There’s a video of it here too (about 1:30 in).

What’s interesting for me is that video game / platform gaming design is starting to permeate physical worlds (and there are few more emotive objects than the car) not necessarily because we’re increasingly wired to those screen based worlds, but because they offer a means, as Russell has said, to pretend, to play. The GT-R is a $60 000 super car, an expensive thing to start building childlike, playful experiences into.  But it’s highly unlikely that anyone buying this car will go near a race track, more likely they’ll trundle along the A338 in rush hour, so helping them to believe they’re a racing driver can only improve their enjoyment of the car.  If it was easy to get this data out of an engine I’m sure we’d have hybrid Wattson / Tom Tom style dashboards stuck to the windscreen of most cars driven by men with a mental age of 17.

As I was writing that talk it struck me that citations, the format for attribution in print, was fundamental to the structure of power that had emerged in higher education.  This post is about that.  It’s about how citations are technologies and the reason I think it’s interesting is that this presents a different lens on what we see as technologies which can help us do better Design Research.  The lens I want to describe is one espoused by Bruno Latour and others around Actor Network Theory.  They have an interesting take on technology which can be summed up in the following quote: “technology is society made durable” (Latour).   

Let’s begin with a story.  Derek is an academic, a lecturer in Geography at a “red brick” University.  He could rest on his laurels and take his salary.  But he wants to progress, get more money and become a senior lecturer.  One way to further his career is to do research.  To do research takes time and he either eeks out this time from his teaching schedule or he ‘pitches’ research proposals to one of a few research councils and grant bodies.  One project on “cities of data” is successful.  One of the requirements of the research is that it is made public.  The grant body does this.  However, the grant bodies publication has little kudos in the academic world and *it is not considered as a measure when being considered for promotion*, although the ability to get funding is.  So Derek needs to publish his work for peer review to be “measured” for quality by peers and if he’s successful it is published in one of a few journals.

Derek wants to pick a journal that will look ‘good’ on his record, something well known.  But another factor for consideration is how the journal is perceived in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).  The RAE is a process run by the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) that measures University department ‘quality’ based on their knowledge output. His choice of publication is based upon which will give him the best possible chance of receiving a high measure.  Popular publications measure more highly as higher supply supposedly pushes up the quality threshold.  Ony the very best is published.    

Derek references his peer group, people whom study the same or relevant subjects to his. In turn they reference him.  Those that break from the cycle of genre busting authors, those who create neologisms, signifiers to describe new concepts.  They get lots of citations.  They’re in the ‘head’ of the citation index and not in the Long Tail with it’s clusters of sub-discipline citation ‘niches’.

We can see from this simplified story how citations embed social practice, values and people. They are also the things around which these things cohere.  They are in short, technologies. They’re almost too innocuous to be seen to be ‘powerful’.  But they are: 

1. They’re the basis for academic standing – acknowledging an intellectual debt

2. They’re the basis upon which over £1bn in funding is distributed each year to academics and depertments in Universities to research stuff. Citations are the metric used for judging the rating by which funding is allocated.

3. Every year academics are hired on their ability to get cited. It’s a skill which in part creates ways of defining concepts (neologisms and new concepts being potentially more powerful ‘hooks’ for other people to reference).

And they have formats. It\s no wonder we’re educated in how to cite others’ work (see this list for a failry exhaustive description of different ways to format citations).  It’s a big deal. 

There is a committee looking at this apparently (thanks to someone at bathcamp for pointing this out with the ajoinder, “I know about all this stuff but find all the web2.0 stuff far more interesting”) called REF (Research Excellence Framework):

REF, which replaces peer-review judgments in science subjects with a
system of metrics, including a count of the number of times
researchers’ published work is cited by their peers..  (link)

The REF is basing its measure of how well researchers produce knowledge or add to the body of knowledge in circulation on “bibliometrics“.  It’s a whole new science of citations!

