Читать книгу Inflection 05: Feedback - Jack Self - Страница 5

EDITORIAL

Lucia Amies, Samuel Chesbrough, Sarah Mair, Olivia Potter and William Ward

Inanimate data can never speak for themselves, and we always bring to bear some conceptual framework, either intuitive and ill-formed, or tightly and formally structured, to the task of investigation, analysis, and interpretation. —Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences.

At present, the term ‘big data’ is virtually ubiquitous: think Cambridge Analytica, social credit and crime prevention systems powered by exhaustive data collection and targeted advertising in our email. Inflection vol. 5: Feedback is an exploration of how designers might manifest this trend within the built environment. Once the purview of software engineers and data scientists, trends in feedback collection, use and theory are now being influenced by designers, while their everyday practice is increasingly concerned with its outcomes.

While we speculate about the boundaries of design’s future, we also critique its present and revisit its past. The original provocation for this volume of Inflection used Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood’s unbuilt Fun Palace project as a framework for speculation. The project was a tongue-in-cheek (but also deadly serious) reaction to the marked increase in available leisure time in the post-World War II era. The allure and the life of the project (arguably) are not found in its architectural expression, but in Price and Littlewood’s utopian aspiration for the truly free society that it would facilitate. The data used here, however rudimentary, is just the glue that holds the project together—data is not just referred to, but utilised to achieve a defined ideological goal.

Regardless of whether the data designers work with is ‘low’ or ‘high’ tech, what matters more is the conceptual framework they adopt to organise and prioritise that data. Data analytics might be a more technically sophisticated methodology than a participatory design consultation, but that alone does not guarantee a positive outcome for each stakeholder in a project. There is a pressing need for designers to re-engage with multidisciplinary theories and concepts that can help them take rigorous, principled positions on the increasingly difficult conditions of the “wicked problems” they encounter.¹ Sometimes, we draw such models from counter-intuitive sources: Hamish Lonergan contends that 18^th century philosopher David Hume’s theory of taste and criticism informs our understanding of the oft-maligned style of architectural conjecture that we find in our social media feed. In the same vein, Sarah Hirschman demonstrates how a methodology borrowed from improvisational comedy could encourage a more egalitarian approach to the everyday practice of design.

The wealth of new data and feedback methodologies accessible to designers can enrich well-established modes of practice. Kevin Jones details how a conceptual understanding of feedback loops helped inform his design team’s approach to replacing the fire-ravaged campus library at Mzuzu University in Malawi, Africa. Here, structured and reflective collaboration with stakeholders and clients ultimately enriched the methodologies of each designer’s practice. In a similar vein, Millie Cattlin and Joseph Norster demonstrate how Price and Littlewood’s ambitions might translate to a contemporary, pragmatic context. As part of their work establishing their Melbourne-based exhibition space Testing Grounds, they have designed a space for flexibility and creative expression that is firmly grounded in modularity, affordability and practicality.

Designers could acquiesce to a popular consensus dictated by political or economic influences; but the practice of design is uniquely positioned to critique, and maybe even start to arrest, the more undesirable directions that we find our society heading. Jil Raleigh discusses how the TreePlayer app she helped develop fosters a cultural awareness of nature in Melbourne’s CBD, using a combination of publicly-available data and design ingenuity. Similarly, Nicole Lambrou posits that deploying smart technology in eco-engineered landscape design can play a pivotal role in altering public attitudes towards climatic risk and resilience. In fact, it is the sophisticated knowledge and interpretation of these landscapes that determines our ability to meaningfully affect them. Nicholas Gervasi and Alexander Ford’s project refashions the monument into a dynamic force that speaks to the passage of time. Their proposal counterintuitively seeks to capture a temporal, fleeting phenomenon: a decades-old oil leakage from a wrecked World War II battleship, the U.S.S Arizona, becomes the site for reflection, homage and speculation. Gervasi and Ford imagine a monument that encompasses the present and future, not just the past.

Continuing squabbles over data ethics and privacy demonstrate that a proportion of those possibilities might not be all that desirable.² The daily movements and interactions of warehouse employees are being reduced to an efficiency calculation by sophisticated multinationals like Amazon and productivity gains are becoming dependent on constant surveillance and analysis.³ James Bowman Fletcher focusses on the technical improvements made possible by feedback loops using the seemingly banal task of boiling water, and reflects on how productivity efficiencies that could hypothetically result in the increased free time for workers that is typically re-allocated to contracted time.

Aware of their claim to agency, practitioners start to push for a more socially conscious and integrated role for design. In our wide-ranging conversation, author and architect Jack Self suggests that designers can, and should, advocate for an ethical agenda in their projects. Curtis Roth explores the complexities of authorship and design’s submerged complicity for working conditions through an exploration of the thriving art-copying market in Dafen, in the Shenzhen province of China. Roth commissioned a series of reproductions from labourers, attaching an accompanying specification requesting that each painter also paint their surroundings, and that the reproduced painting be erased by a separate artist. The result is a series of complex, contradictory portraits that contain traces of the state’s fabricated agenda, the painter’s own intent, the authority of the designer and the squalid living conditions that make it all affordable. Roth’s provocation invites designers to consider the dense web of sociocultural, economic and labour conditions that professional authority distances them from.

By no means does Inflection vol. 5 claim to hold the answers to these provocations; rather, it posits a variety of ways to approach them. Our focus here is not so much the outcomes of data-driven design as it is the methodologies, processes and frameworks that designers employ to arrive at them: what do we choose to value, and how are those values expressed in our practice?

01Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 155–169.

02Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013).

03Tom Simonite, “Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses,” Wired, https://www.wired.com/story/grasping-robots-compete-to-rule-amazons-warehouses/ (accessed October 16, 2017).