Social poetics and Dialogical approach

Extracts from Daniel W Clarke' PhD thesis work:
Social Poetics of Place Making

Cunliffe notes that this is where the difference between social poetics and linguistics lies: whereas social poetics focuses on these taken-for-granted relationships, linguistics studies the relationship of various elements of language. For Cunliffe (2002: 129), social poetics is a research “practice” that “attempts to embrace and enact a dialogical approach ”. The five reminders are:

• the use of metaphors, images, and analogies that allow or provoke us into seeing
  connections
• the use of instructive forms o f talk to move others, such as “do this,” “look at that,”
  “listen ,” and “fin sh this by tomorrow ”
• forms of talk that reveal possibilities or new ways of connecting: “imagine,” “suppose we
  look at it like this,” and “think what would happen if . . . ?”
• the use of gestures: pointing, shrugging, and thumping the desk as we speak
• the use of comparisons, different language games, or juxtaposing words or phrases in
  unusual ways, so that we are struck or moved to see new connections

Towards an Ontological Social Constructionism

Some extracts from John Shotter's talk:

“What we come to form, and thereafter understand (both the formed and the forming), emerge from us being in language in conversations in movements in relationships in culture in nature (we do not have language etc ‘in us’). The Being ‘in’ these various ins can best be understood by letting ‘the feeling that comes’ (by being in these various ins) create its own metaphors, and let those metaphors be part of the language one searches through in order to find a meaning.” (Tom Andersen, no date).

In this, Tom’s thinking was, we might say, comprehensively ‘ecological’ –

from Bakhtin (1986) – one of the originators of the whole dialogical approach to human relations:
“An utterance,” he says,
“is never just a reflection or an expression of something already existing and outside it that is given and final. It always creates something that never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable... But something created is always created out of something given... What is given is completely transformed in what is created” (pp.119-120).

 ‘deep’ changes in that they are not just changes in what we ‘think about’, they are not to do with learning some new and previously unknown facts or bits of information, but changes in what ‘we think with’, changes in how we relate to, or orient ourselves toward our surroundings, and as a result – as Tom might put it – to find ourselves immersed ‘in’ a situation quite different from what we felt ourselves to be ‘in’ previously.

 there are two kinds of difficulties we can face in life, not just one: There are those kind of difficulties that we might, following Wittgenstein (1980), call “difficulties of the intellect” (p.17). These are difficulties that we can formulate (or form) as problems and solve by constructing an appropriate theoretical system within which to ‘think them through’. But overcoming orientational or relational difficulties requires a quite different approach... and that, of course, expresses straightaway the nature of our difficulty:
What actually is involved in our approaching a situation or circumstance that we at first find quite bewildering or confusing or dis-orienting?
 Wittgenstein (1980) calls these kind of difficulties, “difficulties of the will” (p.17) – making use of a word, I venture to surmise, with a very bad press among us here in this conference. But by it, he means, he says, to draw attention to “what people want to see” (p.17), what it is they look for or expect to see as they begin to try to get a sense of ‘where’ they ‘are’, and how they might ‘go on’ within the situation within which they ‘find themselves’.

 a basic bodily need for orientation that is continually at work within us; we need to know ‘where’ we are, ‘what’ actually ‘is’ the situation that we are ‘in’. Thus, the “whole quest of discovery is thus initially... ‘directed’ not to get what we want but to discover what we want to get”(p.177).

[trad psycho.] It has only discovered there what happens when men are led to behave as if they are rats, machines, information channels, etc.... Constructing a true image of ourselves demands a radically different approach,”

. We need first to be ‘introduced’ to them, to meet them face-to-face’, so to speak, in order to acquire some expectations as to how they will respond to a whole range of our actions in our relations to them.


Learning theory-talk, on the other hand, is like learning a second language. It is not concerned with things and activities as they are in themselves; its function is not to help those confronted with raw appearances make a first sense of them. It is a cognitive device in terms of which things and events, which already make one kind of sense to us, may be talked of as being other than what ordinarily they seem to be – for instance, a theorist might tell us that what we talk of as ‘love’ is really ‘object cathexis’.

a theory is of use to third-person outsiders, standing over against and uninvolved in the personal situation of the first- and second-persons. Thus, rather than being context-dependent and personal, theoretical talk, strictly, must be context-free and impersonal. Consequently, these really rather strange and unusual forms of talk must always be accompanied, it would seem, by an account of how they should be understood and put to use; in other words, we must be especially taught, as specialists, to put our everyday ways of understanding and acting on one side, and to function as our theories require.

