually in the games themselves. 

There are quite a few ways that one could analyse the problems inherent in not just World of Warcraft, but in video games in general. I'll start with the closing quote of the clip; I think it allows for a more detailed response than the opening lines, only because I fear it poses an open ended question that I can't answer, quite relieving when I consider it's meant to provoke a discussion. But hopefully we'll be able to get somewhere with it.

It also says, it doesn't really matter if you're smart or adept at trying to get ahead in a system because what really matters is how much time you sink in, because of all these artificial constraints on you. It also says that you don't really need to do anything exceptional because to feel good, to be rewarded, all you need to do is run the treadmill like everyone else

An obvious starting point is to take a Marxist approach, notably that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas and all that. Lets not start bitching and moaning about all of that because it's boring, but there does seem to be an element of control if one were to look at it through that prism. At the same time the Western dream of putting your head down, work hard and in the end it will pay off is touched upon here, but it all seems just so 20th century. At the very least there does seem to be a reflection of the dominant idea about a work ethic going on here. Perhaps though, that's not such a bad thing; a little bit of work never hurt anyone. 

I've never played World of Warcraft, but I consider myself a WoW Widower whenever Uni holidays come around. A lot of time can get put into that game, and none of it seems to amount to anything more than working in the salt mines. Or worse, standing around waiting to buy or sell runes and swords at the auction house, I'll come back to that in a bit.

But killing monsters is pretty much the name of the game. Sure, it's more than that, and there is this huge mythic narrative that covers all the different species of elves and orcs and blah blah blah. I'm being harsh here, but I get to, I've never played the game. The artificial constraints that Blow refers to is evident in most games. You start off with fairly simple weapon with simple monsters and eventually power up to a better weapon only to be faced with harder enemies; and so on. The steady progression is only steady in the problems and solutions. Most games don't force the player to increase his or her skill, but allow the game elements to force the player to progress via scheduled rewards such as power ups, gold coins or bigger weapons.

He isn't stating that WoW explicitly tries to teach you to run the treadmill, but the mind soaks up these rules as part of the environment subconsciously. People identify with their activities, they're products of the environment and if we have this many people playing Wow with the expressed result being an ever increased desire of escapism into a treadmill, then we have a problem. 

One of the more important states that games allow us is to enter into a state of flow; that of complete immersion at the task at hand. One of the easiest ways to create this, especially from a game designers perspective is through fine tuning the balance between challenge and ability level. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychologist has done a lot of work around this, most of it fascinating but I'll let you do your research on your own time. There are a few other methods of gaining flow: clear objective, concentration, distorted sense of time and a loss of the feeling of self-conscious. I've listed almost half, but these seem most appropriate to gaming and game design in general. Playing Halo for hours (months) on end was probably the clearest personal example I've experienced, but Halo 3 was probably the most overly designed game I've ever heard of. Testing rooms rigged with cameras analysing the players facial tics, button pushing, game playing and crunching vast data sets of players movements. It seems that the game was crafted with a sense of flow in mind, by way of constant and scheduled rewards. That's fine, and Halo works beautifully on that level and the narrative sequence never seems to detract from the game. But the skill set required never seems to increase because of it's negative effect on flow.

But flow aside, does the tweaking of artificial rewards have any real benefits? The addiction of games can be something to brag about, but I'm interested in how games achieve this state. TED recently put up a video of Dan Dennett talking about evolution's strange inversion of reasoning. The talk, titled 'Cute, sexy, sweet and funny' looks at these four examples as to how we have it wrong. But the sweet aspect gives us something to lead to. 

"Honey is sweet because we like it; not we like it because honey is sweet. There's nothing intrinsically sweet about honey. If you looked at glucose molecules until you were blind you wouldn't see why they tasted sweet. You have to look inside our brains to understand why they're sweet."

