On Friday 10th February I will be talking about ‘design fiction’ for the Pervasive Media Studio’s lunchtime talk series. ‘Design Fiction’ describes ways of using storytelling techniques, especially in the form of video, to make speculative design ideas feel real. I have collected together the various resources from which I have drawn my materials for the talk into a preliminary bibliography that may be of use to others interested in the topic. Continue reading “The beginnings of a ‘Design Fiction’ bibliography”
A preliminary bibliography for studies of Code/Spaces
I have begun writing down some thoughts about the co-production of space and place between the human and the technical (for me, following Stiegler, neither pre-exists the other) that Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin have usefully labeled “Code/Space”. This is not, of course, the only form of spatiality that are associated with the performance of ‘technicity’ in everyday life, but it is a useful category for description. I have prepared a first cut from my EndNote database and added some additional references from Kitchin & Dodge’s “Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life” that may be of interest and/or useful to others. Please find it in plain text below.
Continue reading “A preliminary bibliography for studies of Code/Spaces”
This summer/autumn I will be…
I have written anything on this blog for quite a while so I thought I’d redress the deficit (a word for our times!) of content by simply explaining what I’m up to.
I’m hoping to give a talk at the UK lab of a prominent technology company, concerning research conducted with Patrick Crogan on the economy of attention. Through meetings with key researchers at that company, the visit will also inform my research fieldwork in Silicon Valley in September/October. More of which shortly…
I will attend the Royal Geographical Society’s annual international conference in September. I’m giving two papers and serving as a committee member in the RGS History & Philosophy of Geography Research Group. The first paper, co-authored with Matthew Wilson (U. Kentucky), concerns the material practices of using location based services. The second paper addresses the tension between contemporary understandings of neural plasticity and the commodification of human attention, especially in relation to pervasive media. Both of these papers will be subsequently submitted to journals to be considered for publication. I’ll put up details on this blog as and when this happens.
During the months of September and October 2011, I will carry out in-depth fieldwork investigating understandings of the future of computing and associated innovation practices within research and development facilities in Silicon Valley (California). The research is funded by a British Academy Small Grant. This is research that will follow on from my PhD work. The exciting advance with this project is that the data gathered will inform knowledge exchange activities with the Pervasive Media Studio network of artists and small/start-up technology companies. This work will also lead to further conference papers and publications. Stay tuned!
Practising tomorrows? PhD Thesis online
I’ve uploaded a PDF of my PhD thesis for people to download [2.1Mb PDF ] should anyone feel so inclined. I have had a finalised version for a little while and have been meaning to make it available but just haven’t got round to it before now.
This work was conducted between 2006 and 2009, with the substantive fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2008 in Silicon Valley. It principally focusses on the ways in which those involved in ubiquitous computing research development, in a corporate context, anticipate particular kinds of future. This work remains interesting and, I would argue, important because “the future” continues to figure as a significant frame of reference in the ways in which we discuss and relate to/through technologies. I have reproduced the abstract, with the inclusion of a key quote, below. Please do get in touch to discuss this work! [ sam (dot) kinsley (at) uwe (dot) ac (dot) uk]
Practising Tomorrows? Ubiquitous computing and the politics of anticipation
Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) research is characterized primarily by a concern with potential future computational worlds. This notion of research by future envisionment has been a feature of ubicomp discourse and reasoning since it earliest days… Such visions, however, are interesting not just for what they say about the future but also for what they say
about the present. This seems to be particularly the case when it comes to normative social relationships.
Bell & Dourish Yesterday’s tomorrows: notes on ubiquitous computing’s dominant vision
The thesis describes the ways in which technological futurity is a complex array of performative and proactive dispositions towards the future that are irreducible to normative and deterministic understandings of ‘progress’. It takes ubiquitous computing as a significant case study because the future orientation practised in ubiquitous computing research and development is emblematic of the perpetual technological forecasting in which humanity engages. While ubiquitous computing has existed as an agenda for nearly 20 years it is still largely concerned with a future that has not (yet) been realised. In the context of ubiquitous computing the thesis argues that it is necessary to make the politics of anticipation, as the particular discursive and performative ways in which future-orientation is codified and conditioned, explicit in technology development. The thesis therefore enacts a critical framework that charts a discourse of anticipation, as the multiple means for articulating proactive future orientation, internal to which are anticipatory logics that structure and rationalise how such forms of futurity are practised.
The motivation and ambit of the research is to thereby describe a politics of anticipation as the ways in which the anticipation of technological futures is codified and contested, whilst performative and multiple. Empirically, the argument is made through the discussion of interviews conducted with a range of internationally significant practitioners of ubiquitous computing research and development, which were carried out in Silicon Valley, California, in 2008. Attending to discourse, logics and emergent politics of anticipation provides a means of making explicit how our ‘knowledge’ of technological futures is produced. It is therefore argued that we should attend to socio-technical futurity as inherently situated in the living present, with all of its associated concerns, and allow for the indeterminacy of the future.
Practising tomorrows? – Sam Kinsley’s PhD Thesis [2.1Mb PDF ].