So what?  Looking at non-human things as cohering power can be helpful in Design Research.  Many researchers still look at people as the only active participants (popular in Humanist philosophy).  They have exclusive agency.  However, in describing how things happen and describing all the actors (human and non-human) involved in the process you can start to better understand where power resides.  In this instance not with the HEFCE or with the individual academics but with a textual format, the citation. This then could and should be a focus for thinking through the problem of Higher Education funding.

Update:
The Guardian has a good article of the effects of ‘bibliometricity’ which it argues is ‘narrowing’  study, making research more niche and resulting in academic research being gamed, becoming little more than a popularity contest:

Adding to the problem is the fact that methods to measure research
impact are becoming more numerical. For example, the number of times an
article is cited by others has become a proxy for quality. There is
even a formula that will reduce a researchers’ whole career to one
digit, called the H-index (http://bit.ly/H-index),
which been used for recruiting researchers for tenure in the US. “A lot
of people feel that their H-index is the most important thing on their
CV,” says Bentley.

This focus on numbers encourages both
researchers and journals to play games to raise their impact scores.
Some play harder than others. A journal called Behavioral and Brain
Sciences has come up with a nifty way of boosting its impact factor -
how often authors in it are cited. It now identifies a “target
article”, and then commissions a dozen comments to appear alongside it,
giving the article 12 citations directly on publication.

The game
playing in the UK’s research assessment exercise is another example,
says Bentley. “When considering what articles to submit for evaluation,
you may have this really good one in a low-ranking journal, and then
you have something in a high-ranking journal, and you always submit
that high-ranking article to the RAE even if you think that what you
wrote was much better in the other one.”

Worth a read.

And yet we’re still in a position where one of the main industries that create knowledge, Higher Education, are bound by arcane copyright laws.  I say arcane because there is no reason why they need be.  We have a situation where Bristol University – but one of the Universities I could get stats for but not atypical – spends £376000 on books in 2006/7 or £22 per student and £2 455 847 on serials or £142 per student.  Thats nearly £2.5 million pounds in one year on buying in the knowledge produced mainly by academics funded to do their work by the taxpayer through research bodies like the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 

There are approimately 171 Universities and Colleges of Higher Education in the UK.  They won’t all spend as much as Bristol.  But if the average spend was just half of that it would amount to £213 000 750. A lot of money for something where the cost of an open solution would be negligible and would actually be fit for purpose. 

But what really grates is that as a taxpayer and someone involved in research and who likes to knowl what people involved in similar research are doing there’s a big chunk of knowledge that I am excluded from unless I pay for it (again).  It’s copyrighted.  Danah Boyd has written about the frustration of being someone who is essentially doing Public Good and paid to share their knowledge of the world through the research work they’ve done, being tied down to a closed system.  Sure many academics can get around this by publishing drafts of their work or amended versions.  And some Universities are biting back by creating Open Access Repositories such as OpenDOAR (which now has over 1200 listings).  
 

Well, I think we tend to anthropomorphisise materiality and / or consign non-human things to the status of second class citizens.  This is mostly as a result of the belief in ‘agency’ residing only with ‘us’ when actually the ability to have effects resides in everything, but only as a result of a coming together with other ‘things’, what ANT is all about; networks of association.  And being drilled in a humanist reading of life that’s hard to take.  We like to think of ourselves as special  

That said many of the people writing around design and experience design in particular seem to be influenced by "materiality".  Terms like ‘affordance’ seem to spring up in conversations I have with people in design, so there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it’s important.   But in terms of doing the background to inform design it’s tough to know where to start.  My old superviser once said to me – when I was struggling to get to grips with how to research materiality – that ANT was basically about being as granular in ethnographic work as possible and not taking anything as a given.  That helped.   

Broadcast:

Here:

• The value is intrinsic to the media itself e.g. a TV programme and there’s a simple general revenue model for it to work [subscription or ads - based on viewing figures proxied by time of day etc.]
• The rights framework is built with that in mind, the rights holders paid for their bit of the media etc. and if the distributor cannot control supply through the medium e.g. decoder then the media must be controlled e.g. DRM
• The primary constraint here is limited supply.  The legal and political framework only allow for a small number of ‘broadcasters’ and to get involved in that is expensive and risky and consequently the barriers to entry are high.
• Any ‘sociality’ around the media is defined by either ‘locally’ produced feedback loops around say the [cliched] water cooler or, more abstractly, as a feedback loop through the media, in say TV guides or reviews.

Networked:

Here the:

• Media value is increasingly defined through the ‘sociality’ of the media itself, that is the ‘links’ that serve to define it in the ecosystem, rather than in the asset itself.
• Consequently value is distributed with the media [which is the case in the broadcast model only in the broadcast model that was pretty much everyone or everyone divided by x]
• The feedback loops are key in defining the value of the media and these loops are not constrained by space or place but play out through them – so you get feedback in the form of recommendation systems that are very public.
• Nor are these feedback loops constrained by time and the physical limitations in the broadcast model.  The loops are ‘immediate’ and are on the whole very ‘transferable’, contained within URLs or even in chat histories via AIM etc.   
• Neither are the feedback loops defined by formal hierarchy – informal [digg] mixes with formal, organised feedback [metacritic] as defined by the status of the reviewer.
• Advertising is the main means through which to generate revenue but this revenue may not fall to the media creator / owner as the media is copied, distributed and published elsewhere.
• Policing this environment is virtually impossible although community driven ‘social  policing’  through  individual reporting can be highly effective.

Of course trhese are two polarised ideals and the reality [at present, before IPTV] is we live with a mix – with some media being bigger than others, or at least more social or popular.  But what I’m getting at is that value is driven by the ‘ghost-like’ relations of links, by the ‘communicative morass’ rather than the media itself.  Blogs, AIM have their own place in that mix that can be defined by speed and fixity.  Blog and link aggregators are the nodes, akin to the FTSE, there to be gamed and played once measured.   AIM, txt, the more intricate, ‘local’ and immediate narrative that is often ephermeral, disappearing as quickly as it came but no less important for that.  Services like Twitter and Dodgeball only serve to facilitate and play on this communicative need.  And as more metadata, links, and  narratives come into existence so media must adapt to play out with them in the form of feedback loops.

However, many people I speak to who are involved in media production are still fixated on the media itself, which of course has to be brilliant but  is just part of the ‘design’ for creating successful genuinely ‘new media’ that pays.  The audience are now more integral than ever to the proposition and how it plays out.  Steven B Johnson sums this up in Emergence from 1991:

"The most significant thing for the web.. is not its capacity to stream high-quality video images or booming surround sound; indeed, it’s quite possible that the actual content of the convergence will arrive via some other transmission platform.  Instead, the web will contribute the metadata that enables these clusters to self-organize. it will be the central warehouse and marketplace for all our patterns of mediated behaviour, and instead of those patterns being restricted to the invisible gaze of Madison Avenue and TRW, consumers will be able to tap into that pool themselves to create communal maps of all the entertainment and data available online." [Steven Berlin Johnson 1991 Emergence p220].

All pretty basic stuff now but quiet prescient all the same and ahead of its time.  In talking through the implications of this nascent ecosystem to indies etc. they inevitably want to know how they can evolve to remain relevant to audiences that are increasingly getting recommendations and media itself [youtube, torrent files etc] from the web.  The basic question for such companies is: "how can we retain or maintain revenue from media when it’s massively distributed?". I’m not sure that anyone who owns IP in the digital age knows the answer to this.  But I’m not sure that there is an answer.  Media that is IP protected will struggle to be social in a networked
ecosystem.  And if it ain’t social then you’re going to have problems
getting it noticed and making money from it.  No, you have to move from a model whereby the media itself is intrinsically of value to a model where you use the social to develop new business models.  Easy stuf, for example:

• Translate. Get people to pay for transferring one media into another.  Just like printing has become a winner for static media e.g. moo for flickr and blurb for blogs, so ring-tones and paid for podcasts etc. have worked for exploiting traditional media.
• Relate. Start to create metadata around the media which can be used to drive discovery [e.g. delicious] and consequently ad revenue.  Then own that data.

