Charles Eames, as interviewed in 1972 by “L. Amic” of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Eames’ Zen-like answers amount to a thorough and timeless definition of design. What stands out to me is the exchange about constraints: “Does design admit constraints?” the interviewer asks. Eames says, of course, design depends on constraints. When the interviewer asks, “What constraints?” Eames begins his reply by saying, “The sum of all constraints.”

What is your definition of “design?”

A plan for arranging elements in such a way as to best accomplish a particular purpose.

Is design an expression of art (an art form)?

The design is an expression of the purpose. It may (if it is good enough) later be judged as art.

Is design a craft for industrial purposes?

No— but design may be a solution to some industrial problems.

What are the boundaries of design?

What are the boundaries of problems?

Is design a discipline that concerns itself with only one part of the environment?

No.

It is a method of general expression?

No— it is a method of action.

Is design a creation of an individual?

No— because to be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.

…or a creation of a group?

Often.

Is there a design ethic?

There are always design constraints and these usually include an ethic.

Does design imply the idea of products that are necessarily useful?

Yes— even though the use might be surely subtle.

It is able to cooperate in the creation of works reserved solely for pleasure?

Who would say that pleasure is not useful?

Ought form to derive from the analysis of function?

The great risk here is that the analysis may not be complete.

Can the computer substitute for the designer?

Probably, in some special cases, but usually the computer is an aid to the designer.

Does design imply industrial manufacture?

Some designs do and some do not—depending on the nature of the design and the requirements.

Is design an element of industrial policy?

Certainly; as in any other aspect of quality, obvious or subtle, of the product. It seems that anything can be an element in policy.

Ought design to care about lowering costs?

A product often becomes more useful if the costs are lowered without harming the quality.

Does the creation of design admit constraint?

Design depends largely on constraints.

What constraints?

The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem—the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible—his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints—the constraints of price, of size, of strength, balance, of surface, of time, etc.; each problem has its own peculiar list.

Does design obey laws?

Aren’t constraints enough?

Ought the final product to bear the trademark of the designer? Of the research office?

In some cases, one may seem appropriate. In some cases, the other, and certainly in some cases both.

What is the relation of design to the world of fashion (current trends)?

The objects of fashion have usually been designed with the particular constraints of fashion in mind.

Is design ephemeral?

Some needs are ephemeral. Most designs are ephemeral.

Ought it to tend towards the ephemeral or towards permanence?

Those needs and designs that have a more universal quality will tend toward permanence.

To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number (the masses)? to the specialists or the enlightened amateur? To a privileged social class?

To the need.

Can public action aid the advancement of design?

The proper public action can advance most anything.

After having answered all these questions, do you feel you have been able to practice the profession of “design” under satisfactory conditions, or even optimum conditions?

Yes.

Have you been forced to accept compromises?

I have never been forced to accept compromises but I have willingly accepted constraints.

What do you feel is the primary condition for the practice of design and its propagation?

Recognition of the need.

What is the future of design?

(No answer)

(transcript via Brimstone and Treacle.)

If you’re in NYC, you might want to check out my talk at the Design and Technology program at Parsons The New School for Design. I will be presenting Reality Ends Here and some ideas about the role of applied pervasive games in education. Hope to see you there.

Talk info:
Monday, February 27th at 2:00-3:00pm
66 W. 12 Street, 5th Floor, Room A510

Detailed presentation of Reality Ends Here, with remarks on the methodology underlying pervasive placemaking interventions of all kinds. Originally presented February 2, 2012 at the Berkeley Center for New Media.

I will be presenting at the Game Developers Conference and the Digital Media and Learning Conference in the first week of March, 2012. These presentations are a part of a panel series jointly organized by the University of Southern California, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and Microsoft Research. The panels, entitled “Gameful Layers for the Freshman Experience”, discuss two very different approaches to using game systems to impact post-secondary education. More details below:

DML
9:00 AM March 2, 2012 Cyril Magnin Ballroom, Wyndham Parc 55 Hotel

The transition to college is a difficult experience for many young people, marked by rapid change as well as social, emotional and intellectual challenges. Additionally, today’s students may feel disconnected from traditional university classroom materials and structures, spending the majority of their out of class time interacting via text and web. This session will look at two very different experimental games which attempt to scaffold that freshman experience, allowing digital natives to bring their existing communication and media skills to bear on the building of college-level social groups and 21st century skills such as team-building, problem-solving, creative and critical thinking, brainstorming, experimentation, etc.

