Matthew Cheney on Samuel Delany.

Why do I blog this?Just a small nugget that helps communicate the special effect of designing with science fiction, and designed fictions. It may be that it is the *language and this idea of the *assumptions and preconceptions readers or those to whom the communication is directed — the things brought to the story, or small moment in which a new sort of experience is depicted. Small extrapolations, such as this idea of a near future world one could imagine based on today mentioned in Sandy Irwin Cohn’s Singularist in which Google’s search becomes Google Find™ as just about everything becomes indexed and meta-referenced — not just physical data, but objects and things, of course.

What is curious about this story is the way it spirals into the bumps and errors and failures of this mutation of Google Search into something not so good, where everything spins out of control. A good extrapolation and despite the downfall of things — it still holds onto a possible extrapolation of today into a world where things go missing despite the extensive cataloging and indexing of the world’s everythings.

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So, early heads-up and there’ll be more — if you’re heading to SxSW this year, I’ve organized a panel under the rubric of *Design Fiction. The full title is Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas, and I feel prescient with that title because it captures much of what’s been going on in the studio over the last, like..3 months.

It’s going to be good. It’ll be Jake Dunagan from the Institute for the Future; Sascha Pohflepp from Supercalifornia (whatwha?!), Stuart Candy from The Long Now Foundation and Jennifer Leonard from IDEO, with perhaps a special delta-net guest operator to flash-bang this one all to hell and gone. We’ve actually done planning and have had *skype conference chats to discuss what we’ve been thinking on this one.

Add this to your conference schedule..and see you with a plate of dry rub in front of me.

Design Fiction: Props, Prototypes, Predicaments Communicating New Ideas

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((This just recently in the inbox from Daisy Ginsburg who lives in that middle space between science and design that is positively the right place to be if you have interests in both of these practice idioms and have a deep commitment to creatively mucking things all to hell and gone. Isn’t this cool? There are two different rules for submitting your bona fides depending on whether you think you’re a scientist/engineer or an artist/designer? More details on the residency and the project are below.))

Here is a PDF of the Call for Participants.

Further Details

Synthetic biology is broadly defined as the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing biological systems for useful purposes. Design is central to synthetic biology, as the living world becomes a product of design and manufacturing choices, rather than evolutionary pressures alone. Thus, it becomes important to ask what role design–and the related concept of aesthetics–play in this burgeoning field. Other forms of engineering and manufacturing work in close conjunction with creative practitioners: structural engineers work with architects; mechanical engineers with product designers. Can synthetic biology benefit similarly from such collaborations?

The Synthetic Aesthetics project aims to answer this question by setting up these collaborations. We will employ the broad framework of ‘embedded residencies’. In these residencies, each participant will host either a synthetic biologist or creative practitioner and then visit and engage with the other’s workspace. These exchanges are expected to introduce members of each community to the other’s work, develop transferable knowledge and skills, and possibly form the basis for longer-lasting collaboration. The details of these residencies are flexible; participants will have a great deal of control over how resources are employed and the collaborations structured. Members of the Synthetic Aesthetics team will provide logistical support for, and document and study the exchanges. Ultimately, we seek more than simply one-off experiences; it is our intention that such collaborations will produce presentable results, which might be disseminated through electronic media, practitioner workshops, or possibly gallery exhibitions.

The collaborations are intended to be complementary and active experiences. Members of both communities who are part of this project will not just be passive recipients of information; they will engage in each other’s work without either practice taking precedence. The process will be equal, and we expect the art, design and engineering to be informed as a result.

These interactions should positively contribute to ongoing work in both communities, as well as develop new spaces for practice, cooperation, and debate. Long-lasting interactions between the two communities would enable more encompassing design concerns to be reflected in synthetic biology projects and products, enabling inclusive and responsive technology development. Collaboration can also contribute to the development of new schools of art and design, as well as to the fostering of existing artistic and design work with this form of biological engineering. Moreover, we believe that art and design can encourage thought and debate in unique and innovative ways, and promote new avenues for outreach and public engagement.

