Chapters 1-4.
Damn this linear format.
Be much better as a website | pop-up book | really freaky bike | film | performance art…..

- They don’t run out of battery
- They don’t need electricity
- They never run out of room (i have MANY cards)
- They don’t crash
- They don’t look finished
- You can arrange and re-arrange and re-re-re arrange them constantly
- They don’t drive you completely insane like NVivo (this might be just me)
- You can carry them around with you everywhere (without dinting your shoulder)
- When you spill coffee on them, they dry
- When you drop them, they don’t break
- They’re wireless : )

[Saying that, if I had to hand write my phd i would go insane]

[I’m aware of the irony of my deep dependence on index cards in a study of new digital technology.]

I’m trying to work this into my phd or at least into everyday conversation.

One of Australia’s leading conservative historians, University of Wollongong scholar Gregory Melleuish, last night described Mr Howard’s course as “the ultimate camel” because it had been shaped by so many committees. Dr Melleuish, who participated in the summit but criticised its outcomes, said: “The problem with this sort of document is that it tells one very little about how things will actually work in the classroom.”

Ref: Salusinszky, I (2007) Howard rewrites nation’s history, The Australian

I just got tickets to this.

Laboratorium
Friday 19 October
7 – 9 pm

Bruno Latour and Barbara Vanderlinden present tabletop experiments with leading artists, theorists and scientists reinventing the exhibition Laboratorium, (1999, Antwerp).

For this event the Pavilion will operate as laboratory and artist’s studio exploring an interdisciplinary project that set out to search the limits and possibilities of places where knowledge and culture are made.

And I’m thinking about this one too.

Experiment Marathon
Part 1 – London
Starts Saturday 13 October 12 noon
Ends Sunday 14 October 3 pm

Last year’s, now legendary, 24- Hour Interview Marathon has been expanded in scope and geography. The 48-Hour Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, introduced by Julia Peyton-Jones and presented by Olafur Eliasson and Hans Ulrich Obrist, will be in two 24-hour parts; first in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007 in London, then in Olafur Eliasson’s studio in Berlin in November.

The experiments performed by leading artists, architects and scientists will explore ideas of time, space and of reality through models, vibrations and perception, investigating Eliasson’s assertion that ‘What we have in common is that we are different.’

Not In The Manual: Inquiries into open-ended and user-based design interventions in and around the home.
Monday 12th November 2007
Inaugural symposium from the Home Interaction Research Cluster at the University College for the Creative Arts at Farnham
Farnham Maltings, Bridge Square, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7QR

Symposium Details
The symposium explores just how individuals are participating in the design of their immediate environment and what influence this might have on the shape of design. What can we learn from these ‘amateur’ interventions? How can professional design harness the creative potential of user participation? What services and products may emerge from this DIY ecology? What new methods of interaction are being offered? What is this sense of ‘home’ that is being created?

The symposium is the first event hosted by the Home Interaction Research Cluster at Farnham and includes papers and presentations from academics within the group, as well as contributions from peers in social sciences, design history and computing.

This symposium will be of value to anyone with an interest in DIY cultures, co-creation, user-modification, personal agency and well-being within (and around) the ‘home’ setting, from disciplines such as design history, sociology, product design, interactive design, human-computer interaction.

Papers & presentations include:
- From Blog to Blogue: Personal media and life politics
- Making Space & Telling Stories: Homes Made By Amateurs
- Making Time: Interrogating the experience of the amateur maker
- Single Lives, Personal Spaces: Autoethnography and design for solo living
- Objects for Peaceful Disordering: Indigeneous Designs and Practices of Protest
- Warranty void if removed: modern day tinkering.

Outline Schedule
9:30 Coffee and Registration
10:00 – Keynote: Dr Tim Dant, Reader in Sociology, University of Lancaster
11.00-17.00 – Papers & Panel Discussion
17.30-21.00 – Drinks & Evening Meal

*Please note that the Symposium is free (including refreshments), but you must register in advance*. Places are strictly limited. To register a place or for any enquiries, please email with your full name, job title/position, organisation name, contact email address, contact phone number and any professional/personal web address. You will receive a confirmation of your booking soon after.

Unfortunately this was one of the evenings last week when i was otherwise preoccupied with visceral hospital activities……

Goldsmiths Critical Practice + MRes Design exhibition

The concept of an Anomaly as something that is different, abnormal, peculiar, or difficult to classify, that the students from this years Masters in Critical Practice have chosen to describe their work, is in many ways a perfect description of what we have been endeavouring to develop and describe within this course. Working between the twin poles of a now substantially discredited model of conventional critical analysis or theory, and the still as yet largely misunderstood or underdeveloped model of a truly “practically” based form of critical research, we have attempted to both investigate, develop, and describe a form of critical practice that not only emerges out of an analysis of the very processes of “design” itself, but the simultaneous recognition – as many of the students have found out for themselves throughout the year – of the relationship between these processes, both socially, critically, and materially, and the processes of fabrication of life itself.

This experience fits neatly in with so much of what i’ve been reading and thinking about the role, importance and use of visual objects that you’d think i’d planned it. But no. As much as I like the aesthetics of xrays and ethnographic experiences this is one I could have done without, thankyou.

That’s an xray of my foot, actually my right toe. Last week I managed to have one of those somewhat embarrassing mundane domestic accidents - you know, stomp on a sewing needle at home, break it off in your foot with enough inexplicable force to propel it near the tendons of your big toe. No doubt i’ve become a nasty UK accidents at home statistic (click here if you’ve always wanted to know how many other people pierce their bodies during a leisure activity) and destined to be listed in reprints of or .

