The amazing Aleks Krotoski, most recently seen fronting the BBC’s The Virtual Revolution, is currently curating a series of interactive events for Digifest at the Dana Centre. She has asked me to take part in ‘Technology You Can’t Live Without’ which will be done Pecha Kucha style on Friday 26th March. PechaKucha 20×20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. This means that presentations last about 6 minutes and are pretty mad and dynamic as you don’t have any control over your slides – you merely have to keep up! I’m pretty excited about this opportunity and pretty terrified as well.

Now, I just have to decide which technological object to talk about…..

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking at the final Goldsmiths DesSS seminar: Object Fair, along with Jennifer Gabrys and Joe Malia. My object (or rather series of objects) was an exhibition of my PhD research that I produced at Goldsmiths last year. It was a really interesting session with three very different interpretations on ‘objects’. I was asked a lot of good questions (such as how has this work challenged/interrupted/augmented my sociological practice? and did viewers know I was a sociologists and does this matter?). Thinking more about these will be very helpful in turning this bit of work into an article of some sort very soon. Thankyou to all involved and especially to Tobie Kerridge for organising and facilitating the seminar.

This was the postcard for my exhibition:

The flyer for the event series:

This week I started a new role as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Humanities and Social Science Department at University of East London. I will be working on an ESRC project called.

This project will focus on four relatively high-cycling areas – Hull, Hackney, Cambridge and Bristol – and try to find out why cycling thrives in these areas. Cycling rates in the UK are low by Northern European standards, but relatively high-cycling areas do exist here. In such areas, cycling extends beyond “committed cyclists”, so it is likely that many residents who cycle regularly would not do so if they lived elsewhere in the UK. Their experiences are important for understanding processes through which cycling becomes more “normal”.

More info here and a new website is in development here.

I’ve spent the last few weeks in Australia doing freelance research for Intel’s Digital Home Group and part of this involved time in central South Australia. During one home visit, my colleague and I were taken on a tour of the cattle and sheep station to check for recent flood damage; there was talk that many of the fences had been washed away. We drove with the property owner in his old weathered ute which had as much red dust inside as out, and was filled with everything he ‘could ever possibly need’. This eclectic ensemble included cutlery, sunscreen, hammer, spanners and cable cutters, mobile phone, pens, bits of paper, matches, food in tupperware containers, tobacco, sheep tags and shearing clippers amongst a plethora of other objects.

Driving around at dusk we spotted lots of roos (Western greys, reds and Euros), Wedge tailed eagles, sheep and some feral goats.

I was aiming to make my way from London to Lancaster (300miles) by bike over five days. A sudden onslaught of snow and sub-zero temperatures meant that I made it to Birmingham by bike (135miles) but had to resort to trains for the rest of the journey. It was a hell of an adventure slipping and sliding on iced roads for at least part of the way. I’ll try again when it is slightly less c-c-c-cold.

This year, I’ve had for the pleasure of participating in the long distance Learning Assistance Programme (LAP) for the School of the Air in Australia. Every week (barring technical issues, travel breaks and school holidays) for one hour I have logged onto a special programme called Centra and communicated with a seven year old girl in central Australia. Because of our shared interests in travel, we have focused on geography. This meant learning a little of the language, landscape, art, architecture, cultural and social practices of a different place each week. Centra is an amazing tool – kind of like a combination of an interactive whiteboard, Facebook and Skype. It enables us to talk to one another and other people can join in, we can upload images and share them, make links to websites and write questions or simply illustrate things on the whiteboard.

The School of the Air (SOA) provides education for hundreds of children living on isolated properties in central Australia. Children who would otherwise have a limited education and opportunities for social engagements use various communication technologies to participate in school via the air. Begin in 1951 using radio, SOA now run their own ISP and utilise satellite technology. As a result, SOA’s history is a rich socio-technical chronicle of cutting edge technology adoption.

