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.
One of the major drivers behind this new endeavor is to do more physical work. To bring the work of modeling and materials into how we talk about technology, how to surface the analogue and the real world – its people, and places – as central to any discussion of applied computing.
I’m craving this kind of physicality, and my instinct is that many of us are. In conversations with others it sure seems so, but this is spotty and anecdotal. It was neat to see an article this morning about the use of physical models in the world of architecture – thanks to Shannon Mattern for the share.
From the article: “Most architects will have to slog through foam and cardboard in a studio at some point, but once they enter the professional world their work will happen entirely on a screen. Now, however, some architecture firms are reinvesting in physical models.”
I spoke at a landscape architecture conference earlier this year, and some of my remarks were about the visceral and physical nature of process – of writing, of note-taking, of summarizing. This was in the context of talking about automation and how the profession was responding to generative AI and the like. After my talk, I spoke to the principal of long-standing Toronto firm, and he shared his feelings about the necessity of physical drafting, while also sharing that their new office didn’t have drafting tables.
Within certain professions – architecture, landscape architecture, engineering – there is a long-standing history of the use of models. And it’s fun to be engaging with how to bring some of these (and other sectoral approaches to modeling) into how to better talk about computers with each other.
The question on my mind today, however, has more to do with time than space. I was thinking about how we model time. The objects I relate to time on immediate thought are about increments of measure – clocks, time-keeping, etc. I know there is so much here, and it’s new territory for me as someone that has not spent much time in the language and workings of physics. My relationship to time – and philosophy of time – has recently been so tied to experiencing the present more carefully. Any method of assigning equal value to time in surgically precise ways doesn’t feel like it captures things appropriately. Which also speaks to a feeling of our need to get more comfortable with imprecision in our lives.
Recently, one of my kids was assigned a project where they had to make something out of recycled materials. We settled on an hourglass, with two bottles attached to each other at the spout, and sand flowing in between. We didn’t use sand that was consistent in size, and I’m guessing this was one of many reasons that it did not keep time consistently. One turn of the bottle was ten seconds, the next twelve. We didn’t chase the physics of this effort with research, and enjoyed the wonky outcome a lot. To me, it seems more fitting than the uniformity we attempt in our increments. The more I look at and write about time, the more I’m convinced that how we approach time is one of the most powerful tools we have to use in this political moment. Shorthand: sand in the gears.
This month I’m thinking somewhat about modeling time, and how time relates to process. Time is the first of two parts of the handbook I’m writing, the current chaptering of which looks like this:
Introduction
Part I – Time
Past
Present
Future
Cadence
Timing
Timelessness
Other?
Part II – Space
Place
Roots
People
Systems
Seams
Wayfinding
Other?
Not here but involved:
Increment
Rhythm
Pattern
Other?
It was really interesting and generative to catch up recently with friend of the studio Zaid Khan. He gave this excellent talk, Thinking with Time – long one here, short one here – about the use of time in design. Highly recommend!
Zaid’s thinking about working with time before space – in terms of linearity – confirmed an ordering that seemed intuitive to me when getting things off the ground here. I have long struggled with linearity in narrative, but in process it becomes a bit easier to assert the necessity of looking to the past before launching headfirst into the future. And perhaps more importantly, as pointed at in Zaid’s talks, the hardest work of sitting still in the present, non-action with intention.
Happy to share that we’ll have some more insights from Zaid soon.
a small set of clay objects from summer camp, including a small green snake, a marshmallow, a mushroom, and a volcano.
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
In the chapter, she talks about trends and cycles that occur within the technology landscape. It’s a great read, well recommended. And it came to mind again later this morning while I was attending a webinar hosted by the Canadian government about the G7 member countries’ approach to AI policy.
The event was focused on efforts to get small and medium sized businesses to adopt artificial intelligence. What I heard in the webinar rhymed a lot with stories we were told about unleashing the power of big data roughly a decade ago. But with the stakes made out to be much higher this time around.
Whether ten years ago or now, there is a common effort in tech policy circles to talk about technologies in the abstract, and to try to resolve challenges about them in the abstract as well. There is also a constant effort at erasing history, putting all of our focus on the future, on the unknown. Books like Bellotti’s help with seeing different kinds of patterns in technology – market patterns and product patterns – that yield a lot of help in reconsidering what is happening now.
Context context context makes conversations about technology use make sense. Good governance and thoughtful technology operations will always need to be contextual, and will require lots of time and thought and awareness of history. Good governance isn’t a product to adopt, or a toolkit to implement, but rather a way of doing business with both creativity and care.
alt: black and white photo of plants with large raindrops pooled on their leaves