Application Procedure and Deadline

Interested scientists, engineers, artists, designers, and others involved in synthetic biology or the creative professions should submit the following required documents:

For designers and artists:
1. CV
2. PDF portfolio, including URLs for relevant websites containing your work.
3. Letter of interest (no longer than one page) describing what you hope to get out of the project and what you would like to contribute.
4. One paragraph outlining the projects that you expect to be working on until December, including any institutional affiliations.

For scientists and engineers:
1. CV
2. List of publications
3. Letter of interest (no longer than one page) describing what you hope to get out of the project and what you would like to contribute.
4. One paragraph outlining the projects that you expect to be working on until December, including any institutional affiliations.

Please submit your application documents via email to before the 31st March 2010 to be considered for one of the 12 two-week residencies (6 artists/designers, 6 scientists/engineers), to:

Dr. Pablo Schyfter: p.schyfter@ed.ac.uk

Contact Information

For further information, visit www.syntheticaesthetics.org, or contact:

Dr. Pablo Schyfter: p.schyfter@ed.ac.uk
Stanford Bioengineering
Y2E2 Building, MC 4201
473 Via Ortega
Stanford, CA 94305
USA

The Synthetic Aesthetics project is collaboration between Stanford University and the University of Edinburgh. It is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK).

Project Team

Drew Endy, Jane Calvert, Alistair Elfick, Pablo Schyfter, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

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Man..was *that a week. No one’s counting, or probably even noticing, but I missed my weeknote from the week before — there’s a gap — so this is really a weeks notes. ((Now I’m definitely talking to myself, I know that.)) But it was all a strange, hopped-up, late-night-then-squeeze-of-port sort of blurofatwoweeks. It was all around developing sound, evocative, provocative poke/prod/converse communication around this Trust project. And it all went splendidly. Only I noticed the holes, skips, bumps and false-starts, so that’s fine. It’s the *auteur’s eye — ((stated with all humility)), but when you get to the point of such profound intimacy with 3200 frames of a short video, you begin to notice as no one else ever will. And, it was also two weeks of an incredible design team hitting on all cylinders without trying. So..there’s that.

So, preparation, making small movies which is way more involved than I would’ve *ever thought, especially given that they ultimately end up being maybe a minute or at most 90 seconds long. Pitifully tedious compositing work that becomes more tedious because I didn’t think ahead to how tedious it could become if you don’t take care of, say — one super small detail ahead of time. &c.

Why little movies? Why small little films? Well — the rough thinking is to communicate differently to engage good folks who are perhaps optimized for being talked to via PowerPoint. *Death by PowerPoint, is what one might say. And *Death by CAD renderings. The death of the imagination. What we want are things that start conversations — a clever idea, something that compels a discussion and encourages a new way of doing what needs to be done. It’s also, despite the pain of production which presumably gets better with practice, quite a good way to think and design and not just a means of communication. The process of being forced to tell a small, momentary story about a thing or an experience — it gives you special language powers and new perspectives, and visual metaphors to help shape and smooth and refine the thinking. Clearly — it’s not just the film itself which is the outcome of all that work.

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Boy, that’s one ugly, ugly industrial design *refresh. I have no idea what got into the head of whoever is attempting to design these things, but that first one? The one on the left? Not great, but it’s basically not meant to be a flashy desktop thingie or to sit next to your flower vase. It goes in the wall, is all. And — that’s good enough. If there were to be an ID refresh? To make distinguish it? Would you throw on a tongue-licker pink brace? And make it bigger? It’s a *plug* computer, for crying out loud.

I’m baffled.

If it matters, these are clever little plug computers under the Pogoplug mark — an incarnation of the plug computing reference platform — that, without much else, create a little puff of internet cloud for you and me, allowing us to avoid fussing with the more vaporous clouds steamed up by Google and Amazon and the like. For small group personal networks — they’re brilliant. That’s the start. Plenty of people are cooking up all sorts of new weird things for these to do. Running Linux makes them ripe for modifications and alterations.