Wittgenstein,
shows us how easily we can (mis)recognize the unique what-ness of the things or events before us: how, for example, we can treat something that is a living and still developing organism as if it was something dead and finished, how we can treat something that arouses an anticipatory response in us (a tense feeling of expectation) as simply presenting us with a picture (an image, shape, or form) that requires our ‘interpretation’, and so on

Descartes:
thereby make ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature” (p.78). It bothers me for one very obvious reason: It is aimed at the exploitation of Nature, not in our own interests, but for our own desires. This might be excusable in our search for energy resources, for instance, but when other people are studied for ‘the uses fro which they are appropriate’, the unethical nature of this aim is clear.

In line with our ‘separatist’, Cartesian forms of thought, it is only too easy for us to think of ourselves as occupying the world, with the earth beneath us and the sky above (as depicted in (a) above). But a world that is merely occupied, he argues, “is furnished with already-existing things;” whereas, one that is inhabited, within which we and many others exist as living beings, “is woven from the strands of their continual coming-into-being” (p.1797).  He calls such a world, which, as such, is still coming into being (as depicted in (b) above), a world within which the many different flowing strands of different activity intertwine, intermingle, become entangled with each other, and then, sometimes, separate, “the weather world.” I will just call it a turbulent, not-yet-settled, dialogically-structured world, a world that is still-in-the-making.

, if I was allowed only one word in which to express what I think to be most important in our lives together, it would be the word: responsiveness. But if I was allowed to add another word to it, I would say spontaneous responsiveness, or to offer a whole phrase, I would say that it is the way that our living, bodily responsiveness to the movements and  activities the others and othernesses around us that is expressive of the meaning of those movements and activities to us, and thus crucial to our being able to communicate with each other

• That there are two kinds of difficulties in life, not just one, and that before we can turn to solving problems, we need to gain orientation, to gain a sense of what in fact is the situation we are in;
• That the search for repetitive patterns can be misleading, each new circumstance we confront is uniquely itself and we need to meet it face-to-face, so to speak, to become acquainted with it; 4. That as result of the spontaneous responsiveness of our bodies, we can learn about events and happenings in our surroundings that we can learn in no other way;
• – but we must be careful, words are not innocent, and no single metaphor can capture all its aspects (and metaphors conceal as well as reveal);
• That, as a consequence of all of this, we must give up Descartes’ nice clear and distinct idea of a world of ‘matter in motion according to laws’, and embrace the very strange, flowing, turbulent world of our everyday lives in which we, like plants growing from a seeds, have our existence within a special confluence of flowing streams of energy and materials that our bodies are continually working to organize, to intertwine or to ‘orchestrate’ into the unbelievably complex forms of our human achievements and behaviours to come.
• All his life, Tom retained his disquiets with what seemed to be finished and finalized stabilities in our treatment of others: What other ways might be open to us? What might we do instead? And those disquiets have motivated me also – and indeed, I venture to suggest, that same restlessness, that need to know: “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (Gauguin’s questions) still sits with us all here in this hall, now.

Difficulties of the intellect and difficulties of the will

So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.

In exploring it – the choice to stop doing something along with the spontaneous emergence, i.e., the non-choice, of a better alternative to it – I want to distinguish between two kinds of difficulties we can face in our practical affairs: What Wittgenstein (1980) called difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems, for as we shall see, talk of problems is much more to do with arriving at answers to clear questions, while talk of difficulties is more to do with overcoming confusions and disorientations in practical life.  

We can formulate difficulties of the intellect, then, as problems which, with the aid of clever theories or appropriate frameworks of thought, we can solve by the use of reasoning, by rational methods. Difficulties of the will, however, are quite different. For they are to do with how we need to find a way of relating ourselves (bodily, i.e., sensitively and emotionally) to the others and othernesses around us, how we orient ourselves or take up an attitude or stance towards them, the ways in which we see them, hear them, experience them, value them – for it is these ways that determine what possibilities for action we can perceive in the situation we are in, they determine or ‘give shape’ to the lines of action we finally resolve on carrying out. And unlike the static contemplative thinker, we must do all this from within our engaged activity with the others and othernesses we encounter within the situation of our action, either actual or imagined.