I'm hoping that this gives a clearer example of the addictive qualities of games. It's runaway signalling. I was lucky to see Geoffrey Miller's talk on conspicuous consumption as part of Darwin's birthday and he delved into this a bit deeper. In a recent post I highlighted how he saw a 21st century understanding of consumerism move forward and away from the left/right argument and I knew it would come in handy sometime. And we're not here to talk about consumerism, but rather an evolutionary take on it. 

Conspicuous consumption arises from human instincts for showing off our intelligence, personality traits, and moral virtues to family, friends, and mates. Consumerism is not a matter of 'materialism', but of runaway signalling, status display, and socially validated narcissism.

This abuse of runaway signalling is exactly Blow's argument. Without these scheduled rewards, is there any worthwhile gameplay left? Without a power up, gold coins, a bigger gun or more narrative, does the game fall below a threshold of playability, of interest? It's these empty rewards that keep most players hooked, the mistaken impression of a fitness indicator. Back to the selling of swords in WoW. Although he skipped over it, Miller quickly discussed a study about weapon purchases in WoW. Specifically the lengths that people will go to buying purple weapons, which while they add nothing in terms weapon damage they indicate high status. Translated into the treadmill of WoW, although that means is how much time someone has spent in the game. It has no actual indication of skill, merely time spent. 

But free time or wealth indication aside Blow questions if game designers have been designing games to exploit the need for fitness indicators and affordances. Rewards can be like food (naturally beneficial) or like drugs (artificial stimuli and the illusion of fitness indicators), games over use the drugs because they don't understand how to make a food. There's nothing wrong with drugs every now and again, or perhaps eating non-nutritious food is a better description. It's when you're eating fast food all the time that problems begin to appear. There's a slide in his presentation with two really really fat kids at McDonalds. It's quite amusing, but also scary, and even scarier when he proposes that these false rewards are doing the same thing to our mental health. And he's not kidding when he makes that comparison, and it's a fair analogy. 

The rules of the game, the kind of interactions that the game puts you into, is the meaning of life for that game. And the meaning of life in WoW is you're some shmo who doesn't have anything better to do than to sit around and kill monsters

Here I think is one of the more profound statements I've heard about gaming, and once I realised it I realised that narrative should play less of a focus in games than it does. Or at least, less than what all the huge multi-million dollar games are aiming for. Games will never be able to compete with movies as a narration devices, and nor should they. It's not what they're supposed to do. As a game play device, narrative can help push things along, but too often games get stuck in creating a choose your own adventure by way of a few superfluous cut scenes. But what he's really trying to get to, which is a bit more abstract, is the dynamics of a game and the way they can convey something. And here's where it gets tricky, only through lack of choice. He gives a few examples that achieve or at least attempt this, most notably The Marriage by Rod Humble. I'd love to play it, but it's a windows only program. The abstractness of it seems to work for it, allowing the user (player?) to interpret different actions in regard to the fragility of marriage. All this through simple interactions between coloured squares. The problem with using this game as an example is that it wanders a bit too far into the artistic realm, or as a side research project. But it does seem to be an indication of nutritious content. It would be fantastic to see a major games company attempt this level of profundity with a best seller game. At the moment it doesn't seem to scale well, or at least it hasn't yet.

Even more intriguing about this is it seems to do so without presenting a narrative to inform the meaning of life for the game. It does so by using the gameplay. Back over at Superbrothers, in trying to describe the motivations behind starting a discussion on this topic and the video, Craig brings up a very interesting point about what Jonathan Blow is trying to convey:

The real meaning of a videogame is expressed by the rules. He explains that these expressions may not be perceived by the intellect, they can be perceived in an abstract, holistic way by the player. 