The technics of attention – thinking about the attention economy through Stiegler’s philosophy of technology
In a final post about the ESF sponsored conference, Paying Attention, held by DCRC in September, I have recently written about the concept of technicity in relation to the capacity for attention. What follows is the text from that post, I hope it is of vague interest…
Continue reading “The technics of attention – thinking about the attention economy through Stiegler’s philosophy of technology”
Blogger apathy, the death of Bloglines and missing links
This year I have been mostly… blogging on the variety of sites attached to the Digital Cultures Research Centre’s network of events and projects – not least our recent conference Paying Attention which addressed the issue of the ‘attention economy’ (see the website for more details). The conference was held in Linkoping, in Sweden, and funded by the European Science Foundation. We were fortunate to have a varied and interesting collection of speakers including Tiziana Terranova and Bernard Stiegler, who were both superb.
Having written the above, I doubt anyone will read this, not least because I don’t really blog much at the best of times and its been even quieter of late. However, I have been spurred to action because of the announcement of the imminent demise of Bloglines, for which I have remained a faithful user for around five years, mostly due to laziness! I’m probably going to avoid the obvious move to the big “G” (as in the internet services company not ‘him upstairs’!) and switch over to NetVibes. An immediate cause for reflection in this circumstance is the number of ‘saved’ blog posts from the feeds I follow which I intended to write about here and haven’t got around to discussing. So, for want of a better strategy – I’m posting them here as a sort of archaeology of my Bloglines account [continued below].
Continue reading “Blogger apathy, the death of Bloglines and missing links”
Addressing ubicomp: Computing people, places and things
The following is an edited excerpt from my PhD thesis, which articulates the various ways we might understand what we mean by ‘ubiquitous computing’
‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’ (Weiser, 1991).
‘The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user”¦ I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp) ‘ (Weiser, 1993).
In the last 20 years the idea of ubiquitous computing has been reiterated, revised and extraordinarily expanded. Starting from the premise that computing might be un-tethered from the grey boxes that sit on desks and become ’embedded in the woodwork’ of everyday life, ‘ubicomp’ has come to signify research agendas, an eponymous conference, technical goals, an ethos and a legacy. This thesis focuses upon the future orientation inherent to all of the threads that weave together to form ubicomp. From the outset the details of ubicomp have been positioned in the future. Weiser’s ‘Computer for the 21st Century‘ popularised a research agenda in the guise of a vision that many subsequently adopted. Yet the article was doubly influential because, as Bell and Dourish observe, ‘it also set a rhetorical tone that many have adopted’. Therefore the same concern for near futures is present in contemporary ubicomp agendas, the papers presented in conferences, and the ways in which ‘advances’ in the field are measured.
There are a number of common threads to the various applications of ‘ubicomp’ as a descriptor for research activity. These themes all somewhat branch from the first and most obvious implication of calling it ‘ubiquitous’. It is worth situating the concept in its initial time-space, for when Weiser and his colleagues were experimentally developing the projects that came to make up the ubicomp project there were few affordable personal computers, no ‘World Wide Web’ and mobile telephones could barely fit into a handbag let alone a pocket. The initial experimental systems created as ‘ubi-comp’ at Xerox PARC under Weiser’s leadership were fixed at three scales of device, called ‘tabs’, ‘pads’ and ‘boards’. As Dourish observes, ubicomp proceeded on three tracks, which ‘were known as computation by the inch, the foot and the yard’ (Dourish, 2004), referring to the three types of device. Inch-scale ‘tabs’ were something akin to ‘computationally enhanced Post-It Notes’, foot-scale ‘pads’ were designed as what might now be recognised as ‘tablet PCs’, and yard-scale boards were epitomised by ‘LiveBoard’: ‘a large-scale display”¦ supporting multiple pens, a sort of computationally enhanced whiteboard’. Of course these things were not supposed to exist in isolation, tabs, pads and boards were supposed to be prolific in number and scattered throughout the everyday environment:
‘In the everyday environment, information continually undergoes transformations and translations, and we should expect the same in a computationally enhanced version of that environment such as might be delivered to us by ubiquitous computing’ (Dourish, 2004).
Continue reading “Addressing ubicomp: Computing people, places and things”
Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy
This is a sub-section of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, its my attempt to reflect on Mark Weiser’s legacy in the field of ubiquitous computing.
2009 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Mark Weiser, a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser has been identified as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the European Union’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Philips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embedded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish remark ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the ‘Ubicomp’ conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.
Continue reading “Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy”
Reflecting on Mark Weiser’s legacy ten years on
The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
-Mark Weiser, 1991 “The Computer for the 21st Century” Scientific American
The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user”¦ I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp).
-Mark Weiser, 1993 “Some Computer Science issues in Ubiquitous Computing” Communications of the ACM
2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’, his name was Mark Weiser. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser is best known as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing. In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the EU’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Phillips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embeded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Bell and Dourish remark, ‘of the 108 papers comprising the Ubicomp conference proceedings between 2001 and 2004, fully 47% of the papers are oriented towards a proximate (and inevitable) technological future’ and ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the Ubicomp conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.
Continue reading “Reflecting on Mark Weiser’s legacy ten years on”
Wordle of recent draft chapter
Related to the last one but slightly different – ‘practising tomorrows’:
