MediaDesignResearch

This week, unexpectedly, I ran into a friend, Lonetorus, a queen of demoscene.

demoscene

example work

She joined the class. and text-chatted with us while we responded verbally, as she did not have a mic.

She invited us to user her sim for the remainder of our meeting. She listened in and intervened on and off with her own comments.

then Shweta presented the week’s readings

Next, we discussed Shweta’s ideas on the readings:

discussion recording - part 1b

discussion recording - part 2

and finally, we discussed individual student projects:

discussion recording - part 3a

discussion recording - part 3b

Lonetorus and I then experimented with SL portraiture…

while Deus tipped me off on how to become a drug dealer in SL…

relevant for another course of mine called Drugs, Bodies, Design.

This week’s meeting was an informal discussion of the readings, general considerations about field methods, and conversations about individual student projects.

meeting v recording - part 1

I had the distinct feeling that some students were bored…

meeting v recording - part 2

after Kristy and Karlo presented the readings, I gave an overview of interviewing, focus groups, domestic technologies autobiographies, domestic technologies tours, creative exercises, and performance research using personas and scenarios.

meeting v recording - part 3a

meeting v recording - part 3b

we then discussed some of the students’ projects and brainstormed about possible methods for tackling the research.

meeting v recording - part 4

In the last quarter of an hour of class, Bianca introduced us to Wheelerwood Oppewall, a filmmaker using SL to screen and promote his and others’ work.

he invited us to sit in one of his screening rooms and watch his short films.

he also gave us invitations to join his group, Wheelerwood Films, through which we will receive announcements on his upcoming events.

This week we met at Bianca’s home.

Some of the students had clearly been practicing some fancy circus tricks.

We stood on Bianca’s porch while Jason introduced the readings.

< insert audio file > (two of the audio files are stored in the Lecture Notes tab on Blackboard while we find a way to link them to this blog — for now, please refer to Blackboard)

Next, Chris and Justin presented their thoughts and questions regarding the readings.

< audio clip 2 >

Group discussion followed

< insert audio file >

We then began to discuss individual research questions

< audio clip 4 >

during the discussion, Bianca developed an indescribable condition

…before falling into a deep slumber

I then suggested we go on an excursion to the Lost Gardens of Apollo.

I hope the class eventually found the magic carpet…

Because I was unable to get soundflower to capture all channels of sound in SL (my voice input through the computer mic, your voices through SL), I brainstormed with Bianca, who came up with the ingenious solution to our audio recording problems: use Snapz to capture video, and then dump the video and save only the audio. Everything went smoothly until the very end, when, after having captured over 2 hours, my computer froze. The only way out was to restart, causing me to lose the capture. So, once again, I will summarize in text form the lecture and discussion of our class meeting.

The meeting began with a prank. I gave everyone teleport invites to a dead space high in the sky (there used to be a bar there). When students accepted the tp, they tumbled long and low to a flat fall on the grass in a residential neighborhood. I then invited everyone to the veranda of my home in Redspire.

Everyone present was able to hear, but Kristy was unable to speak from a New School campus computer without a mic. Karlo had a temporary obstacle, which he solved. I introduced the weeks’ readings by explaining what I mean by the term “media ecology.” In a Heideggerian sense, media technologies have “enframed” our everyday practices and experiences; they influence our being-in-the world. The metaphor implied in the use of the word ecology suggests the totality of media-inflected experience. To distinguish this quality from totalizing, I emphasized that the diffuse and omnipresent mediations characterizing this ecology is experienced differentially across cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, historical, etc. contexts, as we discussed in our last meeting. Our first meeting also helps us to keep in mind that we need to speak of media ecologies, as technological change and access across contexts (often socioeconomic and geographic) constrain and enable multiple media ecologies.

What are the sensibilities, desires and expectations that animate a particular new media ecology? We read excerpts from some of the most salient discussions, particularly surrounding remediation, hypermediacy, participatory culture, hacktivism, copyleft, the blurring of the play/work distinction and affective/experience economies. The question I invited students to think about is how can design account for these sensibilities, desires and expectations? How does such an accounting translate into design choices? What sort of research is necessary?