> (1) First, problem-solving: Approaching a newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved requires us to first analyze it into a set of identifiable elements; we must then find a pattern or order amongst them; and then hypothesize a hidden agency responsible for the order (call it, the working of certain rules, principles, or laws, or the working of a story or narrative). We then seek further evidence for its influence, thus to enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system. We go on to make use of such theories in giving shape to our actions. In other words, we manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of the theory) to produce an advantageous outcome which we call ‘the solution’ to our problem, and we then turn ‘to apply’ the theory elsewhere.

As investigators, we ourselves remain unchanged in the process; we remain outside and separate from the other or otherness we are investigating; rather than being engaged or involved in with it we are ‘set over against’ it; in acquiring extra knowledge about it – in the form of facts or information – we gain mastery over it. // in fact no

(2) Alternatively, in resolving on a line of action: Instead of immediately trying to analyze it into its elements, we can treat the other or otherness as a being that is still radically unknown to us, and, by ‘opening’ ourselves to being spontaneously ‘moved’ by it, we can ‘enter into’ a living, dialogically-structured relationship with it – In other words, we can become involved or engaged in an active, back and forth relationship, with it, a relationship in which, if we go slowly, and allow time for the imaginative work that each response can occasion to take place, we can gain a sense of the ‘inner landscape’, the ‘invisible landscape of possibilities’ confronting us to become “visibly-rational” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.vii) to us.

- We enter a new situation; (3 secs)

- We are confused, bewildered, we don’t know our way about; (3 secs)

- However, as we ‘dwell in’ it, as we ‘move around’ within the confusion, a ‘something’, an ‘it’ begins to emerge;(3 secs)

- It emerges in the ‘time contours’ or ‘time shapes’ that become apparent to us in the dynamic relations we can sense between our outgoing activities and their incoming results; (3 secs)

- An image comes to us, we find that we can express this ‘something’ in terms of an image; (3 secs)

- But not so fast, for we can find another, and another image, and another – Wittgenstein uses a city, a toolbox, the controls in the driving cab of a train, and many different types of games, all as metaphors for different aspects of our experiences of the use of language (3 secs)....

Having gone through a number of images, we can come to a sense of the landscape of possibilities giving rise to them. Indeed, we can gain a sense of familiarity with such landscapes, that we can come to feel confident of knowing our way around within them, and of being able to resolve on ways of going on within them.   

But the process of resolving cannot simply be a matter of calculation, it involves judgement, a moving around on the landscape of possibilities, being spontaneously responsive to the consequences of each move, and judging which one (or combination of moves) best resolves the initial tension aroused in one’s initial confusion – for, to repeat, we are operating here, not in the realm of actualities but of possibilities.

while we can decide very precisely what not to do, resolving on a new line of action, gathering together all the relevant features of the now new situation one faces, takes judgement – for, to repeat, we have to consider, not facts, but possibilities. And a moment of judgement – the 3 to 5 second ‘present’ moment of a judgment (Stern, 2004) – entails, I want to suggest, some judgemental work, work in which we go out, imaginatively and feelingfully, to relate ourselves to various aspects of our current circumstances, aspect-by-aspect, sequentially, over time, with the aim of gathering them all together into what we might call an inner landscape of possibilities. Only once we have done this, only when we know our “way about” within such a landscape can we feel some confidence in “going on” (Wittgenstein, 1953).


It is what the nature of that imaginative judgmental work feels like, looks like, and sounds like that, if time allowed, I would like to discuss further. For, I would want to claim, that coming to act in a way that seems to be for the best in a particular situation is not something we can decide upon simply within ourselves, we must turn towards the now new situation to which we have chosen to relate ourselves, and open ourselves to being spontaneously responsive to it – if we can do that, we will then find that various crucial happenings simply will occur quite spontaneously in the complex processes at work in the emergence of alternatives.

So, although such inquiries cannot offer anything objective, anything that can easily be pointed at and described, nor can they offer us any techniques for immediate practical application. They can in fact offer us something of much more value to those of us as professional practitioners who must act in the moment, from within the midst of complexity. All objective approaches tell us only of what we already know how to inquiry into; they lead us only towards the continual re-discovery of sameness, simply the elaboration of the cognitive knowledge we already possess – they cannot inform us of the distinctively different, invisible, possibilities for action available to us in each new and unique situation we occupy.

