Living in the middle of (media) things @ Linköping 2012: Handouts

TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING:

“What is transmedia? Deep media, persistent narrative, immersive storytelling, transmedia: right now, we are experiencing a moment of radical technological change, with seismic shifts in the way that entertainment is conceived, produced and distributed. Savvy companies and producers, including the creators of Lost, Star Trek and Halo are incubating concepts that are designed to captivate and interact with audiences across an array of media platforms. According to Henry Jenkins, author of the seminal text, Convergence Culture: 'Transmedia storytelling is storytelling by a number of decentralized authors who share and create content for distribution across multiple forms of media. Transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.'” (Gomez 2009; Jenkins 2006)

CRITICAL DESIGN:

uses "design as a medium to stimulate discussion and debate amongst designers, industry and the public about the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies." (Dunne & Raby 2012)

DESIGN FICTION:

"Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating about the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination." (Bleeker 2005+)

TRANSCONTEXTUAL

“As I delved deeper into the relations between developers and users, it became clear that a kind of communicative tangle was occurring. I used the work of Gregory Bateson, who had studied these sorts of communicative mishaps under the heading of ‘double binds.’ As with Bateson’s work on schizophrenics, and what he called ‘the trans-contextual syndrome,’ the messages that were coming at level one from the systems developers were not being heard on that level by the users and vice versa. What was obvious to one was a mystery to another. What was trivial to one was a barrier to another. Yet, clarifying this was never easy…. I began to see this as a problem of infrastructure—and its relative nature.”

• phrases quoted from Bateson: "genesis of tangles," "the weave of contextual structure," and "transcontextual syndrome” • More Bateson: “It seems that both those whose life is enriched by transcontextual gifts and those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions are alike in one respect: for them there is always or often a ‘double take.’ A falling leaf [or] the greeting of a friend…is not ‘just that and nothing more.’”

• Star syllabus: “borderlands are full of motion and emotion.”
(Star 2010: 610; Star & Ruhleder 1996: 127 quote Bateson 1972: 276; Bateson: 272; Clarke quotes Star syllabus 2010: 589)

“Boundary objects are a sort of arrangement that allow different groups to work together without consensus.” (Star 2010:602) “Consensus was rarely reached, and fragile when it was, but cooperation continued, often unproblematically.” (604)

• “The object (remember, to read this as a set of work arrangements that are at once material and processual) resides between social worlds (or communities of practice) where it is ill structured.
• When necessary, the object is worked on by local groups who maintain its vaguer identity as a common object, while making it more specific, more tailored to local use within a social world, and therefore useful for work that is NOT interdisciplinary.
• Groups that are cooperating without consensus tack back-and-forth between both forms of the object.” (604-5)

“Over time, people (often administrators or regulatory agencies) try to control the tacking back-and-forth, and especially, to standardize and make equivalent the ill-structured and well-structured aspects of the particular boundary object.”
(613-4; Star & Griesemer 1989, Star & Ruhleder 1996, Bowker & Star 1999)

boundary objects, such as standpoint theory, intersectionality, material feminisms
• as spaces for communication • as carefully tacit, deliberatively discreet grounds for collaboration without agreement • as objects wrought over time through intensive negotiations over practice and terminology • as structured objects that permit recursion at different levels of system holding paradox in tension • as process points in cycle of standardization, generation of residual categories, emergent alliances

Talk

Handouts