It is probably no surprise that SOA featured briefly in the intro to my PhD about innovative technology practices in Australia. It is a great example of an Australian world first that emerged from the fusion of available technologies, skills, isolation and challenging circumstances to meet basic needs. I saw it as emblematic of local knowledge, technical skills and the unique spatial character of the country and demonstrates the imperative to connect people across great distances. Despite the fact I had researched and written a little about SOA in my thesis, I had no real experience or contact with the service until March this year. Working as ethnographer for two months with Dr Genevieve Bell in her role as the 15th Thinker in Residence, our research lead us all over the state of South Australia. During this time we had the opportunity to visit a SOA office in Port Augusta where teachers work to teach their students online. We participated in a school assembly via Centra and Genevieve was interviewed by the Principal with input from students via voice and written questions on the shared whiteboard. It was then that I discovered LAP, run by the very supportive, super calm and time generous co-ordinator Vanessa Kirkham. With Vanessa’s help I cleared a Police check, was given access to and taught to use the computer programme and was matched with a student.

I have many notes of the rewarding experience of being a LAP volunteer (I’m an ethnographer of science and technology studies after all). I will post some of these over the next few months between school terms. I was also surprised on many occasions about the significant role the weather played in our communications. I was often (not unsurprisingly) unaware of weather conditions in central Australia and the effect it would have on our cross-hemisphere sessions. For instance, the massive dust storms that raged over central Australia in September this year and later hit the coast, covering Sydney with fine red dirt, resulted in cancelled lessons, and not just ours but literally days of school, as landlines and communication satellites were badly affected.

Temporal differences are also a unique aspect of my experience of LAP. All LAP volunteers, except for me, are located in Australia. Tonight for instance, because of the current 10.5 hour difference between London and South Australia (SA), the session for me starts at 22.30 which is 09.30 in SA. Earlier in the year, our sessions commenced at 7am London time which was 16.30 in the afternoon in SA. Tomorrow night is the end of year LAP morning tea which is an annual event to publicly thank volunteers for their commitment to LAP and students. I really want to attend this and I will even though for me it is not really morning tea time, but rather will involve midnight snacks.

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Update: A screen grab from last night’s SOA morning tea.

The third event in the Design and Social Science seminar series – Speculative and Critical Objects – is on tomorrow at Goldsmiths. If you cannot make it, the talk will be webcast from 4pm GMT at: http://www.materialbeliefs.com/stream/dss3.php

— seminar poster:
http://www.materialbeliefs.com/pdfs/The-objects-of-design-and-social-science.pdf

===========================================
Design and Social Science Seminar Series 2009-2010
===========================================
The Objects of Design and Social Science
Seminar 3 – Speculative and Critical Objects
James Auger, Royal College of Art
Wednesday November 18th
—————————————————————————

— speaker biography:
James Auger (b 1970, Derby, England) has a BA in Product design from
Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Design Products from the Royal College
of Art in London. Post RCA He worked as a Research Associate for Media Lab
Europe, where the main focus of his research was a design-based
investigation into technology mediated human experience.

James is currently based at the Royal College of Art in London where he
teaches and is a PhD candidate in the Design Interactions department. He
is also a partner in the speculative design practice Auger-Loizeau whose
projects have been published and exhibited internationally, including
MoMA, New York, 21_21, Tokyo, The Science Museum, London and the Ars
Electronica festival, Linz and is in the permanent collection at MoMA.

Prior to being a designer, James completed an engineering apprenticeship
at Rolls-Royce (aero engines) and worked as a special effects technician
for T.V and film.

