Readings for 11/13

Let’s continue our conversation on the promises and perils of the Maker movement and related trends in co-creative design (“co-creative” meaning that this user is as much a generator of content as the designer). I’m assigning three relatively brief, but nonetheless potent, readings, all of which touch on the user/designer relationship as it’s become transformed in the Internet era:

Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990) pdf

C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, “Co-Creation Experiences: The Next Practice in Value Creation” (2004) pdf

Felix Stadler, “Between Democracy and Spectacle: The Front and the Bank of the Social Web” (2012) link

I’m also assigning a TED Talk by Clay Shirky, “How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World” (2010) link

Reading for 11/6

For next week, we’re going to telescope forward to the present to consider the Makers movement, focusing on the claim that the user and the designer have become, or are in the process of becoming, the same person. Please read Part 1 of Chris Anderson’s book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (2012), pgs. 1-78.

Anderson’s career trajectory intersects with the content of our course in a number of ways: he worked in the hard sciences for a number of years, most notably as a physicist at Los Alamos and as an editor of the journals Nature and Science; in 2001, he became editor-in-chief at Wired, the magazine co-founded by Stewart Brand in 1993. As you read through Makers, I’d like you to think about the ways Anderson’s arguments tie back to the theories and projects we’ve discussed so far in class.

This is a relatively long reading, so make sure you carve out a chunk of time to plow through it. However, I think you’ll find that it’s a much easier read than most of the material we’ve looked at so far – it shouldn’t take you that long to get the gist of Anderson’s argument.

Because of the length of this reading, I won’t require you to print out a copy for class, but please do find a way to access the text from the seminar room, whether it’s a physical copy of the book or a pdf accessed via tablet or laptop.

chris anderson makers pdf

Reading for 10/30

Our conversation yesterday morning broached some difficult (though essential) questions concerning the limits and failures of user-oriented design in the 1960s, a period that saw the emergence of movements for user autonomy, as epitomized cyber-communes like Drop City and primitive peer-to-peer networks like Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue, and, simultaneously, the top-down application of cybernetic principles in the work of Buckminster Fuller, whose World Game project sought to reorganize society wholesale, using computerized feedback mechanisms to distribute resources equitably among all humans.

The projects discussed in yesterday’s slideshow and readings were largely the work of fantasy; Archigram’s “Plug-In City” and “Suitaloon” were never put into production; Fuller failed to persuade the world’s governments that the World Game should usurp the authority of the United Nations; and although Stewart Brand’s thinking would eventually spur the digital revolution of the 1990s, his readership of cyber-hippies remained an isolated group, whose belief in the transformative power of “whole-systems” consciousness never found a mainstream audience.

This coming week, I’d like us to focus on a real-life case study of cybernetics in action, and in crisis. In Chile during the early 1970s, between the election of Salvador Allende and the 1973 military coup d’etat, the socialist government attempted to implement a computerized economic planning system, called Project Cybersyn, in collaboration with British cybernetician Stafford Beer. Historian Eden Medina has recently published a terrific study of this project, titled Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile; the main arguments of this book (worth reading if you have the time) are summarized in an article, “Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile” – please read this for next week.

At the same moment, in the early 1970s, Chilean workers sought to declare their autonomy in a way analogous to, but quite different from, the communitarian movements of the U.S. and Europe. In the midst of a transportation strike led by the managerial sector and backed by the Nixon administration, workers occupied their workplaces and managed production by themselves without bosses or overseers, linking up with one another to ensure that the production and distribution of essential commodities would continue during the strike. In class, we’ll screen a portion of Patricio Guzman’s film, The Battle of Chile, which offers a rare glimpse into the occupied factories.

EdenMedinaJLASAugust2006 pdf

Buckminster Fuller, The World Game Report, 1971

As promised, I’ve uploaded a pdf copy of the World Game Report, a publication that affords a more in-depth look into the weird world of Fuller’s World Game project. Lots of interesting stuff here. Enjoy!

fuller world game report pdf

Readings for 10/23

This coming week’s class will focus on the application of cybernetic principles and ideas in design, architecture, and art. I think you’ll find this material genuinely fascinating, if a bit wild. I’m assigning several short readings by a handful of designers, critics, theorists, and historians, all of which center on the cybernetic communalist movements of the 1960s, specifically the Whole Earth network pioneered by Stewart Brand (he would later become one of the founders of Wired magazine, in 1993). Here’s the list of readings:

* Fred Turner, “The Politics of the Whole circa 1968–And Now”
* R. Buckminster Fuller, “The World Game: How to Make the World Work” (1972)
* Reyner Banham, “A Home is not a House” (1965)

Turner’s essay, from the exhibition catalogue, The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside (2013), provides a critical overview of the Whole Earth network and the application of cybernetic ideas to design. Buckminster Fuller’s proposal for a “World Game” to allocate the world’s resources efficiently and intelligently is described in his short essay on the topic. Last but not least, Reyner Banham’s essay provides a glimpse into the weird world of inflatable and biomorphic architecture, which flowered in the 1960s thanks to the influence of Wiener, Fuller, and other “whole earth” thinkers.

I encourage you to do research of your own on the Whole Earth Catalogue, Buckminster Fuller, and the architects mentioned in Banham’s essay; the internet is teeming with interesting archival material from the late 1960s. For instance, you can peek at the first pages of The Whole Earth Catalogue, no. 1, 1969, here: http://designmobs.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/whole_rth_ctlg_19691.pdf

Likewise, if you’re curious to know more about the World Game, you might want to check out this project summary written by John McHale (Fuller’s collaborator) in 1967: http://challenge.bfi.org/sites/challenge.bfi.org/files/pdf_files/wdsd_phase2_doc6.pdf

And I definitely recommend spending some time with Fuller’s “Dymaxion World Map” – you can read about it here: http://gizmodo.com/how-buckminster-fullers-dymaxion-map-tessellated-the-w-484584437

Also: some videos on Drop City, a famous cyber-commune in Colorado:

As you read/look through these texts, I’d like you to think about the way these projects attempted to put cybernetic theory into practice. How did they succeed and where did they fail? Is there anything worth recovering from this moment in design history? What do you make of the various diagrams that appear in these pages?