Works within the existing framework, exploiting essentially dead media, like any artefact or product.  Packaged dead media in the form of formats like Wife Swap and Super Nanny are still the most lucrative [because they are 'transportable' and 'transferable' assets] but it is precisely their ‘dead’ nature that limits their potential in the networked digital world of the future. Going forward networked digital distribution allows is to give media life – to make it  inherently social by developing feedback loops or ‘ripples’ and therefore creating more opportunities to spin off into other [older] media [translation], or initiate subscription for extra functionality around a service and of course drive advertising into new areas.  To produce more social media, you need to get people [both end consumers and developers / producers] involved in creating or augmenting media in the first place and to play with the variety of things that influence the media such as links, metadata and narrative.

Enough waffle, I’m going to try and knock this into something meaningful soon.

Met up with Danny Dorling last night, Professor Danny Dorling to you, master of maps which actually kind of underplays the incredibly important role he has in defining social policy, especially in the UK.  Anyway, aside from some mutually supportive moan on why you just can’t win trying to be a new dad and all this modern man business is a cynical attempt by feminists to allow us to believe we’re empowering ourselves when [tailed off into drunken half-baked rubbish...] we discussed World Mapper, one of the most fantastic map resources on the web and a product of Danny and his team which they’re due to complete very soon.

Map of those living on less than $1 a day

And each of the maps has fantastic  notation:

The first Millennium Development Goal is to halve, between 1990 and
2015, the proportion of people who live on the equivalent of US$1 a
day, or less. In 2002, an estimated 17% of the world population lived
on this amount. They lived on less than or equal to what, to be
precise, US$1.08 would have bought in the United States in 1993.

In
over twenty territories more than a third of the population lives on
less than US$1 a day. All but two of these territories are in Africa.

The largest population living on US$1 a day is in Southern Asia, most of whom live in India.

It’s a fairly exhaustive attempt to map the key data that defines ‘us’ in the world and in the process get you to think!  [Maps are such a great stimulus for visually representing data.  It's probably no surprise that so many information architects / designers  are map freaks]. 

The main issue for World Mapper and the people behind it, is how to make better use of a resource which is probably, according to Danny, the last of it’s kind because, going forward there will be such an abundance and a variety of data that mapping it will be so much more difficult.

So how to make better use of it?  If you have an idea either Danny or myself would love to know.  There’s no API, though to be honest it’s difficult to know what this could allow anyway, the real value is in the imagery but there is a partial RSS feed.  The data itself is available to use in xls format [and someone could do a job in making this machine readable...] as are the images, released on an attribution, non-commercial share-alike license though the website is far more ambiguous about this [it isn't creative commons because that could inhibit some major media exercise with partners etc].  Thoughts on how this could be more useful…

Worldmapper: The world as you’ve never seen it before

I also find it interesting how people, particularly women travelling alone, are using cameraphones to take images of cab drivers / driver licenses when taking a cab home to mitigate the risk of attack or abuse. 

What other social uses does the cameraphone and the ‘image’ have in discreet social situtions to help us stay safe?  Occasions / need states anyone?  I’ve seen people use them when they’ve been in an accident – but that doesn’t require the upload of the image to a remote server necessarily, it can stay ‘local’ to the phone itself.   I guess things like tickets, reference numbers, identifiers of all sorts when moving about would be handy to capture in case you lost them and your phone.   With 3G providers desperately looking for need states and ‘killer apps’ it may be worthwhile looking at social risk as much as social pleasure [entertainment] to sell their services. 

I’ve quickly tried to map some of the dynamics of different ‘community’ mechanisms, partly inspired by Tom’s Model for Mapping Group Activity.  It’s basically aimed at clients and intended as a basis for developing ‘community strategies’ and is a very rough first draft.

