This Friday, our next #HCIISeminarSeries guest will be Amy Bruckman, Regents’ Professor, School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Join us!
🎙️ "The Crisis in 'Knowledge': What HCI Practitioners Need to Know, and What We Can Do"
The past few days I've been thinking a lot again about one of the thought/design models most influential on my own #OpenSource practice: Frank Duffy's architectural pace layers (and Stewart Brand's subsequent extension to different contexts), their different timescales and interactions as basis for resilient system design:
Each layer exists & operates independently, moves at different timescales (from seconds to millennia and beyond)
Each layer influences and only interacts with its direct neighbors
I always found that model super helpful for analyzing and deciding how to deal with individual projects and components in terms of focus/effort, and asking myself which layer this thing might/should be part of. Lately though, I keep on trying to figure out how to better utilize that model to orient my own future practice, also with respect to the loose theme of #PermaComputing and how to frame and better organize my own approaches to it, incl. how to reanimate or repurpose some of the related, discontinued, but not invalid research & projects I've been doing along these lines over the past 15 years...
I understand and appreciate most of the focus on #FrugalComputing & #RetroComputing-derived simplicity as starting points and grounding concepts for attempting to build a more sustainable, personal, comprehensible and maintainable tech, but these too can quickly become overly dogmatic and maybe too constraining to ever become "truly" permanent (at least on the horizon of a few decades). I think the biggest hurdles to overcome are social rather than technological (e.g. a need for post-consumerist, post-spectacular behaviors), so I'm even more interested in Illich/Papert/Nelson/Felsenstein-inspired #ConvivialComputing, #SocialComputing, IO/comms/p2p, #Accessibility, UI, protocol and other resiliency design aspects becoming a core part of that research and think the idea of pace layering can be a very powerful tool to take into consideration here too, at the very least for guiding (and questioning) how to approach and structure any perma-computing related research itself...
Given the current physical and political climate shifts, is it better to continue working "upwards" (aka #BottomUpDesign), i.e. primarily focusing on first defining slow moving, low-level layers as new/alternative foundations (an example here would be the flurry of VM projects, incl. my own)? Or, is it more fruitful and does the situation instead call for a more urgent focus on fast-moving pace layer experiments and continuously accumulating learnings as fallout/sediment to allow the formation of increasingly more stable, but also more holistically informed, slower moving structural layers to build upon further?
It's a bit of chicken vs. egg! In my mind, right now the best approach seems to be a two-pronged one, alternating from both sides, each time informing upcoming work/experiments on the opposite end (fast/slow) and each time involving an as diverse as possible set of non-techbro minds from various fields... 🤔
Personal: I am very happy to announce that I have accepted a tenure-track Assistant Professor position at the University of Groningen. Looking forward to further collaborations, and am glad to continue working within the Information Systems Group at the Bernoulli Institute.
Has been any work on the notion of "algorithmic anger" or something similar?
I define AA (yes, pun intended) as the anger we feel when the algorithmic mediations in our lives (e.g., social media) screw us over (e.g., shadowban, deboost, etc.).
It's revealing to me how much frustration a broken algorithm can create in our lives. It's a testament to how much our lives are governed by black boxed, arbitrary, and broken algorithmic systems.