—————————————————————————
The seminar will run from 4:00pm – 6:00pm,
Interaction Research Studio,
6th Floor, Ben Pimlott Building,
Goldsmiths, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW
—————————————————————————

— seminar series description:
Common to both design and (parts of) the social sciences is a shared
pre-occupation with objects. On the one hand, design is concerned with
making and interpreting objects including the finished article (e.g.
consumer products), ‘experimental’ design aids (e.g. prototypes), and
projective representations (e.g. scenarios). Recently, design has also
begun to re-engage with more speculative objects whose ambiguous
functionality contributes to the exploration of the social and the
material, the political and the aesthetic. On the other hand the social
sciences also work with objects, including categorical objects such as
race, gender, and health, empirical objects ranging from the mundane to
the exotic, and conceptual objects such as the notions social scientists
use to understand and theorize the social. Here, the sociology of science
and technology has been especially productive, introducing notions such as
boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989), epistemic objects (Rheinberger,
1997), immutable mobiles (Latour, 1990), quasi-objects , black boxes
(Latour, 1988) to name but a few. Accordingly, a focus on material,
empirical and conceptual objects brings into sharp relief overlaps and
disjuncture between the two disciplines and a rich space for dialogue.

This seminar series will seek to bring into view and explore existing
objects of both design and social science as well as draw out objects of
novelty for both disciplines. In doing so we will seek to engage with
emerging issues and topics in both disciplines such as the outputs of
speculative and critical design, participation, engagement and publics as
well as addressing notions concerning heterogeneity, process and event.
This series will continue to serve as a platform for opening up
interdisciplinary research futures

i just found a series of sketches I made during the Domestic Space and Interfaces for Located Mobility project back in 2007. It is interesting to see these sketches all together. I’ve started to collate them here in order to see how they might develop.

This week is busy!

In addition to applying for this, chairing this and talking at this, I am also attending these two INCITE events:

On Thursday

ATMOSPHERES OF PARTICIPATION: ART, MEDIA, POLITICS
Two talks and a discussion about presence, liveness and the importance of participation

Kris Cohen (Art History, University of Chicago) – “Intimacy without Reciprocity: Suffragists, Trolls, and Sharon Hayes’ Art of Protest”

Edgar Schmitz (Art, Goldsmiths) – “Some rather ambient attitudes: indifference, exit and the question of affirmation.”

Chair: Nina Wakeford (Sociology)

Location: IGLT, Whitehead Building
Cost: Free – all are welcome, no booking required
Department: Sociology
Time: 12 November 2009, 18:30 – 20:30

On Friday

ATMOSPHERES OF PARTICIPATION: A WORKSHOP
Friday 13th November 2009
Goldsmiths, University of London
Depford Town Hall, Lewisham Way (map at www.gold.ac.uk)
Organised by Nina Wakeford, Sociology & Goetz Bachmann, CCS

9.30am Welcome and introductions
10am Irmela Schneider (University of Cologne) – “Tele-dialogue in 20th Century German Television: a case study of participation.”
Respondent – Goetz Bachmann (Goldsmiths)

11.30am Coffee break
11.50am Anne Cronin (University of Lancaster) – “Urban billboards, fabulation, and the animation of public space”.
Rachel Moore (Goldsmiths) – ‘Not what the neon sign says…’
Respondent – Celia Lury

Lunch (1.15-2.15, DTHB 110)
2.15pm Karen Mirza (http://www.no-w-here.org.uk/) – “The Museum of Non Participation”
Karen Tam (Goldsmiths Cultural Studies & http://www.karentam.ca/) – “Orientally Yours: Karaoke Singers, Opium Addicts, and Chinese Diners”
Nina Pope (http://www.somewhere.org.uk/) – “Fully Engaged?”
Respondent – Kris Cohen

3.45pm Tea
4.15pm Scott Lash (Goldsmiths) – “Public Sphere as Atmosphere”
Respondent – Ken Anderson (Intel)
5.30 Closing remarks

THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED

Who says I don’t have a job -I don’t have time for a job : )

I have the pleasure of chairing the ‘Working with Industry’ on Wednesday at Goldsmiths which features a presentation by Ken Anderson of Intel and aims to look critically at the possibilities and tensions created in collaborations, as well as the opportunities presented within internship programmes for graduate students. Should be good.