The two case studies were both launched in Fall of 2011 and each team has worked to assess and evaluate the outcomes so far. Just Press Play, from the Rochester Institute of Technology, is funded by Microsoft Research, and is an achievement-based system that encourages students to think of the obstacles in their path as part of a narrative of their educational development. Reality Ends Here, from the University of Southern California, is an internally funded project from the School of Cinematic Arts. Structured as an alternate reality game, the experience introduces students to the culture and history of the school, encouraging them to become part of that tradition from day one. Designers and evaluators from each project will discuss learning goals, design strategies, assessment approaches, preliminary outcomes and next steps for these innovative digital learning environments. (DML 2012)

GDC
10:00 AM Tuesday March 6, 2012 Room 2004, West Hall, 2nd Fl, Moscone Convention Center

DESCRIPTION: A comparison of two experimental games that each attempt to scaffold the first year university experience. “Just Press Play,” from RIT, an achievement-based system that encourages students to think of the obstacles in their path as part of a narrative of their educational development. “Reality Ends Here,” from USC, is a DIY media-making ARG that introduces students to the culture and history of the cinema school, challenging them to become part of the school’s storied tradition. Designers and evaluators from each team discuss learning goals, design strategies, assessment approaches, preliminary outcomes and next steps for these innovative digital learning environments.

TAKEAWAY: Attendees will learn design strategies, assessment approaches for creating innovative digital learning environments. From-the-trenches reports of technologies of play interacting with established curriculum. Outcomes for these experiments that point the way to new and exciting design solutions for games in educational settings. (GDC 2012)

Other movies, like Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, explore the unsettling social implications of a technology that enables people to digitally capture and play back what their brain sees and hears and feels. More recently, Charlie Brooker’s brilliant Black Mirror (episode 3, “The Entire History of You“) presents a plausible vision of how such a technology could become ubiquitous, and the devastating effects it will have on privacy, intimate relationships, and the way we remember our lives.

And so it was somewhat disconcerting to come across this research conducted at Berkeley’s Gallant Lab:

The researchers describe the project as follows:

As you move through the world or you watch a movie, a dynamic, ever-changing pattern of activity is evoked in the brain. The goal of movie reconstruction is to use the evoked activity to recreate the movie you observed. To do this, we create encoding models that describe how movies are transformed into brain activity, and then we use those models to decode brain activity and reconstruct the stimulus. (UCB Gallant Lab)

Right now, to capture these recordings, the subject needs to be positioned inside a giant fMRI machine, so we’re a little way off from the dystopias described by the narratives of Strange Days and Black Mirror. But as the researchers at the Gallant Lab write, “both the technology for measuring brain activity and the computational models are improving continuously. It is possible that decoding brain activity could have serious ethical and privacy implications downstream in, say, the 30-year time frame.”

Strange days, indeed.

I will be speaking at the Berkeley Center for New Media on February 2nd, 2012, at 5PM in the BCNM Commons (340 Moffitt). Here’s the description of the talk:

In this talk, Jeff Watson will present Reality Ends Here (2011), a pervasive alternate reality game designed to effect immediate change in the community of learners at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA). Over the course of the project’s 120 day run, collectible cards, rumors, secret websites, and a mysterious black flag drew more than 150 students into an intense underground social game involving collaboration, strategy, and artistic experimentation. By connecting students to one another in unpredictable and serendipitous ways, and by providing a framework for meaningful play and performance, the game transformed a collection of heavily siloed academic divisions into a productively chaotic and interdisciplinary community of practice. Drawing on the research and methodology underlying the design, implementation, and assessment of Reality Ends Here, Watson will argue for the transformative potential of pervasive game interventions across a range of domains, from education and public policy, to activism, innovation, and beyond (Berkeley Center for New Media).

UPDATE: Slides posted here.

Some of my own first inklings of this sort of systems thinking came about when I was learning how to write JavaScript. One of the first projects I did was a kind of “random log line generator” that put together snippets of beginnings, middles, and ends to create surprising (and often absurd) pseudo-random stories. As I worked to make the program do more sophisticated things — things like check if there had been a car mentioned in an earlier part of the story, and if there had, bring it back in later in the story — I began to see more clearly how traditional fixed linear stories (at the time I was working on various screenplay projects) were in fact complex dynamic systems (at least in terms of the development process — though of course as far as their relationship to spectators goes, they remain so long after they are “finished”). Making a change in one part of the text has cascading effects throughout the whole, changing meanings, altering stakes, and opening (or closing) lines of possibility. It seems obvious now, but for me it also felt like a breakthrough.

Maybe that discovery was part of why I became interested in participatory and environmental media broadly and game design more specifically. The thrill of watching those possibilities open and close and those changes ripple through the system was something I wanted to design for. Why should authors have all the fun playing with the pieces and seeing how things shake out differently as the constituent elements of a story environment are changed? As Phillips puts it, it’s a wonderful game to imagine “how else we might have assembled the same cogs and gears to make [the clockwork machine of a story] run faster or quieter or keep time better.”

