Box 006: Gadget Realism

05.08.2007.08.20

Do we only map things out to try and stake a claim to them? It feels like even mapping out theoretical or disciplinary stuff is just a way of staking a claim on something. That’s why a lot of folks I hugely respect out-and-out reject the idea of mapping or establishing boundaries. Anyway here’s some maps…

Mapping

It’s always tricky to throw a definition around something. In 2020, trying to thrown one around the genre that was once speculative design is even trickier. There’s been a lot of different attempts which have themselves broadly fallen into two categories; impenetrable academic treatises that either add it to the interaction design toolkit or propel it into some philosophical netherworld or productivity hype, where it is appropriated into innovation cycles. Elliott Montgomery has done a pretty decent job of trying to map out the space around it, creating a map I’d broadly recognise.

Elliot P. Montgomery’s *Unresolved Map of Speculative Design*

What’s missing from Elliot’s map here is some dimensionality. That muddled space between ‘art’ and strategy is a deeper space where something that is a method, approach or tool that might broadly be applied across a range of fields as opposed an attitude or discipline. For example, ‘design fiction’ covers a huge range of cases; everything from advertising through to critical artistic practice. While something like critical design I would suggest is highly constrained as a discipline of critiquing design.

Equally therefore, not all design fiction is speculative design; some design fictions are not intended to speculate but to propose or cement an ambition of the future; think of product visions from Microsoft, they’re not asking a ‘what if?’ – they’re selling a vision. These works are formal design fictions in that they are designs that are fictional, but not necessarily speculative and very rarely critical. Similarly it’s difficult to think of an opposite – a speculative design that is not a design fiction.

So, in writing this I decided to – with the deepest of respect – rework Elliott’s map a little. I’ve stuck to the original colour to try and show where I’ve moved things. I’d be quick to caution that many of these mapping exercises so revered by design academics are largely futile, highly subjective and broadly irrelevant to the actual experience of practice. Nonetheless, it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a little while.

The axes definitions here are still work in progress. I want to demonstrate a couple of things. First of all, the relationship of the work to the creator. Here this is outcome-led versus practitioner-led to describe say a client-led project versus a more reflexive experiment that a practitioner might do out of their own interest. Secondly, I’ve reworked Elliott’s constrained/unconstrained with my own interpretation – applied/imaginative. This is similar to the first axes but is less about the intention of the practitioner in their own work than the way it is received or considered by others. So a client-focussed project might still be broadly theoretical in execution, while a personally reflexive project might be a very distinct, applied product. Finally is the axes I was hinting at earlier, the one that slides form method to attitude/genre (or discipline). Here, design fiction is up top as a method while science fiction and critical design slide down into the bottom.

Gadget Realism

All of this was a long way round of thinking about a brief discussion with Simone Rebaudengo via Instagram having consumed his new book of design fiction fairy tales Everything is Someone. It’s a short little book of allegorical stories about things. It’s packed with coded references to design fiction projects, not least the work of Automato.farm and Rebaudengo’s great Teacher of Algorithms. Stylistically it sits somewhere between a Tim Burton fairy tale book and some of China Mieville’s shorts. It’s not as out-there weird as China Mieville’s excellent collection of short stories Three Moments of an Explosion, though it did remind me of it for its focus on non-human things and it hints at surreal and magical narratives opened up by considering things as actors. So I decided to call it ‘gadget realism.’

Where ‘magic realism’ is the contextualisation of supernatural or magical phenomena in a mundane setting, reaching all the way from Borges to Mieville’s ‘new weird’ when a ‘highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe’ gadget realism examines, usually through design fiction, the weirdness of gadgets and their strange effects on the world, often centering them as characters. In magic realism, the ‘magic’ is usually outsize and off-screen, it influences the characters but rarely has fully explored motivations.

Keichi Matsuda’s Hyperreality

Keichi Matsuda’s Hyperreality springs to mind easily. Here the gadget (augmented reality) is initially normalised then the strangeness of it is revealed both diegetically and non-diegetically through the contradictory experience of us in our AR-absent world and the POV character who is experiencing non-AR in a deeply unsettling way.