This is where it gets a bit tricky in sketching out solutions to the problem. But it has to happen. For games to be given serious merit, they have to be able to affect people the same way that a poem, a song, a book or a movie has done so. Yet, with each of these examples, they have the power to affect people through different methods, each of which by suiting the medium. But they've had a longer time than videogames to achieve maturity. And I think to figure out how to achieve this, one of the best places to start would be through defining the space that games exist in. By looking at Wittgenstein's language games, the definition of 'game' can vary enormously, becoming harder and harder to pin down. Blow quickly looks at the definition of games and defines them as follows: 

Games are where you are trying to achieve a goal and there are some rules governing the actions you can perform and their affects on the game world and also what the game world can do back to you

By defining games this way, surely levels of emotion and maturity can seep through? It doesn't have to be steeped in narrative to try and affect the player emotionally; once again, it never should, this isn't their strong point. Back to The 1 Console, Craig closes his piece stating

the rules of a videogame have meaning, intended or not, that is where their expressive power comes from, and that these meanings are absorbed by the people who play them

There's more to be said about this, but not here. I've had a few ideas for some posts in my head, but not sure where to take them. Now I do. Expect to see more about this in the future. I really hope that something important comes about through all of this, and hope that it somehow spawns, or at least furthers the movement to make games what they could and should be.

Update: Thanks for the link Craig. If you've came here from the 1 Console, put your feet up and have a leisurely browse.

On the nature of cosmopolitanism

When you see words printed or burnt onto food you have to buy it. You don't have a say in the matter. Arguments of free will go right out the window as your hand reaches onto the shelf and picks it up. An ironic smirk as it falls into the shopping trolley. Where disbelief should be, it is instead replaced by a grim acceptance of the world. And then it is forgotten as you get distracted by how much milk you should buy. To be left in the fridge as you realise how much of a sucker purchase it was. 

But you have time you tell yourself. This is a highly processed food, it's built to last. It will probably outlast western civilisation and still be there when nuclear fallout and cockroaches are the only other things still left standing. A few days past, and you see it in the fridge again reminding yourself, promising yourself, not to get drawn in by trial yet whimsical purchases. Looking at the packet, you wonder which marketing branch decided that this would be a good idea, tempered by weeks and weeks of ambiguous market research. Which market segment would think this to be a nice idea. Polite multiculturalism gone wrong. A 21st century Betty Draper keen to show off how worldly her dinner party is. And then you notice the use by date. Three days ago. Confusion as you realise that this is a premium product, that doesn't belong in the frozen foods section. 

Cynically, you realise that this product, this object d'art must be documented. It must be recorded and presented to the wider world. People have to know. Taking it out of the box, the uncooked food looks even more delightful and implausible than it does on the packaging. Humouring yourself, you decide to try and mimic the mise-en-scene as close as you can. A tinge of embarrassment as you realise to your horror that you don't have any sweet and sour sauce and wonder how this happened. For how long has this been missing from the cupboard? You press on, and are reminded once again that you still don't own any chopsticks despite your cosmopolitan world view and eating habits. After a few attempts at this still life, you wonder what the cooked result will be, while reminding yourself that it's past the use by date and is for display purposes only.

Twenty minutes past and you take it out of the oven. It looks worse than your wildest dreams. A few decisions as to how to best photograph it, you set up the shot. Curiously, you smell them, and wonder why it doesn't smell so bad. So you take a bite. And another. All the while checking for evidence that it has gone bad. You take another bite and realise that you've just eaten one. Reminding yourself to get back to the job at hand and take a few photos. And then you eat another one. So far, only one of them seems to taste a bit wrong, but it's all vegetarian, so, it can't be that bad. You tell yourself that the fact that the filling is black has nothing to do with the use by date, and push it to the back of your mind. A few more compositions, a few more photographs, a few more bites. You decide that you've taken enough photos and eat two more. Rational enlightened self-interest washes over you and you realise that you've eaten more than a token amount and vow to put them all in the bin, not before having another nibble.

Walking to the bin, you read over the ingredients and realise that one of them had prawns in it. Confusion turns to horror turns to shame as you realise that was the reason the filling was black. Slight panic as you wonder when it will hit. Later on in the day; perhaps tomorrow when you've all but forgotten about your shameful secret. Perhaps tonight, as you're sleeping the horrible truth will make itself known. You cover up all evidence in the bin so your girlfriend won't know that you've eaten some, and vow not to tell her how many if she does ask. And then you forget about it.

As you sit on the train the next day you begin to feel a bit strange. Moments pass and sharp stabbing pain grips your inside. It all comes flooding back. Panic washes over your body and you try to talk to your digestive track and tell it that it can handle it. We've been through worse things before. We can do it. More stabbing pains and a slight wave of nausea ripples throughout your body. The air suddenly becomes thick and you hope to hell it doesn't all come undone on a busy train. Not here, not now, and not like this. 

And then it's gone. You did it. You overcame adversity. You congratulate yourself on a job well done and vow never to do something this stupid again. Deep down you doubt you've really learnt anything by the experience. Except perhaps that you can't wait to see some sanskrit on a samosa. That would be totally cool.

The Relational Ontology

I'm going to be going out on a limb here, not just because I'm going to be wading through some unfamiliar territory but also because it has ramifications about the nature of this blog in ways that I can't really quantify as yet. I've stumbled across this thing called a relational ontolgy, and I agree with it in many ways, despite the difficulties I have with grasping it, as well as looking at and understanding things in this new way. 

Whether to conceive of the world as consisting primarily in substances or in process, in static "things" or in dynamic, unfolding relations. It's thesis argues that the relations between entities are fundamentally more important than the entities themselves.

The origins of this post came from a TED video by the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin titled How science is like democracy, which I've been sitting on for quite awhile. Mostly because it's a deep topic, but also because I found it hard to grasp, both visually and as a mode of thought. The further I went into it the more stuff I picked up along the way that forced me to wade through philosophical, sociological and linguistic tracts while trying to understand it all. The secondary source I looked at, the Manifesto for a Relational Sociology by Mustafa Emibrayer, expands upon what Smolin is talking about, but obviously more from a slightly different perspective. I've had trouble trying to reconcile the difference to see if an agreement can be made between them. 

While the title is mildly deceiving, he looks at three different stages of how we have thought about space and time and how they correlate to the society of the time.

Smolin starts off by looking at Aristotelian cosmology. It's clearly hierarchical, with these series of spheres with the earth in the centre followed by the sun, the moon and the celestial spheres where sit the stars. It illustrates rather nicely the way that medieval christian society worked; everyone having their natural place in society. Everything is defined by these spheres, where outside lived god in an eternal perfect realm.

Meanwhile, Emibrayer looks at Knowing and the Known, a book written by John Dewey and Arthur Bentley that cover the same three historic levels of organisation that Smolin discusses in the chapter Interaction and Transaction (whether these are by coincidence or choice on Smolin's behalf I don't know). While they discuss the same historical periods and link them to ideas about time and space, they focus on the action associated when taking a substanstialist viewpoint as a means of looking into logic and and the inefficiency of words and concepts. The first action type that they look at is Self-Action: Where things are viewed as acting under their own powers. 

"Aristotle's physics was a great achievement in its time, but it was built around 'substances'. Down to Galileo men of learning almost universally held, following aristotle, that there exist things which completely, inherently, and hence necessarily, possess Being; that these continue eternally in action (movement) under their own power – continue, indeed, in some particular action essential to them in which they are engaged. The fixed stars, under this view, with their eternal circular movements, were instances"

While this doesn't talk directly about the feudal structure of medieval Europe, we can clearly see the correlation through the image above; the planisphere of Ptolemy, or the mechanism (or movements) of the heavenly orbits following the hypothesis of Ptolemy laid out in planar view.

This Aristotelian view ended when the Newtonian universe came into play. Smolin starts to discuss this Newtonian framework, which is best illustrated by the use of a Cartesian grid, allowing for a fixed framework of reference when explaining where something is. I vaguely remember reading that Descartes came up with the idea of his grid while lying in bed watching a fly buzz around his room. I couldn't find any sexy woodcuts or engravings of this scene, so I instead need to refer to the Holodeck in Star Trek as a visual aid (and yes, I can hear you sniggering in the corner).