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Second point. I’ve been wrong to think that design-led creation of technology *stuff is the way of the future, and Mike’s experiences plus a couple of things here and there that I’ve experienced more directly are what make me certain I was wrong. Between knowing what it takes in practical terms to materialize an idea that won’t blow smoke when you plug in the power, and knowing that you can’t force someone to do something that they don’t believe in, especially if they are a technologist — well, the in-between is this idea of working together. No one wants to create a crap experience, but defining what is a good experience is what helps you get there.

Anyway. Listen to Mike’s talk and try to avoid wondering if his shirt was made from the same material they use for table clothes in pizza restaurants.

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Since the *winter holidays here in Los Angeles, which is a strange thing for an East Coast boy, especially as I hear reports of epic dumps of man-killing snow in New York City, my favorite photography spot has been the recently opened Venice Beach Skate Park and the equally awesome Venice Skatepark. I’m not a skater, nor a Sk8r, nor a photographer inclined to action-y things, but being in the mix, under threat of kicked out boards and lawless aerials

makes the park an invigorating and challenging photography playground — and quite addictive.

I don’t want to attempt a rough-shod bit of metaphor-stretching — or at least not too much — to try and rationalize sharing this *non sequitur of a post, except to say that, as pertains the last photo, I have been obsessed with these moments when something tried..fails. The failure has this curious, no-fear character to it. Trying the thing that seems impossible, over and over again. Getting closer, or moving away from the original idea and into something else, &c. It’s never a failure out right, at least as I see it through a viewfinder. There’s always something quite lovely about the moment when the board stays where it is, and the skater goes somewhere else.

Why do I blog this? *shrug.

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Well, this is one popped into my head the other day, but not for the reasons I’ll mention in this post — I’ll save the initial motivation for a post in the near future. In the meantime, while I was watching this again I found deep enjoyment in the first few minutes of the film when the viewer basically has to learn what the heck the is the technoscience of the fiction proper so they can knit it into their interpretation of the story. Sometimes the technoscience is pure MacGuffin — nothing specific, but *the device or what-have-you. Other times, it’s speculative but connected in a legible way to existing ideas, conversations or prototypical exemplars of what one sees as science/technology fiction in a film. That is, the film plays with current technology *memes, extracting, manipulating and cleverly employing them to service the story and general entertainment.

The question here is a fascinating one — how do you transport the audience into this world? How do you let them know what the technoscience that undergirds the fiction is? This sort of introductory moment is necessary of course, to make the good gooey technoscience into something legible — otherwise it’s all *bubbe meyses rather than good, extrapolated ideas brought to life and inserted into some corner of life’s drama.

We’ve seen some good instances of this transportation — there has to be a word for it — in Jurassic Park where we see the sort of high school science film explaining how dinosaurs were brought into the present; in the film of Minority Report where we see the pre-crime bureau and pre-cogs who can anticipate murder through a quick and dirty, open and shut case at the beginning of the film ((we also see the gesture interface that Chief Anderton will use — one of our canonical, exemplary examples that describe *design fiction)).

What we have here in this Brainstorm (1983, Douglas Trumball, director, with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood..which is weird) clip is precisely this function of quickly introducing the audience to the technoscience of the film without belaboring it too much. It’s actually quite simple as a concept, especially in the era of quantified selves, brain neurscience, brain wave game controllers and all this sort of stuff. Basically the technoscience fiction in Brainstorm is a R/W drive for the brain. Brain *waves can be read and recorded and equally-well, written to. This is it. This is what is shown in the first three minutes of the film. Done quite curiously, starting with the opening credit roll — a bit of extra-diegetic visual fun, where no time is wasted in getting to the story: what we might naturally think is a visual screen-saver-like backdrop to the credits is actually a test display on the device Christopher Walken’s character is seeing as they are testing their prototype. Dialogue also begins to creep in at this moment as well, gradually bringing the audience into the story itself. A few more moments of dialogue, a pratfall and prop-clues lead us to a reasonable conclusion that the *device is one that can read and write brain activity and actually allow one to jack signals into another persons brain giving them a full sensory experience of whatever was/is being recorded remotely. ((Sort of the *augmented/virtual reality enthusiasts’ wet dream. I’m much more interested in the production details of introducing the speculative technoscience. I find this technique here worth noting.