Anyway the relevancy to this blog and my thesis apart from me having found the ultimate diversionary study tactic and now own pretty pictures of inside my body is how the needle was actually found and ultimately (hurrah) removed from my flesh.

Although i still find the visceral detail fascinating I’ll limit myself here to the short story.

Imagine the A&E doctor saying when he sees the xray…. “It’s too deep for me to dig about for it. I would do more damage trying to find it. I will page a surgeon”

I start to think my day may not go according to plan.

The surgeon arrives.

“We have two options.

1. Cut for it under a local anesthetic. It will be painful and we may not find it but if we do you can go home after.

2. Book you in for surgery under a general anesthetic. They will have a better chance of finding it and you might get in tonight or tomorrow.”

Note the use of the word ‘find’.

Recounting the story later a friend laughed incredulously, ‘but it’s not like digging for the cookie dough chunk in cookie dough ice cream’. But it was. That was the fantastically surprising and supremely traumatic thing about it. Those xrays only show you the general location (ie toe) and size of the thing (bigger than we thought), not really where it was. It was a guide but ultimately the approach and technique was left up to the surgeon.

I’ve been writing about the paradox implicit in DIY WiFi. If WiFi is an invisible, fragile, temperamental and complicated technology that predicates meticulous precision, advanced technical skills and abstract diagrammatic schema and the practice of DIY is characterised by an affinity with the materials at hand and a fluid, more malleable, bottom-up approach then what constitutes DIY high tech? Furthermore how do members negotiate the intersection of wireless technology and tinkering? Gary Alan Fine’s writings on cooks is useful in thinking about this.

Some occupations demand precision. Yet, all produce “slop” with which workers can mess. Few occupations require the microscopic precision of draftsmen or machine-tool operators, but even for these workers there are micromillimeters of choice. To permit approximation is to provide autonomy (Fine 1996:24)

With ’slop’, ‘approximation’ and ‘autonomy’ in mind I return to the story.

I went with option 1 (and it turns out option 2 as well, later).

For 1.5 hours i lay on my front with my foot twisted sideways whilst 2 surgeons, 2 nurses and 2 student nurses looked, talked, oohed and cut into my foot.

General chatter:

“I think I see it.”

“No that’s tendon, leave that.”

“I think it’s deeper, more over here.”

“How is the pain?” (this is another blog post, hell another thesis, but this would have to be THE most difficult AND interesting question to answer….).

Different people came in and offered advice, different surgeons held my foot at different angles, using an assortment of tweasers and scalpels and hands at different angles with soft swabs to hold open the wound and there constant references and discussions about the xrays displayed on the computer screen on the far bench. Unfortunately it kept on going to sleep as computers are wont to do. Annoying at your desk, another thing completely when you have sterilized gloves on and your fingers in an open wound and you have to get up and wake it up with your elbow. Until, that is, it logs you out. Then you have to get a student nurse to type in your password and talk her through the procedure of finding your patients files……

After about an hour, there is no sign of the needle and references are made to the haystack. So they stick in one of their needles pointing to where they think my needle might be, tape my foot up and wheel me back to xray. The results show they are cutting in the right direction but it’s still deeper than they thought.

More cutting and talking but consensus shortly after is made to tape it up, get a me bed, prep me for surgery and then really go for it. Apparently (I may have been there but I have no memory of it) in surgery they have an on-table xray facility to trace and track their constant movements and not having to worry about my pain levels or me wiggling about which makes finding a needle much easier.

Overall a fascinating and awful ordeal, but one that made me think about the intersections of precision and ’slop’, approximation and customisation in a different way. I continue to have enormous respect for NHS staff and the service they provide.

I also now have no diversions to study as I can’t walk.

From John Law’s, ‘Making a Mess with Method’, published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YN, UK

Here we had moments of concern which sometimes edged towards panic. What on earth, we wondered, was it that we were actually studying? Why couldn’t we hold it still? Why did it keep on going out of focus? Why, when we were ‘supposed’ to be finding out about the treatment of ALD did we end up talking about other things? Related things perhaps. But nevertheless not what we were supposed to be talking about.

I met up with Britt Hatzius last week for coffee and a chat about past projects and potential collaborations. (It was one of those lovely interactions where afterwards you feel compelled to go home and make things). She holds an enviable position at Goldsmiths in which she works as an art director/ visual sociologist/ researcher/ artist on a variety of interesting projects. (She probably has a proper title but that’s what i imagine she does).

Our conversation was sparked by the recent Goldsmiths Photography and Urban Cultures Postgraduate Show 2007: Mise-en-scène at Candid Arts in Islington where I had seen her (and Les Bac) talk about recent work on London cycling (couriers + commuters). The project was linked to Intel’s PAPR ‘Cultural Mobilities: It’s About Time’ - a study of temporality in relation to mobility that looks at what constitutes ‘temporal textures’ and how this might manifest itself. I had heard about the project last year through Nina who was also part of it but this was the first time I had seen it presented.

Being a cyclist and somewhat of a visual researcher I found the whole project fascinating. The culmination of a myriad of visual methodologies was an installation in PAPR’s Portland offices. This is an example of one of the many visual objects that formed the final output; an image of two life size prints of London public buses that were hung from the ceiling that physically invited participants to feel the sensation of London cycling.