In gadget realism, the gadget becomes a character that influences the world of the other characters, sending them on surreal journeys through its construction. If we can conceive of magic as a causeless technology then gadget realism would be a continuation of the same logic of a sort of ‘deus ex’ technology that influences the cause of events without displaying an apparent motivation. It’s important that the gadget must exceed the control of humans in the story in order that the strangeness be introduced. The Microsoft visions for example would not be gadget realism as they don’t provide the sublime, Lovecraftian experience of outsize influence over human life. In these design fictions, strangeness is avoided to recreate normalcy with believable gadgets.

There’s probably more work to do here exploring this sub genre. The reason I contextualise this in the mapping is to propose cutting across disciplinary and methodological boundaries for stylistic purposes. Gadget realism as a loosely formed notion seems to me to have the potential to ground and anchor outsize technologies in a narrative framework that understands them as more than utilitarian devices. For example, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s The Subsitute is not a design fiction or speculative design (I’d bracket it under critical technical practice) but is a form of gadget realism, exploring the outsize strangeness of machine learning.

Short stuff

That took me exactly too much time to do for what was supposed to be another brief missive. I have actual writing to do for actual things. Couple of quick ones:

Arebyte have a browser exhibition called Real-Time Constraints. It’s a browser plugin. Every few hours an art pops up on your desktop. It’s a great format and there’s some great artists. Thanks Miranda Marcus for bringing this to my attention.
This person restores old tools and gizmos. Each video is about twenty minutes, very mediative stuff. Why is that we love watching these processes so much?

I can’t think of a third one right now, I’d usually have a list. Anyway, love you, have a great week.

Box 004: Not enough particles.

15.07.20

I missed last week because I don’t have anything clever to say. I have a very low bar and an incredible sense of self-aggrandisement for what I consider to be my own remarkable cleverness so the fact that there’s been nothing for two weeks should tell you something. I’m just going to list some recents and skip to the videos.

Recents

I completed my Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy after a stalled attempt last year. I wrote about digital pedagogy and the emancipatory potential of working with as opposed to parallel with or against the digital ecologies we are already immersed in. A lot of the writing is about leadership philosophy and what you’ve learned. This was a delicate process of unpacking and trying to understand the last few years, acknowledging mistakes and trying to identify some sense in the way I’ve made decisions. I find taking myself seriously and doing that kind of serious introspection to play havoc with my ego; it dispels the sense of whimsy that peppers my self-constructed mythos.

On Tuesday morning I did an Instagram live chat with my friend and professor at Karlsruhe, Füsun Türetken about her project ‘Object For Likes‘ that she’s running out there with a group of students. We chatted about the temperaments and tendencies of working online and the industrial production of images for social networks. I think it’s all still up on their profile.

Short Stuff

Here’s a rendering engine for non-Euclidian geometry. Actually, the title is a little misleading; it’s a Euclidian rendering engine that fakes non-Eculidian geometry. I was a little disappointed once the trick was revealed, I’m hoping there’s a real one out there. It reminded me a bit of this video where someone tries to recreate Portal and exposes the incredible complexities in the process.
Speaking of rendering, Dezeen have drawn attention to some of the stuff we’ve explored in What if Our World is Their Heaven?: The penchant for dreamy rendered landscapes in design. I feel like there’s more unpacking to do here about the preference for these types of images.
Finally, at its current rate of growth, in 8604 years humanity will exhaust all particulate matter in the universe. According to the maths.

Listen, I love you but that’s it for now. I’ve been doing a lot of lecturing recently and I’ve used up all my good ideas on paying audiences. I’ll get back to you in the cheap seats next week.

Box 001: Remember when we laughed?

18.06.20

Good afternoon! You may have picked up that this blog looks different. Or, you may have barely noticed because the content is so good that it distracts from any concerns of aesthetics. Well, unfortunately my disquiet with Blogger hit a nadir and I finally decided to move operations over here to WordPress. I’ve had a couple of stalled attempts at doing this in the past and found the set-up costs in time are kind of high and involve quite a bit of fidgeting to get something that I like. But already I’m dealing with a more intuitive interface, with responsive elements and with something altogether more consummate with 2020. I hadn’t blogged in four weeks and was feeling things slip. I try and write here (or there) each week – whether anyone reads or not – because it continues to give me an anchor in the real-world and I read and discover things with purpose, trying to structure them into a sense of narrative that I can then write about. It’s also simply good practice.

