Design Research as Possibility

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Oct 102011

The con­se­quences of this are legion. It means that pro­to­co­log­i­cal analy­sis must focus not on the sci­ences of mean­ing (representation/interpretation/reading), but rather on the sci­ences of pos­si­bil­ity (physics or logic)… (52)

This is from Alex Gal­loway’s Pro­to­col, which I’ve been reread­ing dur­ing the last few days. Galloway’s book is closely related to the project I’m cur­rently work­ing on. The pri­mary dif­fer­ence is that I’m focus­ing on the rela­tion­ship of pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion to writ­ing and rhetoric whereas his argu­ment focused on pro­to­col and stan­dard­iza­tion through the lens of crit­i­cal social theory.

This pas­sage is sig­nif­i­cant in the way that it turns the inter­pre­tive method on its head. For Gal­loway, pro­to­co­log­i­cal (stan­dards) analy­sis explores pos­si­bil­ity rather than under­ly­ing mean­ing. This type of analy­sis explores pos­si­ble worlds that may not yet exist as a type of research, but are enabled through media, or in my favored ter­mi­nol­ogy: infrastructure.

Gal­loway calls this type of research hacking.

Before read­ing this, I’d formed an uncom­fort­able alliance with design study research, some­thing I’m not trained in, but found use­ful because of the its focus on pro­duc­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than inter­pret­ing exist­ing texts. As I’ve worked on my own research, I’ve found it odd that rhetor­i­cal stud­ies hadn’t fre­quently taken the turn to pos­si­bil­i­ties and text pro­duc­tion more enthu­si­as­ti­cally. Rhetoric had his­tor­i­cally at one point been focused on cre­at­ing heuris­tics for pro­duc­ing new texts, not inter­pret­ing old ones. While a few rhetori­cians pur­sue that idea (Kaufer and Butler’s Rhetoric and the Arts of Design for exam­ple) and oth­ers have sug­gested that rhetor­i­cal analy­sis is pri­mar­ily a heuris­tic for pro­duc­tion rather than inter­pre­ta­tion (like in Dilip Gaonkar’s infa­mous attack on the rhetoric of sci­ence), research in rhetor­i­cal stud­ies in the mod­ern uni­ver­sity has largely remained a crit­i­cal act of inter­pre­ta­tion. I’m not sure why that is, per­haps there is more polit­i­cal power in the human­i­ties for being an inter­pre­tive dis­ci­pline rather than pro­duc­tive one. Any­way, I had taken to read­ing design schol­ar­ship because it embraces pro­duc­tion as research rather instead of the inter­pre­tive crit­i­cal approach.

Galloway’s work is moti­vat­ing because he takes the pro­duc­tive per­spec­tive from within media stud­ies, which is more closely aligned with rhetoric than design is, at least in North America.

Posted by NRJ at 6:59 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,

Information Infrastructure and Ecologies of Rhetoric: Thoughts on Collin Gifford Brooke's Lingua Fracta

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Oct 042011

As back­ground read­ing for a book project, I have been work­ing through Lin­gua Fracta by Collin Gif­ford Brooke. I like this book alot because of its genre: it’s the type of the­o­ret­i­cal work I’ve been writ­ing recently.

One part in par­tic­u­lar has stood out as par­tic­u­larly use­ful so far: Brooke’s dis­cus­sion of rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies. Brooke describes a rhetor­i­cal ecol­ogy by way of the clas­si­cal rhetor­i­cal canons: inven­tion, arrange­ment, style, mem­ory, deliv­ery. An inven­tion ecol­ogy, for exam­ple, is “a per­sonal sen­si­tiv­ity to the con­di­tions under which inven­tion takes place in my own writ­ing” (44).

It’s his exam­ple of an inven­tional ecol­ogy that drew my attention:

I attend a cou­ple of con­fer­ences per year and each time, start­ing about halfway through the con­fer­ence and extend­ing to as long as a week fol­low­ing my return trip home, I am a par­tic­u­larly pro­duc­tive writer. I sus­pect that many peo­ple share this expe­ri­ence .… When I began blog­ging, I noticed a shift in my per­cep­tions of the world around me.… Over time, the sub­tle oblig­a­tion of the weblog has some­times encour­aged me to write when oth­er­wise I would not” (44).

Although Brooke is writ­ing largely about social con­ven­tions affect­ing the writ­ing process, I couldn’t help but think of a Howard Becker book (Art Worlds) in which he explores the infra­struc­ture of musi­cal con­certs. The typ­i­cal con­cert lasts about three hours and sys­tem­atic depen­den­cies like con­cert labor, park­ing space, and occu­pant spaces become hope­lessly entwined into that 3 hour time period. The odds of being able to run an eight-hour con­cert must work against a slew of pre­con­fig­ured and embed­ded con­ven­tions of prac­tice. The time of the con­cert, once estab­lished, lit­er­ally becomes infra­struc­tured into the social prac­tice of the con­cert. When these con­ven­tions become embed­ded within tech­ni­cal sys­tems, this infra­struc­tur­ing process becomes sig­nif­i­cantly more complex.

Mate­r­ial objects are built because of social con­ven­tion but then push back and solid­ify con­ven­tion (ANT the­o­rists will be yawn­ing at how rudi­men­tary that seems). Get­ting back to Brooke and his book, the thing I find inter­est­ing about rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies is the infra­struc­ture involved in each. Yes, to some extent rhetor­i­cal ecolo­gies are dynamic, but they also con­sist of infra­struc­tured, mate­r­ial tech­nolo­gies. Just to begin think­ing about blog­ging, it seems that one part of the struc­tured ecol­ogy the HTML form field that is used in many con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems as a way to shut­tle text to the server. The inter­face pro­vides an easy way to write a ton of text, but it resists com­pos­ing with some­thing more like a mind map­ping piece of soft­ware. This is to say that it’s hard to doo­dle with bub­bles in a blog. I need to think a lit­tle bit more about this, but stan­dard­ized com­po­nents pro­vide resis­tance to writ­ing and rhetoric.

This is all just a long way of say­ing that I’m find­ing a lot I like about Brooke’s book. It’s smart, and I see some great places to add infra­struc­tural the­ory to his con­cep­tion of rhetoric.

Posted by NRJ at 12:41 pm Tagged with: , , , , ,