Daniela’s presentation focused on the issue of information, knowledge and education. Details of her thoughts can be found on her blog: spiritualmedia

Adam’s presentation focused, in part, on education and gaming. Details of his thoughts can be found on his blog: medium difficulty

Afterwards, we engaged in a long and interesting discussion. Here I invite the participants to add what they found most important:

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please post your input here

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At the end of the meeting, we attempted to listen to music samples that were evidently available for download via links to websites. My intention was to show an example of the new levels that the experience economy will possibly reach: from the 19th-century European urban arcades to the American shopping mall, and from the virtual commerce of Ebay to immersive experience of Second Life avatar shopping.

Some of us continued onwards to a holodeck, with which I intended to demonstrate our increased fascination with hypermediacy. This virtual-world-within-a-virtual-world typifies what Bolter claims is a dominant sensibility of contemporary media ecologies.

There were both outdoor and indoor spaces to rez.

And, in line with Bolter’s claim that our desire for hypermediacy is coupled with a seemingly contradictory desire for immediacy (the effacement of media), the holodeck contains the option to hide its control panel.

Despite the multiple mediations making this experience possible, there was indeed something immediate about the experience.

Once again, I was unable to capture others’ voices in Second Life while recording. Karlo has recommended an application called soundflower, which I will be testing extensively between now and our next meeting. For now, in place of an audio recording, I’ll sketch for you the minutes of our meeting:

I opened the discussion by stating that the current readings focused on the specific practice of ethnography. They included a theoretical discussion of the practice and an implementation of it. Schweder’s article instructs us to clean the slate of the presumptive universals we even unwittingly take for granted and attune ourselves to the specifities of context, culture and difference. Miner’s study of the Nacirema, which not everyone realized as a semi-parodic ethnography of the American (Nacirema spelled backwards) demonstrated the potency of the modus operandi: make the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Again, in this reading, it is attuning one’s attention to the otherwise taken for granted practices and sensibilities that are culture.

Next, Clara presented the readings in greater detail. She included in her presentation references to the earlier reading on autoethnography. Clara made the point that accounting for one’s own subjectivity is the underlying modality for the kind of ethnography Schweder is proposing and autoethnographic methods. While the former addresses subjectivity in order to shed presumptive universals, the latter takes subjective experience as an inescapable yet valuable resource of productive inquiry. The question of subjectivity became a focal point in a related discussion of quantitative and qualitative methods in people-centered research, including media design research. Justin characterized quantitative methods as a generalizing form of calculus. I suggested that a broadly sketched distinction between quantitative and qualitative methods is that the former tends to convert or reduce qualia to universal equivalents (such as numbers) in order to identify patterns, while qualitative methods tend to meditate on the particular with the goal of description and interpretation. Some of the students stated that quantitative methods might better achieve objectivity, while Shweta emphasized that bias is often present in the very act of framing quantitative analyses and formulating questions. Schweder’s essay demonstrates that questions, whether they are the tools of qualitative or quantitative analysis, can carry with them presumptions that distort, exclude or invent the phenomenon and context in question.

Karlo offered an important insight when he said that methodologies are best chosen according to the exigencies of the context, as well as the objectives of the research. I offered the idea that some methodologies are more appropriate to some researchers than others, according to one’s subject position and individual skills. In fact, I strongly encourage creativity in the development of research methods.

These considerations emerged in the context of our discussion regarding the appropriateness of qualitative and quantitative methods in media design research. Clara had already offered a response: using both types of methods may provide a balance of broad pattern and descriptive specificity. I suggested that quantitative methods can also serve as a broad orienting device , and that they can also act as crosschecking or corrective device for qualitative, ethnographic research. Overall, the answer depends on the specific objectives of the research. If it is anthropological research, the objective is understanding, as Clara suggested. I offered that it is a conversation for the production of mutual recognition. If it is media design research, the objective is more narrow — and this will depend on the sorts of broad interests in media technologies, services and content that each of you have. Are you interested in social change, such as producing equalities by enabling the disabled? Are you interested in education? Entertainment? Do you want to enhance creativity or productivity? Are you interested in work environments or domestic spaces? The kinds of broad interests and researchable design questions you will ask will in great part determine the kinds of methods you will use to effectively achieve results.

Next, Adam asked what we made of autoethnography — where is its legitimacy as a methodology? I offered that first and foremost it is an exercise you are performing in relation to your experiences with the media technology Second Life in order to attune your attention to multiple dimensions of experience, embodied experience. This is an important skill: to develop a mode of attention that allows you to accumulate and record observations that become, through their accumulation and documentation, rich with insight. This skill will then be applicable to the experience of others, of communities of potential media technology users. Next, what better way to understand the intimate investments in and experiences of technologies that by starting with one’s own embodied experience? Last week’s reading from Brenda Laurel’s Design Research included a passage about design improvisation, which means design development through staged, bodily enactments of user scenarios.

Finally, I said, your autoethnographies of your SL experiences may yield general questions that are relevant across many areas of media design. This will be useful for your upcoming assignment to formulate relevant and researchable media design research questions.

After our discussion, Bianca took us to the machinima institute so that we could begin to see some of the productive uses of Second Life in particular, in education and the arts. Students located and activated the in-world streaming media function and together we watched a machinima piece. That’s when Jangula, a student of mine from another course, dropped in. He was taking a break from his ongoing ethnographic research on the consumption and circulation of hentai anime images.

unfortunately, audio hijack only recorded ambient sound in Second Life. It appears that voice chat needs to be captured via the system mic and speakers. Luckily, I have rather detailed lecture notes I can post for those students who did not make the meeting:

It’s nice to “meet” everyone after all of our asynchronous telecommunications. Using Second Life probably came as a surprise to you when you received the syllabus. As you know from the announcements on Blackboard, I recently took over this course from Elizabeth Ellsworth, who regularly teaches this course, and does so in the traditional manner, using Blackboard.

I revised the syllabus so that it reflects my individual areas of expertise, allowing me to better guide you through research – I am an anthropologist and have conducted ethnographic field work for about a decade. I decided that I could not bear using Blackboard alone to connect with students about what I think is really fascinating material. Bianca, the TA, and I have been working hard in the little prep time we have had to invigorate the course with new interfaces and, eventually, a smoother integration between them.

Today, in this meeting, I would like to do the following things:

I. give you an overview of the course, its content and its goals, and the role you will all play in it; II. give you a brief lecture on the enhancements that the discipline of anthropology has brought the field of design, as well as many other areas of thought and practice. I’ll refer to your first three readings: Autoethnography and “Possession”, which is a chapter from an anthropological study called The Cell Phone: An Anthro of Communication by Heather Horst, and the first selection of Design Research by Brenda Laurel. I then want to talk about Second Life and your first, ongoing project: your autoethnographies of SL, your SL journals. The point I will make when we get to this is that we need to train our attention on the multiple dimensions of our own direct experiences of design before we can begin to research the experiences of others with the goal of developing successful design:

I. This is a course that will teach you concrete research methodologies for developing media content, services and devices. Where do you begin? You begin with users, with people. Technologies are not cultural artifacts – they are not static, self-contained objects of the sort recovered in archeological digs and displayed in pristine glass cases in the American Museum of Natural History or the Louvre. Rather, they are media-in-use, and as media in use, they actively mediate human experience while human experience mediates the meaning of technologies. That is, technologies are inextricably intertwined with how humans perceive, use and invest significance in them. Moreover, the perceptions, uses and investments of individuals differ from context to context – be it a cultural context, or generational context or historical time period, or contexts based on region/geography, socioeconomic class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

In this course will hover for an extended moment over these considerations of technologies as culturally embedded and culturally inflected. The particular, situational meanings of technologies. The issue of everyday life contexts. To do so, we will first examine what it actually means to examine everyday life contexts. The discipline of anthropology has since its inception, grappled with this under the rubric of “culture” – what it is it? Where and how does it get made and sustained? How does it change? Two main things I will hope to get across to you at that point is 1. that in studying culture and cultural contexts, it is much more fruitful to analyze how things happen rather than why; and, relatedly, that carefully studying how things happen, the manner in which they occur, is a process of making the strange familiar and the familiar strange.

Next, we will look at the Media Ecology, the specific characteristics of a media saturated environment in the U.S.. What sorts of conditions, possibilities, constraints, conflicts, points of view, sensibilities, desires, anxieties, needs, etc, should we attune our attention to in order to understand our relationships to media technologies to then begin developing relevant and resonant designs research?

You’ll then narrow your broad survey of the ecology by articulating sample research questions that are pertienent, maybe even pressing (social change, for example), and researchable. You’ll then select one to pursue throughout the rest of the course.

While pursuing your individual research, I will guide you with a set of tools. 1. We’ll discuss library and internet research and the evaluation of sources, both academic and vernacular – and you will develop a literature review appropriate for your research. 2. We’ll discuss and practice concrete research methodologies, which will fall into two, broad categories: a. speculations and meditations abstracted from everyday life and b. embedded, interactive ethnographic research. This latter type of research will include a pilot study, the results of which will help you make useful revisions to your original design question, lit review or methodologies. The result will be a design research proposal – which will also serve as a grant proposal for those seeking support for their work.

YOUR JOB:
On each set of readings, starting with those due next week, you will each post a 1-2 page reading response on your wordpress blogs by 5pm on Fridays. This will give me time to read at least some of your work before we meet in SL, when meetings are scheduled (on Saturdays or Sundays). Your reading responses should address pertinent themes you find in the readings and should include your own critique or supportive elaboration of those themes.

You’ll take turns leading discussions on these readings whether we meet in SL or not. For meetings in SL, you’ll attend armed with discussion questions or talking points to elicit the participation of the other students. I will co-facilitate when needed. I will usually open up our meeting with some general statements to introduce the readings and place them in the context of the course. When we do not have an SL, you will post your questions/talking points page you will create on our wiki by 5pm on Fridays. Others will be required to post responses by 9am on Mondays. It will be an absolute imperative that you abide by these deadlines. Online courses can be frustrating if there is not tight coordination among participants. If we each do our part, then each of you should only have to logon 2 or three times a week for this kind collaborative work.

You will lead discussions in teams of two – or more, if there are too many of you. You must sign up on the front page of the wiki.

In addition to conducting the pilot study and completing a final proposal, you will present your work to the rest of us at the end of the semester. I hope to do this all in SL.

THE CELL PHONE
Performative individualism
Is of cell phone not only to communicate with interlocutor on the phone, but the people in the immediate surroundings. The cellphone’s appearance and a specific set of capabilities become essential. How it is worn, it’s colors, ringtones, flip top. Possession means individual autonomy from family and family billing. Possession means inclusion in Jamaica. It is laden with heavy cultural significance — not having a cellphone means exclusion more than or in addition to poverty. Why? because the cellphone in implicated in fundamental modes of presenting oneself and engaging in social interaction. It is inextricably linked to identity, autonomy, individualism. In sum, the cell phone in Jamaica shows how a media technology can be enmeshed in:

- culture-specific notions of individualism
- culture-specific notions of communication
- stage of integration of technology into the fabic of the ordinary everyday
- moment of its integration into the media ecology – before landlines were diffused – this is linked to ‘development’, to economy, to geography in some cases. Also, the cost of computers makes the cell phone an attractive alternative that performs many many computer functions, such as calculator, web browsing (and mp3player, clock)

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY
If you take this reading and think about it specifically in relation to the study of technologies design, it is possible to say that one way we experience technologies is to integrate them in our life narratives – or not. We invest personal meaning (or not) in technologies; there are stages to the adoption process, as you will have noticed with SL, and will continue to notice. Bianca can attest to that.

SL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY:
I want you to post your journal in an area of your blog and continue your journaling (and posting) as the semester progresses.
Reflect on your adoption/investment process.
Reflect also on the design activities within SL (scripting, building, art, etc).
You may also consider conducting ethnographic research on SL users.

Students commented on the unorthodox, personal nature of the research we are beginning. I responded that autoethnography is founded on the premise that we can bridge personal experiences with those of others. Additionally, we can identify our biases and locate differences across contexts.

We briefly discussed the technology of SL, its enabling qualities — overcoming obstacles of geographic and personal distance — creating real-time co-immersion for co-participants. We then explored the home of the Greenies to experience the power of perspective, of subjectivity. We then visited the Virtual Van Gogh museum to experience 3D inhabitable paintings.