, we need to recognize that we face two kinds of difficulty in our lives: those of the intellect and those of the will (Wittgenstein, 1980), difficulties we can formulate as problems which we can solve by creating a priori frameworks or perspectives in terms of which to ‘work out’ solutions, and orientational or relational difficulties require a different, hermeneutical-phronetic approach, aimed at resolving on a line of action. Resolving or overcoming difficulties of this kind requires us to exercise judgment in conducting a kind of inner imaginative work, work aimed at exploring the unique details of our current situation in terms of criteria appropriate to the different dimensions of our concerns, and with gathering them all together into a common focus. Such work involves a process to do both with ways of paying attention (listening, noticing, being open to being ‘touched’, etc.) to contextual details, and with negotiating, in dialogue with others, a line of action recognized by them to be both intelligible, legitimate, and ‘fitting’ in the situation in question.

Attention to such issues as these is not at all easy to sustain, for it entails our trying to capture things ‘in motion’, which means trying to capture them while they are on the way to being other than they already are – in other words, we cannot easily name the things of our concern, for they have the character of, as William James (1890) put it a long time ago, “signs of direction in thought”.
However, although we cannot easily name them, we “nevertheless,” says James, “have an acutely discriminative sense” (p.253) of their direction and ‘shape’. Indeed, as I have outlined elsewhere (Shotter, 2005), they continually give rise both to the happening of “transitory understandings” and “action guiding anticipations.”

Indeed, once we turn in this direction, once we adopt this practice-based approach – and move away from the static thinking subject towards the active, moving around agent – we realize that we can face a kind of difficulty very different from that of solving intellectual puzzles. The image we need is, I think, something like this: It is as if we are living and trying gain our orientation, our ‘at homeness’ in our surroundings, while always living within a thick fog, and we must work like blind persons in terms of ‘touchings’ rather than in terms of ‘seeings’. However, what we have to gain a sense of through our touchings and feelings, is not of what actual objects are there before us, but of the possibilities these actualities present to us for our next possible steps.

In exploring the character of this tense restlessness further – and the way in which it involves the choice of stopping doing something, along with the non-choice, spontaneous emergence of a better alternative to it – I want explore what Wittgenstein (1980) calls difficulties of the intellect, and difficulties of the will (p.17) further – and I want to stick with talk of difficulties instead of talking of problems


: the need to work within a landscape of possibilities, as well as actualities

Knowing by Being-There Making: Explicating the Tacit Post-Subject in Use

some extracts from the original text of Tonkinwise

All making is a gift. As a materialisation, an externalisation, making gives something to the world, the world in which others live. So even if something is initially made just for oneself, it will be there available for others, to notice, to appreciate, to use.

The key difference between the knowing of making and knowing proper is universality. Knowledge not sourced from making is codifiable and thereby transmittable because it is universal; whereas the knowledge of making cannot be extricated from the specificity of its material context. Making might therefore be a type of localised knowing, but as non-abstractable, it must be kept distinct from the knowing that lies at the foundation of the university. If making involves searches and findings, these are not the equivalent of researching truths.

What is so refreshing about Material Thinking is that it explicitly sees its task as the generation of creative metaphors by which to access the research that is creative making.
institutionally delimited language of ‘research’ — much as I have been doing so far for example, with the linguistic chain ‘knowing, new, significant, justified, triangulated, sharable,’ etc.
letting the makingly knowing of each his co-creative cases guide him, theorising from the ground up, rather than fitting making into this or that theoretical frame about research, Carter is able to, and keen to, maintain a certain open-endedness or finitude in the poetics he develops.

Not needing to defend a thesis with regard to the knowing of making, Carter is able to develop more resonant ways of articulating that knowing, resonant in the sense of ringing true to the nature of practice more generally but also in the sense of amplifying those knowings so that they may begin to gain the attention of institutions arbitrating on what counts as practice-based research.
examples I’ve seen of descriptions of creative processes that remains faithful to the non-generalisable specificity of such material practices, using terms firmly located within the particular constraints of each project, whilst nevertheless generating notions that are applicable and extendable beyond the time and place and nature of each project, that are still knowledges in that sense.