"There is no centre, there are particles, and they move around in a fixed absolute framework of space and time. It's meaningful to say where something is in space because that's defined by not where other things are, but to an absolute notion of space. In liberal political theory, there are individuals (particles) which have fixed rights (or properties) absolute and universal aspects of rights and justice. Which are independent of what is going on in history."

He continues on to mention that there is no space for god inside this grid, but as an outside external observer. This viewpoint of an external observer is something that has become my default photographic style here, so to move away from this is something I'm quite nervous about. But for the sake of the discussion we'll talk about it later.

Dewey and Bentley refer to the second mode of thinking as Inter-Action: Where thing is balanced against thing in causal interconnection; action takes place amongst entities  (not by generating their own action as they did in Self-Action). We're dealing here with Newton's laws of physics or Hume's billiard balls – simple cause and effect type stuff.

"For many generations, beginning with Galileo after his break with Aristotelian tradition,  and continuing until past the days of Comte, the stress on physical inquiry lay upon locating units or elements  of action, and determining their interactions. Newton firmly established the system under which particles could be chosen and arrayed for inquiry with respect to motion, and so brought under definite report... the inter-actional presentation had now been perfected."

In other words, the entities remain fixed, while the action takes place between them. 

Beginning with general relativity and continuing with quantum theory, old Newtonian ideas of absolute time and space became superseded by a network of relationships. There is no meaning by saying that something has a fixed point in space as was with the Newtonian/Cartesian framework, only that everything is relative to where something else is. There is nothing fixed anymore, only an ever expanding and evolving network constructing the universe. This is what he terms the Relational universe. Nothing can be outside of this relational universe, which means that there is no absolute or eternal maker to impose order over the universe. Nor can there be eternal laws governing this universe as everything is in a constant state of flux and constantly evolving. This idea of a ever-changing relationships is a nice extension of the Darwinian idea of constant change. So if there can be no external order dictated to this universe, the only way to create order and complexity is through processes and mechanisms of self-organisation. In the universe, this mechanism is gravity. The image above, taken from George Smoot's video titled The Design of the Universe shows how obscenely large the universe is: each dot is a galaxy. But before you vomit in your mouth over that scale, look at how fascinatingly similar it is to a network. Thus, the only way to exist inside this universe is to be embedded inside this network of relations, and the only viewpoint one can have is that of an incomplete and internal observer with partial viewpoints. He continues by saying that this ties into ideas of a pluralistic democracy, where we try and recognise our continually evolving networks of relationships. The image below is the known universe; our partial view. Once again, each dot is a galaxy.

Trans-Action: Where systems of description and naming are employed to deal with aspects and phases of action, without final attribution to "elements" or other presumptively detachable or independent "entities," "essences," or realities," and without isolation of presumptively detachable "relations" from such detachable "elements."

Emirbrayer thankfully makes sense of this sentence; the  very terms or units involved in a transaction derive their meaning, significance, and identity from the (changing) functional roles they play within the transaction. The latter, seen as a dynamic, unfolding process, becomes the primary unit of analysis rather than the constituent elements themselves. 

Got it? Good. 

One of the difficulties with comprehending this ontology is the shortcomings in western languages in expressing processes that are in a constant state of motion. It is impossible to hold the verb and the noun together in the mind at once, whereas we are used to the idea of the noun, thing, essence first, isolated of any event or movement. We don't ask "look at the perpetual flowing of the water", we state "look how fast the water is flowing". It is these linguistic shortcomings that make this hard to comprehend as a day to day way of thinking.

Enlightenment humanism begins with entities rather than relations, and the construction of power as property only makes sense within a logic that privileges entities. According to Enlightenment humanism, human beings, in their capacity as asocial, self interested, stable entities, seek power-over before power-with.