This pleasure, I think, is at the heart of game play, not just game design. It’s a unique kind of pleasure that comes from a feeling of real agency, of having one’s actions effect tangible consequences upon a system, and of discovering the new and unforeseen challenges associated with those consequences — and it’s what keeps me passionate about writing, designing, and playing alike.

Chris Burden’s Metropolis II opens this week at LACMA. According to Burden, “The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the speeding toy cars, produces in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic, active and bustling 21st Century city.” And also, I would add, the thrill and the wonder…

Here are a few stats on the piece:

• The cars are attached by a small magnet to the conveyor belt that brings them to the crest.
• The only motorization of the cars is the conveyor belt to the top.
• Once the cars cross over the crest and head downward, their entire movement is by gravity.
• They travel at a scale speed of 240 mph, plus or minus.
• The tracks they take are Teflon coated to reduce friction.
• The tracks are beveled at 7 degrees to give added torque for speed when
  they come through corners and curves.
• The trains are out of the box electric train sets that run on electricity.

(Unframed)

See also: Big Wrench.

Nicholas de Monchaux’s WPA 2.0 entry, Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial data to map the thousands of abandoned city-owned lots scattered across North American cities. But this is more than just a data viz project: de Monchaux conceives of these spaces as “an essential archipelago of opportunity” for making cities more livable, functional, and sustainable. The project proposes a provocative union of urban environmental sensor data, citizen participation (presumably captured via social media), and parametric design software:

Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology—and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well —a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen. (Nicholas de Monchaux)

Related: WPA 2.0 Exhibition

Via @elejansen

An ecotone — literally, a place where ecologies are in tension — is a transitional area between different biomes, such as the boundary between grassland and forest or between different kinds of forests. Such places are sites for evolutionary dynamism, conflict, and experimentation. Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, draws on the ecotone as analogy and inspiration in her provocative essay regarding the future of design education and other institutional systems, Innovation Ecotones (.pdf).

Here, Pendleton-Jullian outlines the continuum between linear (“twentieth century”) and elastic/non-hierarchical (“twenty-first century”) learning and innovation models:

The left side of this continuum corresponds to models, methods, and mechanisms associated with twentieth century learning and the right side corresponds to how we are beginning to conceive of knowledge construction for the twenty-first century. A twentieth-century approach to education holds fast to the notion of teaching as a systematic delivery of knowledge—knowledge that is vetted and sanctioned and delivered in discipline-based packages from expert teachers to students. It is education in which one learns about specific stuff and how to do specific things.

In contrast, twenty-first century learning environments are about learning that extends far beyond the classroom (it scales), which in turn promotes elasticity and agency. The assumption is that we need to prepare for futures in which the specific things we will be doing, and specific stuff we will need to know, do not yet exist. Implicated in an education for the twenty-first century are all sorts of new mechanisms—cultural, social, and intellectual mechanisms—that are either directly or indirectly affiliated with the digital age as a global phenomenon.

Intuitively, we understand that a twenty-first century approach to learning is radically different from education that focuses on the accumulation of information and the simplistic transfer of culture and ideas associated with this information. But what is it more precisely? I would suggest that it begins with an epistemological shift in which learning how to learn and act (learning to be), in a highly situated manner, replaces learning about something. And then it is about how this scales, so as to create elasticity and agency.

Agency is the key word here. In the staid and siloed ecologies of traditional education, everyone has their place. Agency is reduced to choosing which silo you’re going to set yourself into — a choice which can drastically scale back your exposure to what’s going on in other silos. As a result, your world — your learning ecology — becomes smaller and less diverse over time. And the less diverse a given ecology becomes, the slower its pace of evolution and innovation.

In an “ecotone culture,” what once was siloed begins to collide, mix, and cross-pollinate, opening new vectors for discovery and collaboration. The results are unpredictable, but rich:

Because the students of the ecotone culture share the space and their work with others unlike themselves – with diverse species – there will be those cases in which one enters as one thing and evolves into something else: an architect, for instance, evolves into a musician/architect; or an astronomer evolves into an astronomer/environmentalist. Like the Greenbul [a bird whose song pitch and aeronautical capabilities adapt in response to its environment], though, it is not a change of song but a new tonality that honors both the song structure and the new context. This means that this new talent will acquire the ability to contribute in more than one field and maintain a key presence in multiple camps.

The ecotone analogy is extensive and highly productive. Diversity of species, new species development, keystone species as engineers, distribution of nutrients, corridors for transfer of creatures and stuff—even the idea of microhabitats (smaller habitats within larger habitats, like a tidal pool)—are all intensely relevant in terms of conceiving, designing, and implementing organizational structures and mechanisms for this innovation ecology model. Each component might independently have an impact and add value to the system, but the fact that the ecotone is a system, rather than a collection of components, means that their collective impact scale.