Or, it is generative, able to be repeated but with difference rather than replicated; it is reproducible in the biological sense, as opposed to cloning. e., it is a different form of knowing — it is also not that of utter particularities — i.e., it is nevertheless still of the order of knowledge. It is sharable, and it is sharable because it concerns, if not rules, conventions, things that come together, regularly enough to be more than idiosyncratic.
Making can be accepted as research to the extent that it is uncovering things that are useful and insightful for some other situations, for some other places, times and practices.

this sort of general knowledge because his concern is place; not the specificity of place, but what place generates beyond its particulars, what is sharable about places.

It can be made explicit, or more precisely, it can be made less tacit, but such acts of explicitation demand more creativity than mere translation; a poetics is demanded to overcome some inherent resistances.

To know something is never to know something objectively, but to know it subjectively, that is de-subjectively, by being it, experiencing generally what it is by becoming it.

These are new ways of understanding a place, or a culture, or some texts, or some media or art practices. To this extent, Carter’s job of articulating knowing-in-making is actually easier than if his collaborations had been with designers, where the knowing at play concerns more ‘uses’ than meanings


An affordance is an ‘actual possibility’, a ‘promised action opportunity.’ Affordances are the result of interactional perceptions, seeing not just a feature, but a future way of making use of that feature. I do not see a shape, but a handle, or rather a 'handable'. I am here already interacting with what I am still only sensing from a distance.

Affordances are literally articulations, or joinings, material conjunctions of the capacity of tools and the skills of bodies. But for this very reason, they are constitutionally resistant to being articulated. To attempt to explain what a product knows about a body in such and such a situation, what it knows a body knows about what can and cannot be done with the things about it, is to either semiotise affordances, or to become mired in animistic relativisms.

On the Consequences of Post-ANT

extracts from
Gad, C., & Bruun Jensen, C. (2005). On the consequences of post-ANT. Centre for STS Studies, Department of Information and Media Studies. Århus: University of Århus.


To Mol, a conception of reality as multiple calls for metaphors other than perspectives and points of view. Reality is manipulated in many ways and does not lie around waiting to be glanced at. It does not have ‘‘aspects,’’ ‘‘qualities,’’ or ‘‘essences,’’ which are shed light upon by a certain theoretical perspective. However, when doing ontological work, different versions of objects appear. These, in turn, may relate and shape partially linked versions of reality. Concepts such as ‘‘intervention,’’ ‘‘performance,’’ and ‘‘enactment’’ highlight the attempt to approach reality as ‘‘done’’ rather than ‘‘observed.’

The idea that reality exists in multiple related versions lends itself to the notion that one can ‘‘choose’’ freely between them. However, if one tries to locate the outside position from where one is supposed to evaluate and make such choices, one finds that such a place simply does not exist. Mol points out, that one consequence of this situation is that possibilities seem to exist everywhere. Important normative moments and decisions therefore often appear as originating elsewhere and feel as if out of reach. However, Mol’s analysis also shows why it is in fact impossible to identify, evaluate, and compare discrete perspectives. For as her analysis of the versions of arteriosclerosis indicates different enactments do not necessarily exclude each other but may be in various ways entwined: ‘‘What is other is also within’’ (Mol 1999, 85). This is why objects such as arteriosclerosis are characterized by fractality. They are ‘‘more than one but less than many’’ (Mol 2002a, 82).

It was also sustained by the belief that more perspectives would allow social science to move closer to a ‘‘completion’’ of its knowledge. Yet, this belief in progression is challenged as perspectivism becomes explicit: it facilitates a critical questioning of whether we really learn more about the world by exploring it from different angles.

‘‘Methods’’ simply provide different kinds of access to the nooks and corners of reality, explored with any given theoretical perspective. So, while knowledge appears to be constructed through the production of more perspectives, it is also produced as each perspective elucidates different ‘‘subject matters’’ or ‘‘parts of the world’’ through the application of a variety of methods. Yet, as pluralism and perspectivism are challenged, the idea that methods provide clear and coherent guidelines must also be questioned.

Sociomaterial Practices: Exploring Technology at Work

Extracts from the original text of Orlikowski.

Materiality, on this view, is a special case, and this is problematic because it loses sight of how every organizational practice is always bound with materiality. Materiality is not an incidental or intermittent aspect of organizational life; it is integral to it.