I can't remember where I got that quote from, but it illustrates rather nicely the differences between the two different modes of thought, especially when dealing with power relations. But where does this leave us when trying to visual these new power relations? I think that will have to work for another post, but I'll be getting into that sooner rather than later. The Aristotelian and Newtonian imagery is easy to consider, considering the amount of time that has been spent on it, as well as their fixed nature. I won't really be looking into the medieval system, but more the differences between the objective/absolute viewpoint and the relational way of seeing the world and it's effects on aesthetics and design. Looking back this post was more to help me understand it enough to regurgitate it back out, and we'll pull our sleeves up in a little while and get to the design stuff later.

ROFLMAO

While watching the opening ceremony, I was eagerly awaiting their rendition of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Would Mao rise up from the massive scroll on the ground with millions of smiling workers walking across China? The 5,000 years of history were breathtaking, and rightly so put western histories of the invention of print to shame.

But as the 'modern' China began to emanate out of the screen, and flashbacks to my fluro-coloured raving past caught up to me, it dawned on me that China were trying to either slip it under the carpet, or prove to the world that they were done with that part of their history. It had me mildly perplexed until the Teeming Void (via City of Sound) pointed out that it was there all along.

"The Water Cube and the Birds Nest don't simply display China's modernity, they claim a jump into a digital, sustainable, mega-scaled future. The computational aesthetics of multiplicity that mark these structures are, again like the opening ceremony, a powerful cultural narrative: coherence, strength and beauty made of countless tiny pieces. Like the flickering grid of the drummers, the ordered diversity of these structures is important too, in that it's not total uniformity, a simple (modernist) grid. In fact these buildings contain a kind of post-industrial grid, where the uniformity or regularity is not literal or material, but procedural or computational - the computer's ability to resolve complex distributions of force is what enables the "organic" multiplicity here."

While this doesn't discuss lack of overt communist propaganda per-say, it does illustrate this in a roundabout way. The economics and political structure was inherent throughout; either that or the sheer size (more is more) of the nation and the ceremony makes up for it as a trick to the eye. The overarching mythic narrative of their history viewed through the prism of both 20th century top-down communism as well as 21st century bottom-up complex emergence. The notion that we're moving into a post-post-modernist computational or procedural system - one where the grid isn't so apparent, or gridlike - is something that I think will start to take more of a front row seat. As the complexity becomes too vast for us to comprehend, and previous modernist notions of control become quaint, how will visualisations of these scales become useful, even useable? Do we take the multi-nodal worldview, or do we either obscure unnecessary data, or try through brute force?

City of Sound relates this to an earlier post regarding the modular mass production (or the simulacrum of diversity, take your pick) of the Terracotta Army and how this – as a post industrial system – relates to the breathtaking simplexity of the ceremony.

As an afterthought, how will these new rules inform the world of design? And by design I refer to publication and poster design, your bread and butter of communication/graphic design? Can we expect computational grids, or generative magazine design? How will typography respond to these new truths? Moving away from Meta, Helvetica, Gotham etc as the default typeface of the times? Open Type has paved the way for many type designers to explore the possibilities of character sets reaching into the thousands, but these are mainly in the domain of brush scripts with ever so realistic ligature sets used to mimic the human hand and the natural flow of these letters. Beowulf, which constantly and randomly generates slightly differing curves in the face was a good start, but it came out 13 years ago, and was more of a joke experiment than anything. Are we slowly headed towards a new legibility war between the traditionalists and the generativists/proceduralists?

All images the property of Boston.com and/or Getty Images

The Eamespunk Manifesto

I've noticed today, that quite a few people were coming here after googling Eamespunk, and it got me thinking. What if this thing really took off? That a throwaway line by Bruce Sterling would usher in a whole new meme. Boing Boing and Wired would start posting galleries of people modding their computers with bent plywood, and then the purists insisting that they must be mass produced and maybe even modular for it to be called true Eamespunk. This says nothing for those that got into Eames before it went all punk, but there's no point in being into anything unless it's post post modern (two orders of simulacrum at least for kids these days). The mid century modernists would get all up in arms at all these newcomers driving up the price of second hand chairs.