It should be noted that establishing an innovation ecotone in an institutional setting does not mean that one must completely change the entire system overnight. As I've observed over the past few months, a lightweight and entirely opt-in pervasive game geared around peer discovery and collaborative production can have transformative effects on an otherwise siloed educational environment. Once the channels for agency and disciplinary elasticity have been opened, it’s hard to close them again. After all, young media artists, theorists, and designers (among many others) are eager to find their niche in the world, to discover their identities, and to make a contribution — and in diversity, there is opportunity.

Download the complete text: Innovation Ecotones (.pdf)

Featuring Mathieu Castelli, Nathalie Pozzi, Greg Trefry, Chris Weed, and me. Moderated by Colleen Macklin.

This is a free-range session about games that go beyond the confines of the polygonal frame. In other words big games, street games, args, playful disobedience, analog games or whatever you’d like to call them! Panelists will discuss design considerations, new approaches and what’s next in the genre. (IndieCade 2011)

The constructed model is able to answer three fundamental questions: (1) where the person will stay, (2) how long she will stay at the location, and (3) who she will meet.

In order to construct the predictive model, Jyotish includes an efficient clustering algorithm to cluster Wifi access point information in the Wifi trace into locations. Then, we construct a Naive Bayesian classifier to assign these locations to records in the Bluetooth trace and obtain a fine granularity of people movement. Next, the fine grain movement trace is used to construct the predictive model including location predictor, stay duration predictor, and contact predictor to provide answers for three questions above. Finally, we evaluate the constructed predictive model over the real Wifi/Bluetooth trace collected by 50 participants in University of Illinois campus from March to August 2010. Evaluation results show that Jyotish successfully constructs a predictive model, which provides a considerably high prediction accuracy of people movement. (ScienceDirect)

Full paper here.

Via New Scientist.

Like Toy Story, but for graphic designers. Via Flowing Data.

Doug MacCash of the New Orleans Times-Picayune caught this footage of me talking about Reality Ends Here when he and several other brilliant Engine 29 Annenberg Fellows paid a visit to the Game Office. Also included in this video: über-player Will Cherry, newly-minted player Celine Lam and footage from the excellent music video Deal, Space Bound.

The winning entry from the experience will be used as a special challenge for players of the real game at USC. We will post their work as soon as it is available and share it on the #diydays hashtag. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all those who played!

All of this cloak and dagger stuff was part of an innovative game — an Alternate Reality Game of sorts — which is being conducted amongst the entering Cinema School undergraduates this year. If my own experiences are any indication, the game is proving to be enormously successful at getting students involved, excited about entering the Cinema School, more aware of its resources, more connected to its faculty, more engaged with its research, more connected across different divisions. It is also getting them involved in collaborative and production like activities than most entering students who have had to wait for a bit before they would be allowed to take production classes. I’ve seen lots of discussion over the past few years about the potentials of using ARGS for pedagogical purposes. But, this is the first time I’ve seen such a large scale experiment in integrating ARG activities across an entire school to orient entering students to a program and to serve a range of instructional goals. The passion the game is motivating in USC students is palpable. And I can tell you that many of the faculty, who have gotten pulled into the game through one play mechanic or another, are feeling a real pride in their school for its willingness to embrace this kind of experimentation and innovation. (henryjenkins.org)

Read the full interview.

More info on the game here.

Special thanks to the IndieCade organizers for asking us to appear at this year’s festival, and to all the players from the “real” game who showed up and helped make Deals with the general public.

Responsibility has yet to be claimed for the beautiful papercraft sculptures that have mysteriously popped up in Scottish libraries and arts centers, each accompanied by notecards featuring the Twitter handles of relevant authorities or personalities.

Tangible artifacts like these have so much presence. It’s hard to imagine augmented reality objects ever having this kind of impact.

This project is a great example of how “embedded” media objects and an active engagement with technology and network culture doesn’t always need to depend on glyphs, bar codes, scanners, cameras, or smartphones — as cool as all those things are.

Just because we can do something 100 percent digitally doesn’t mean that we should. All media forms are tools in the transmedia artist’s toolbox, and every tool has its place. How much less effective would these sculptures be if they had been objects that you needed to download Layar or some other AR app in order to view? How much less presence would they have? How much less mysterious and thought-provoking would they be?

Yes, it’s true, AR people: embedded papercraft objects are better than embedded digital objects.

This is what differentiates the true media artist from the technofetishist. The former adopts whatever medium or combination of media that suits the needs of their project and maximizes impact. The latter always adopts the highest-tech solution, regardless of other options.