What I haven’t done is map offline activity or looked to illustrate the specific dynamics of each system via examples.   It’ll be interesting to see where the offlineactivity ‘sits’ with the online activity and what we can learn from looking at them together.

Thoughts?  Comments? Please annotate the flickr image as you see fit…

But the public loo has it’s own history – as a space of subversion, be this in the form of sexual activity or inscription / graffiti.  Perhaps due to this public loos are increasingly subject to measures of control and territorialization.  Payment being a key mechanism – filter out the loiterers.  But new ‘sanitory’ tools and products are deployed to control ‘us’: how much loo paper we use; how much time we spend in the loo – design of flows of movement; how much water we use etc.  This is often so that facilities managers can measure and predict cost per use and manage their resources effectively [which is fair enough as one estimate says we use around 83 million rolls a day around the world].  Promoting these developments often as improvements in ‘hygiene’ is just a convenient way of packaging  control. Electronic sensors on hand driers, taps and even all-in-one sanitory solutions – those hole in the wall things which give you soap, then water, then hot air whilst you desperately try to gauge where each is coming from next – are popular in Yorkshire. The message is: we’re not trusted to wash our own hands, we need to be controlled and managed along with the resources we use. The cult of hygiene allows us to perceive this as a benefit and sell the odd product – ‘sanitary seat covers’ anyone?

A new product we’re working with attempts to control the amount of paper people use and manage hygiene factors.  As part of the research I’ve just done around toilet paper I find a proliferation of interest around whether people scrunch or fold their paper [I fold].  But this isn’t just a fun question for student forums – it’s a fundamental design issue for new products.  Dispensers of toilet paper have also had to deal with the problem of replenishing supplies before the paper runs out.  I found an article which actually analysed the problem of placing two rolls side by side and found that they both ran out at the same time.  This due to the fact that people generally take from the roll that has most paper on [and confirmed by our own dispenser at work which has two rolls and always runs out simultaneously].

I find it interesting that the recent use of ‘open loos’ in central London – due to the problem of people urinating in public late at night – ha s proved to be quite successful.  But this is the only innovation in terms of the ‘experience’ of using a loo that I have seen in recent years.  How could the experience of taking a shit  / urinating be improved?  Is it too taboo to take seriously?

Addendum:

I’d forgotten about the "fly in the urinal design" in Schipol airport, Amsterdam, by influenza, as commented on by Kim Vicente as an  example of ‘intuitive design’

"If you go to the
men’s washrooms at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam
you may notice there’s a fly in the urinals. So what do you think most
men do? That’s right, they aim at the fly when they urinate. They don’t
even think about it, and they don’t need to read a user’s manual; it’s
just an instinctive reaction. The interesting feature of these urinals
is that they’re deliberately designed to take advantage of this
inherent human male tendency."

Also, Bathroom Mania’s ‘kiss’ urinal is one fun approach to innovation. 

Some choice quotes from a Guardian article based on an MTV report:

One in three children who
use the internet makes friends online. Children in the UK aged between
10 and 19 own approximately 7.5m mobile phones, on which they send many
of the 89m text messages written daily. And one pound in every 10 of
disposable income was spent by teenagers on mobile products and
services this year.

"Word of mouth as a
source of information has always been trusted, especially by younger
generations," says the report. "The speed of the internet means that
websites can provide information quicker, and its size means that a far
greater pool of talent can potentially be accessed in a single sitting.
Its information is trusted more because it is perceived to resemble
word of mouth… This is why viral marketing campaigns work so well."

I’m not sure that all internet is any more effective than traditional media at conveying word-of-mouth, that is a more trustworthy communication.  Is the internet as medium percieved to resemble word-of-mouth?  Surely it depends on the nature of the website and the context in which it is read?  I can see corporate clients jumping on this as justification for viral marketing and then producing another lame execution.  Viral marketing works when it pushes the brand beyond its comfort zone, i.e. the content and/or context involve some disjuncture from what you would expect, rather than the mechanism itself being the answer.

see also: textually.