Couples would start making plywood chairs, and fabric patterns, and making their own modernist prefab homes that would have plenty of natural light (oh, people are already doing this). But then all the short stories would come out (or would that make it fan fiction?), chronicling the life of all encompassing genius design couples working in the forties, fifties and sixties and their holistic design ethos. Which is about the time the movement would move away from being a merely aesthetic exploit, and people would start believing in it.

Then serious writing entailing the lifestyle would begin, and serious magazines and newspapers would start writing it up, and it would get the credibility it would deserve. People will get angry that it's being brought out into the mainstream, and cry afoul that it has lost the spirit it once had (remember, double order simulacra; not the original). At some point the Eames foundation will try and get involved, or claim copyright, but they will all rise up and force the argument that it's everyones now, not just theirs.

Hell, people are already getting Eames dot pattern tattoos, so the wheels are already in motion for the hardcore set. Even House Industries are working on an Eames typeface project (everyone will just have to use Neutra while we wait). On other typographic lines, even H&FJ have coined Modpunk, which may give the movement some competition.

Better Living through Plywood

Who needs brass goggles and mirror shades when you can have wall size projector screens in bucky domes? Overturn the individualist agenda and share in media together! Collective humanist action will unify us while we are amazed at still slides of interesting details! The great medium of the slide will return to its former glory and the rich colours will return us to a time of wonder at the world. We will return the suburban home to the great importance it once had. The focus on the family as a unit will return, and we will design for them and their needs. And they will have a multitude of things to sit in. And they will be vastly more comfortable than temper-foam or leather upholstery. Soft curved humanist wood, with modern curves will form to your body. Enjoy the comfort! And the modular shelving systems will enable them to display their books or typewriters and maybe even vases. Post War enthusiasm will return my friends. Pavilions and fairs demonstrating the latest in plastics and molded plywood will bring amazement back into your hearts. Who needs cyberspace or the great aether when we will have the house of cards. Interchangeable modules of information, slotting different electric modules of knowledge together. The great consensual hallucination will be made from card and be in your hands.

Different constellations and connections will allow us to understand humanity. As we navigate these connections, we will realise the length that we have come, from the atom, to the galaxy, our humanity will become apparent. The experience that is life will be mediated through the choices we make with these cards. As we slot different cards with different cards, we will pursue a path of our humanity. And our backs, our whole body will rest at ease, and sometimes with our legs up on an ottoman.

We will take our pleasures seriously. We will remember that everything connects. We will live and breathe powers of ten. We will accept constraints, but we will never accept compromise. By learning of the process of problem solving we will structure the information to be conveyed. No detail is insignificant, the detail will make the design. We will learn that the process of arriving at the solution is what counts. By separating sciences from the arts, the hand and the machine, work and play, we only cheapen our experience, the human experience. By integrating parts into a meaningful whole, we understand the connections.

With sincerest apologies to Charles, Ray, and the Eames Foundation.

Colophon: I've posted some of these pictures in larger form on my flickr, more to come.

If anyone is interested in pushing this silly thing any further, I am all ears. Hell, I'm thinking of copying some of their Herman Miller graphics. No point in not ruining a good thing I say.

Choose the one you like best

With a roll of the eye I picked up this brochure while getting some last minute binding done at Officeworks. It seems inevitable I guess, that "Australia's largest retailer and direct supplier of quality office and technology products for home offices, students and small to medium size businesses" would move into the 'product as service' business. Dare I deny small businesses the privilege of an identity and logo – I partially side with Michael Bierut regarding the design of dog food packaging – but this sort of service strikes fear into the heart of all hard working designers everywhere. The industry has had to shift priorities a few times to keep up with society and in no way is this comparable to the invention moveable type, desktop publishing or the web, but it does signal a changing of priorities. I've come across a few businesses offering this sort of thing, but not to this scale. Even crowd sourcing has played a part in lowering the entry for design (this is a good thing). And the logos aren't bad either, well they're not awful – they're functional and they do the job. I just don't trust the scale of it. Officeworks shouldn't be getting involved in this sort of thing, stop diversifying and stick to products and retail.