The other difficulty associated with organizational studies of technology adoption, diffusion, and use is their tendency to focus either on technology effects (a techno-centric perspective) or on interactions with technology (a human-centered perspective). Both perspectives are limited and limiting for a number of reasons. The techno-centric perspective is interested in understanding how technology leverages human action, taking a largely functional or instrumental approach that tends to assume unproblematically that technology is largely exogenous, homogeneous, predictable, and stable, performing as intended and designed across time and place. Yet, as critics have pointed out, this perspective reifies technology, ignores how technology is bound up with historical and cultural influences, and thus produces technologically deterministic claims about the relationship of technology with organizations (Barley 1988; Kling 1991; Suchman 1994; Thomas 1994).

The human-centered perspective focuses on how humans make sense of and interact with technology in various circumstances. Here the technology is not black-boxed but understood to be different based on the different meanings assigned to it and the different ways in which people engage with it. Furthermore, such interpretations, interests, and interactions are seen to vary by time and place, entailing a more dynamic and situated view of the relationship of technology with organizations. While this grounds use of technology in particular socio-cultural and historical contexts, it tends to minimize the role of the technology itself. By focusing primarily on the human side of the relationship, the technology — as commentators such as Button (1993) and Berg (1997) have argued — vanishes from view in the preoccupation with the social.

[A]n alternative view asserts that materiality is integral to organizing, positing that the social and the material are constitutively entangled in everyday life. A position of constitutive entanglement does not privilege either humans or technology (in one-way interactions), nor does it link them through a form of mutual reciprocation (in two-way interactions). Instead, the social and the material are considered to be inextricably related — there is no social that is not also material, and no material that is not also social.


Towards a view of Constitutive Entanglement:
to figure out how to take seriously the recursive intertwining of humans and technology in practice.

A number of particularly interesting ideas for doing so have been emerging in sociology and science and technology studies over the past decade: for example, actor-networks (Callon 1986; Latour 1992, 2005), sociotechnical ensemble (Bijker 1995), mangle of practice (Pickering 1995), object-centered sociality (Knorr Cetina 1997), relational materiality (Law 2004), and material sociology (Beunza et al. 2006).

Latour (1987, 1992, 2005) has long argued that agency is not an essence that inheres in humans, but a capacity realized through the associations of actors (whether human or nonhuman), and thus relational, emergent, and shifting.

Suchman (2007: 261) similarly emphasizes the importance of reconceiving ‘capacities for action … on foundations quite different from those of a humanist preoccupation with the individual actor living in a world of separate things’.

 In particular, this requires replacing the idea of materiality as ‘pre-formed substances’ with that of ‘performed relations’, in order to characterize the recursive intertwining of the social and material as these emerge in ongoing, situated practice (Pickering 1995; Latour 2005). As Pels et al. (2002: 2) observe: ‘it is not so much what materials … symbolize within social action that matters but their constitutive agentic effects within the entangled networks of sociality/materiality’.

>>>>>
The notion of constitutive entanglement departs from that of mutual or reciprocal interaction common in a number of dynamic social theories. Notions of mutuality or reciprocity presume the influence of distinct interacting entities on each other, but presuppose some a priori independence of these entities from each other. Thus, for example, we have tended to speak of humans and technology as mutually shaping each other, recognizing that each is changed by its interaction with the other, but maintaining, nevertheless, their ontological separation. In contrast, the notion of constitutive entanglement presumes that there are no independently existing entities with inherent characteristics (Barad 2003: 816). Humans are constituted through relations of materiality — bodies, clothes, food, devices, tools, which, in turn, are produced through human practices. The distinction of humans and artifacts, on this view, is analytical only; these entities relationally entail or enact each other in practice.
‘This is a thoroughgoing relational materiality. Materials – and so realities – are treated as relational products. They do not exist in and of themselves.’ (Law, 2004:42)
>>>>>


Instead, seeing organizational practices as ‘sociomaterial’ — to borrow a term given recent currency by scholars such as Mol (2002) and Suchman (2007) — allows us to explicitly signify, through our language, the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life.

>>> Google Search and Blackberry usage examples.!!! <<<

Law and Urry (2004) argue that contemporary social science is ill-equipped to address issues of ephemerality, multiplicity,  dispersion and mobility.


Ephemerality: phenomena that are ‘here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear the day after tomorrow’. search results of google...