So here we are then, in WordPress, having fought through all the marketing and e-commerce templates to something understated and clean (with a lot of editing on my own part.) I’ve called this new place The Bounding Box. I had to think of a title quickly because I only had this morning to get this done. The bounding box, sometimes in video games referred to as the hit-box, is the lower-geometry and usually invisible geometry that encapsulates a 3D object making the calculation of collisions and 3D interactions easier. I like that as a metaphor for what the purpose of this blog is. It may not always be directly relevant and can sometimes deviate but it’s a loose boundary marker of things I’m into. As a consequence I’ve jettisoned the French Republican Calendar as a source of continual narrative through these Wednesday missives and will simply call them ‘boxes.’ This is Box 1. The old blog is still up here and I’ll write a post about it all moving and keep it there until Google decide to sunset the service.

This was all part of a bigger project where I found the list of things I had been doing and needed to update the various platforms o™n was growing out of control. The Tobias Revell brand needed a refresh. So there’s a new website which isn’t too dissimilar to the current one in the works with a new platform for ease of use but is currently causing me all sorts of headaches. There’s also some consistency and date issues that need fixing. Then everything needs to be uploaded to the different research platforms as well. It’s all very repetitive.

Where did the fun go?

I’m finding myself increasingly worried about how viciously serious everyone is about design these days. Of course, with a series of horrific and revealing crises there’s good cause to question today’s practice and offer to use what we have to help. However, there seems to be a nasty breed of particularly evangelical, ascetic design-thinkerers out there right now. Their rhetoric seems to be a level more severe than the usual design-saviourism that gleefully bounces around the conference circuit in a microphone headset berating people about empathy and affinity diagrams. To these folks, doing anything <em>but</em> trying to save the world is a selfish waste of time. There’s a persecutory nature to it that concerns me.

Design has been in some form of crisis, transition or introspection as long as I’ve known. Hell, as long as it’s existed. And design has got some accounting to do for its role in reinforcing racial injustice, contributing to climate collapse and furthering wealth inequality. These are serious matters that need serious change. It’s good to be reflexive, it helps us grow. But it should still be fun; it should still be a bit silly and playful. You should be able to build communities, make friends and laugh. You must be able to laugh. I gave a lecture to some students (sorry I can’t remember who or where – again, I really need to keep better track of things) where I remember saying that the saviour narrative of designers was just as dangerous as the multi-billionaire startup one. All those diagrams, double-diamonds and toolkits lend it as much legitimacy as any pyramid scheme with a convincing marketing pack in the wrong hands but be honest, it’s just messing around with shapes really.

Recents

I was on the jury for Core 77’s Speculative Design Award with Radha Mistry, Monika Bielskyte and Rob Bolton. We had some really interesting conversations, often funny and occasionally serious about the entries. It’s clear the field has diversified and shifted massively and generally we were in agreement that our role was not to identify projects that conformed to a canon of speculative design practice but support those that pushed or challenged it in rigorous ways. I’m really happy with the selection we made in the end. Head on over to check them out.

Natalie and I are doing another Haunted Machines project. This time we’re working with Utrecht arts students from HKU on ‘Trophic Cascades’ with Anika Schwarzlose. Yesterday we ran a lecture and seminar on the intersection of technology, imagination and complexity in the ecological context. This drew on a lot of work we did for Ecological Alexa. There’s a load of slides of interesting projects in this area in a big deck. If you ask I’ll put them up, ok? Here’s the cover slide which gave me the opportunity to mess about with hair simulations in Blender.

Learning

As usual, I’m going to try and share interesting things I come across. They’re not necessarily connected to anything but spark my curiosity.

This video of how the designers of Wolfenstein 3D redid the sound of a gun in the game after players complained it wasn’t powerful enough. It was powerful enough, it just didn’t sound powerful enough.
The Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences. Is a list of 334,000 integer sequences. See also Sloane’s Gap. This is the observation that numbers are not evenly distributed over sequences; some appear rarely, some often.
The Bodélé Depression is a dried-up mega-lake in Chad. Every year, 50 million tonnes of dust, made of diatom fossils, from the depression is blown across the Atlantic Ocean to the Amazon rainforest where it supplies half of the fertiliser the Amazon needs.

Anyway, that’s it for now. It’s nice to talk to you again. Have a good week.