Category: Space

Last month, I attended a great two day design conference called Fabric, hosted by the also great 1RG co-working space in Toronto. The second day of the event was an unconference, which was something I haven’t been part of in a while. I loved it.

The gist of an unconference is that the participants are the ones that pitch the sessions and vote on them. Then the organizers support by managing the logistics to make it all happen.

I pitched a session to share the structure of the handbook I’m working on for feedback. I’m going to write up a bit of a summary of that conversation at a future date because it was such an incredibly rich set of responses and thought, especially for an hour of conversation.

One of the themes that came up early in our conversation was memory. How memory and other type of knowledge relate to time and space. I learned about the idea of memory palaces, also apparently known as Method of loci.

One of the foundational reasons for this studio is to create and use methods that engage with physicality – real materials, real places, real people – when we talk about technology. It seems that working with these systems in the abstract isn’t putting us in positions of power, nor is it helping humanize the people and places that get turned into data and data points. The spreadsheets and lists and diagrams are too flat.

Timelessness is generally understood as an inherently good quality, while placelessness, at least in geographer’s terms, is pejorative. Placelessness is not a quality anyone wants in their neighbourhood or city – that banal, could be anywhere capitalist outcome.

It seems at least a bit plausible that the experience of the placelessness of the internet – and the systems we use on top of it – are also messing with the ways we generally use memory to navigate our work and our relationships. Feeling unsettled is bad footing from which to deal with hype and uncertainty.

As for unconferences, another session is coming on day two of Civic Spark – August 16&17 – in Toronto. Join us! 🙂 We’ll be talking about some of this

a black and white photo of the fabric flyer, which is a paper weaving pattern.

A few years ago, someone asked me whether I lived in my neighbourhood, or if I just slept there. I thought it was a brilliant question that offered so much in so few words.

Relationship to place is one of the most frequent themes of my work. In particular, the relationship between technological systems and the local places and people that they impact. So far, I have found it productive to keep asking about how to bring more place-based thinking into how we talk about technology, how we design and build it, how we buy it, how we use it, and how we govern it.

There is lots of room to be creative in procurement. But you have to stand still for long enough to understand, deeply, where you’re starting from with your systems. And be comfortable in that knowledge. Familiar, even.

I saw a little glimmer of relatedness in this great interview in ROOM Magazine with the writer Ursula K Le Guin. I enjoyed this bit in particular about rootedness and stability and creativity, but the whole thing is excellent:

“ROOM: Do you feel that your rootedness has any correlation to your output? Does stability have any correlation to creativity?

UKLG: It does for me. It gives me time and room to write, a fixed space in which my imagination can just move out wherever it wants to. Whereas usually the only writing I do when I’m travelling is just a descriptive journal, because I’m busy describing the place where I am now. If I had to do that all the time I probably wouldn’t write fiction.”

I’m thinking about whether we live in our technologies, or if we just sleep there.

alt: photograph of bright red sour cherries in pale blue fruit boxes