Please note that only the texts listed above with bullet-points are required reading.

Here are the pdf files:

banham home is not a house pdf

fuller world game pdf

turner pdf

Reading for 10/16

For next week, please review the Wiener chapters we read for this week. Additionally, I’d like you to read chapter 5 of The Human Use of Human Beings, “Organization as Message” (pgs. 95-105).

Over the course of the next two sessions I’m assigning several sections of N. Katherine Hayles’ book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999). Hayles offers a useful historical overview of the emergence of cybernetics in the 1940s and its influence through the following decades; she takes a critical perspective on Wiener’s theory of human-machine interactions, focusing on the social agenda of The Human Use of Human Beings and its framing of the “post-human” subject.

For next week (10/16), please read pages 1-20 of How We Became Posthuman. This covers most, but not all, of the book’s first chapter, “Toward Embodied Virtuality.”

I’m probably going to assign an additional chapter of Hayles’ book for the following week (10/23): “Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled,” pgs. 84-112. So if you have the time and volition, feel free to look ahead.

hayles how we became posthuman pdf

Reading for 10/9

Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (1954)

weiner human use download pdf

Marx: Where to begin?

A couple of you mentioned being interested in reading Marx. I’m going to see how best to fit this material into our syllabus, but for those of you who are extra-curious, here are some links to relevant material:

First of all, there are a number of different entryways into Marx’s thought-world; most undergraduates will have read The Communist Manifesto (1848) at some point in their humanities training – if you’ve not yet looked at it, I encourage you to do so (link below). Co-written with Marx’s collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the manifesto was published during a wave of revolutions that resonated across Europe, marking the birth of modern class warfare as we now understand it. In France, the revolution pitted workers against the forces of order (police, army, national guard, backed by representatives of property-owning class, the bourgeoisie) in deadly barricade fighting throughout Paris – a battle which the workers ultimately lost. Although The Communist Manifesto didn’t contribute directly to the events of 1848, it was quickly seized as a rallying-cry for revolutionaries around the world. In the wake of the counter-revolution in Germany, Marx and Engels were forced to flee to England, where they spent the following decades writing Capital, a multi-volume analysis of the capitalist system.

Although Marx is primarily remembered for his politics, his economic research is the bedrock of his thinking, and should be the starting-place for any serious investigation of Marx and/or Marxism. Overturning the prevailing wisdom, which attributed economic inequality (i.e. poverty, unemployment, housing shortages, etc.) to malfunctions of the capitalist system, Marx and Engels argued that inequality was the inevitable result of the accumulation of capital: focusing on the industrial sector, they showed that the exploitation of the workforce – specifically, the gap between workers’ pay (which is denominated according to the supply and demand for labor) and the actual value of that labor when employed in production – was, and remains, the source of all profits. If workers were paid the full value of their work, then capitalism would simply collapse; this disparity, or “surplus-value” as Marx and Engels call it, is the key to the economy as a whole, and cannot simply be repaired through better management or more stringent economic regulation.

These are complicated arguments, and they deserve to be studied in detail. For an excellent guide to volume one of Capital, I recommend this online lecture series by David Harvey, a Marxist geographer who currently teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY): http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

Of course, the genuine article is Capital itself. For our purposes, it might be useful to begin in the middle of the book, with the long chapter titled “Machinery and Modern Industry.” For one thing, this section offers a fascinating history of the rise of factory production and various resistance movements (e.g. the English machine-breakers); it also helps to concretize the various theoretical claims made elsewhere in the book, so that when Marx tells us about “surplus-value” and “primitive accumulation,” we have specific historical examples at the ready. Here’s a link to this chapter: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm

And a link to The Communist Manifesto: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/

I would be happy to discuss these texts outside of class with any students who are interested.

Reading for 10/2

Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, and Action” (1964), in The Portable Hannah Arendt

arendt labor work action download pdf

Assignment due 9/25

Short essay – 300 words

In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman mentions a case of vandalism in British railway passenger shelters: initially, the designers employed glass to construct the panels of the shelters, but vandals routinely smashed the glass. However, when the glass was replaced with wood, the shelters were no longer smashed up by vandals, even though “no extra force would have been required to produce [the damage]”; instead, the plywood shelters were merely defaced by graffiti writers. Reflecting on this case, Norman develops his theory of affordances, arguing that “a chair affords (‘is for’) support and, therefore, affords sitting. A chair can also be carried. Glass is for seeing through, and for breaking. Wood is normally used for solidity, opacity, support, or carving. Flat, porous, smooth surfaces are for writing on. So wood is also for writing on. Hence the problem for British Rail: when the shelters had glass, vandals smashed it; when they had plywood, vandals wrote on and carved it. The planners were trapped by the affordances of their materials” (p. 9).

In this passage, Norman seems to be suggesting that the glass-breaker and graffiti writer are both legitimate “users” of the shelter. Do you agree? Why or why not? Are there limits to a designer’s responsibility to manage the affordances of objects, whether physical or digital? In your opinion, where should we draw the line between design problems and social or legal problems (e.g. illegal vandalism)? Please refer to Norman’s argument in crafting your response; and please do take seriously his argument that “glass is for seeing through, and for breaking.”

Please write your response in Times New Roman, 12 point, double-spaced. Include a word count in your final draft. Print your response and bring it to class on Wednesday.