Nescafe does it again

God I just love this kind of shit.

Stepping off the train today in typical shitty melbourne rain wanting a coffee and this orange monstrosity comes into my field of vision. You can just tell that someone was really proud of what they'd done.

Synergising the brand elements into a cohesive whole! Aligning the brand values with the flavour of the 'freshly roasted' coffee that allows the product line to grow! Allowing a space for the consumer to relax while enjoying their great new product range! Creating a space within a space while allowing the structure to create a dialogue with the culture of Melbourne! Creating an interplay between the public, space and the notion of a temporary structure masking itself as a trendy cafe!

Let's not forget to put some Eames chairs in there so they can relax with their coffee while watching the day go by!

Or even better, we can put some modular modernist couches in there so they can relax inside the brand structure! Guys, we're creating an experience here!

I know, to make it even funkier we can create these funny t-shirts that objectify the model SLASH barista while reinforcing brand values!

Yeah! We can put 'Smooth' and 'Dreamy' on the guys pecks and put 'Luscious' on the girls tits! That will create a positive brand memory!

What should we put on the cups? Oh, I know! we'll write "Feed your Cafe Craving" in bold white Avenir on a bright orange background and put these squiggly lines that act as metaphors for each flavour; we'll reinforce this on the menu as well! It's gonna be great! We'll win awards and get put up in all the trade magazines for this humdinger! I can see it now! We'll give the coffee away so that we create repeat customers!

I had Hazelnut.

The Annotated Prophetic Primer

Some more crazy fun from those industrious little christians (that's 2 christian posts in one week; who says I'm not balanced). These fantastic detailed charts come from Clarence Larkin, who spent three years making these charts, when God laid it on his heart to prepare a work on Dispensational Truth, or God's Plan and Purpose in the Ages. Despite their horribly messianistic tendencies (They were made during WWI), they're apparently scriptually sound which makes these lovely nuggets of information design even tastier. I'd love to have a higher res pic of Genesis to show some detail, but I can't find it anywhere. For some higher res charts point your divining mouse here and here

Steaming Lemonade

I'm a few weeks late to the party with this one, but all this hoopla about the Microsoft/Yahoo merger reminded me about it.

Apparently the Google logo was designed.

By a designer.

By an actual living breathing designer.

And they got paid for it.

Who would have believed that? I always thought the Google logo was found in a piece of shit, brushed off, and put on their front page. But no, it was really, actually designed. I'm not making this up.

You can read the interview with the designer here.

The texture and shading of each letter is done in an unobtrusive way resulting in lifting it from the page while giving it both weight and lightness. It is solid but there is also an ethereal quality to it.

That may be true, but the interview makes no mention of the fact that it is a piece of shit. Steaming in fact. Nor does it mention that the "ethereal quality" coming from the drop shadow (seriously, who says that? About drop shadows? Oh, thats right, the dick that designed it) was inherited from the original design that Sergey Brin attempted before getting a 'pro' in to do it.

I could keep on quoting from the interview and keep on giving it the shit that it deserves, but I'm not that bored. The only benefit of the doubt that I'm willing to give them here is that it was 1999, heady days before the bubble burst, and drop shadows were totally partying like it's 1999 (sorry, I know, but I couldn't help it). I'm all for the zany pictures they add to the logo on special days, got no problem with them, they're kinda cute, but only because they're making lemonade when they were given steaming lemony shit.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of the google.org logo (the philanthropic arm of Google). Simple, clean, beautiful, everything their other logo isn't. Whats more, its set in Franklin Gothic Thin (I could be totally off here, anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), which is utterly perfect for Google. A staple workhorse face, thinned out for 2.0 goodness.

This is how Google should look. This is what Google is all about. You want solid and ethereal quality? You got it right here. If they ever change their logo, I pray to the type gods that they change it to this.