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Well, another week, another set of tardy week notes..it only seems like sheer anxiety about not being diligent propels me and that only when the subsequent week begins.

Onward.

It was a week of production of things related to project Trust; completing, debating, refinishing, redesigning as these things go, which seems classic completionist dyslexia, seeing as the next, next *done-by that we set was, technically, the end of February and already the calls are coming in to see it to help with whatever-whatever other thing someone else is doing that they feel could use a burnish or a braze from Trust. We’re genuinely excited to have these conversations — almost a dozen such over the next two weeks according to this scrap of paper with names, dates and locations.

In the midst of this, at this point is the curious letting-of-things-go insofar as the *intelligence or the *ideas in the project have been assumed embedded directly enough in their exemplars that actually figuring out what the ideas are, or refining them and so forth — this has gained little attention with a pure, slightly unnerving emphasis on the communication of them through small films, and a focus on the means and mechanics by which the communication happens. I suppose this is as these things go — for the writer in me (I mean this quite modestly), this is like the polishing and editing of the thought, with the thought and story quite well completed and beyond the point where major revisions can happen. If I can keep on this track of pure production, pure editing, I’d be surprised, knowing my penchant for rethinking at the last minute.

There was a short, two day trip to San Francisco to visit the facilities there and participate in an in-depth technical review, which was 2 parts engaging, 2 parts intriguing and 1 part exhausting. Communicating the experience of interaction touchpoints and *user (bleech..) journeys in order to feedback into the circuits of design, technology, logistics and accounting is something quite new to me, but something I genuinely want to understand and participate in, *only to know how design can shape an influence and be instrumental to the work that (a) engineers do; (b) software programmers do; (c) middling, junior designers do; (d) people under tremendous pressures with financial incentives calibrated to meeting some date in a calendar, um..do; (e) accountants and business people do..etc. ((This thinking calibrates with a talk Mike Kruzeniski gave at IxDA, which I hope to hear one day where he conveys this important, crucial notion that if you cannot make your design criteria, pattern, process, thinking — whatever — communicate to the sensibilities of the engineers making the stuff you draw in story boards, then you may as well take up horse shoeing.))

What also occurred to me during this workshop-y couple of days was the means and mechanisms by which one communicates *feedback. The spreadsheets and awkward photos seems positively medieval, which is not to register anything negative about the facilitators. I think we’re all meant to contribute to this new, new process of review and it got me thinking about another mechanism that is closely to small, short visual films (of course..it’s all we’re doing these days) that may be more impactful if less didactic.

Finally, a lovely close to the week — I sprinted off of the bloated plane from SFO, jumped into my car (becoming the mayor of Parking Lot C on Foursquare, in the process, much to the ridicule of *friends) and headed over to the Gadget OK! exhibition, talk, dinner at UCLA’s D|MA. Sadly, I missed Maywa Denki perform, but I did get to see the exhibition and buttonhole Tosa-san for our obligatory weird photo. ((More photos of the exhibition and stuff are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/julianbleecker/sets/72157623486756774/)

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Continuing the RoboCop theme — truly a prescient gem, this one. It’s got two things going on. One: a failure of technological hubris. Two: demo…and die, a quiet nod to the insane inane practice spawned by the Media Lab to be always demoing..demo..or die. Such a stupid proposition, whether it *works or not. Just do good work and don’t explode your head.

Why do I blog this? Thinking about ways of working and *demonstrating / *sharing / *communicating to an audience. What are the ways you can take an audience through to your world and way of seeing things? What are the various rhetorical, visual, prop elements that can effect the transit into another way of thinking? As *Rhys has been encouraging — what are the equivalents to the train in Harry Potter; the Wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? Or the mechanics of establishing the new rules, the new physics of some other kind of logical universe. Thinking on this, I am now curious to gather up all of the inset graphics that play as adverts in science-fiction films that help establish the milieux of the near future worlds themselves. Do these adverts and other inset graphics play the role of establishing the ontological furniture of these stories?

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