Multiplicity: that which takes different shapes in different places’. results are multiple and shifting acc to conditions and contexts.

Dispersion and mobility: the distribution and movement of ideas across time and space may be manifest in many ways.

to forgo perspectives that treat materiality as either invisible or inevitable, or that abstract, black-box, and separate technology from human affairs. Instead, we need perspectives that are grounded in ontological and epistemological sensibilities that take seriously the sociomateriality of organizing.

Material sociology and science and technology studies offer useful vocabularies and guidelines for exploring the deep intermingling of materiality within practice. These can help us reconfigure our taken-for-granted notions, assumptions, and practices of organizational research, and allow us to recognize and investigate the multiple, emergent, and shifting sociomaterial assemblages that constitute organizations.

Strange familiarity on the material turn in feminism and HCI

Some extracts from the original text by Anna Croon Fos

the paper focuses on the question concerning how feminism can assist interaction designers with productive ways to generate new insights and influence the design process based on modest witnessing of digital physical blends (Haraway 1997).

Some cornerstone concepts (figures, scripts) that lays the grounds for this text among others; situated knowledges (Haraway 1991), design from somewhere (Suchman 2002), partial translations (Ibid) and modest witness(Haraway 2006), companion species (Haraway 2003), diffraction and agential realism (Barad 2007).

Agential realism is a theory that intra acts with philosophical and ontological questions concerning humans and nonhuman. For instance in agential realism it is affirmed that reality is not only socially constructed, but also materially constructed/configured/figured (Haraway 1997, Barad 2007).

"“Diffraction is the production of difference pattern in the world, not just of the same reflected – displaced -elsewhere.” Donna Haraway 1997, p. 268"

“Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matter and what is excluded from mattering.”Karen Barad, 2003, p. 827

feminist generative contributions Bardzell (Ibid) suggest such feminist theories, methods and results can contribute explicitly in decision-making and design processes to generate new design insights and influence the design process tangibly.

Sheridan writes; “Feminist theory is not just about women and gender but, of necessity, it is also about epistemology and ontology.” (Ibid, p. 24)

As such one common concern within the Scandinavian setting has revolved around issues on how to participate in the generative practices that digital designs embody (Mörtberg et al. 2003).

This in turn resembles the strategy advanced by Suchman (2005; 2005b) attending to the specificities of knowing subjects, multiple and differentially positioned, and variously engaged in reiterative and transformative activities of collective world making. Being in a position in-between, transgressing boarders (Mörtberg 1997), sitting on the fence Sefyrin (2010), imploding the inside and outside Elovaara (2004) making visible the invisible Jansson (2007) and/or concerned with the production of different patterns (Alander 2007). The insistence on keeping several heterogeneous and parallel stories alive enable multiple and ambiguous accounts of the relationships between the real and the not-yet existing crucial for exploring alternative ways of becoming human as well as non-human. Hence, throughout the years a readiness to think, feel and account for digital designs has evolved as a majestic strategy of using situatedness (the real) as a resource for transformatory projects (not yet existing).

the material turn redirects the perceived ground for design away from objects themselves, as independent, toward the demand for new conceptual characteristics of wholes that seems necessary in an increasing gathering of digital materials. Therefore HCI in its designerly aspirations needs to move away from finite, fixed objects of interaction and practical use contexts to physical/digital textures co-existing with humans, and non humans and increasingly comprising and redefining our collective and individual environments (Croon Fors and Wiberg 2010).

“The process is nothing less than our way of bringing the familiar [real] to bear on the unfamiliar [not-yet existing], in such a way as to yield new concepts while at the same time retaining as much as possible of the past” Donald Schön 1963, p. ix)

Remembering the motivations of cultural probes

Some extracts from the original text by Gaver et al.

• Probes embodied an approach to design that recognizes and embraces the notion that knowledge has limits. It’s an approach that values uncertainty, play, exploration, and subjective interpretation as ways of dealing with those limits.
• None of these tasks (or any of the others we used) produced returns that were easy to interpret, much less analyze. How could you compare two photographs, even if you knew both were meant to show “the spiritual centre of the home?”
• Our Probe results are impossible to analyze or even interpret clearly because they reflect too many layers of influence and constraint.
• When we finally receive the results it is clear that they are incomplete, unclear, and biased. We do not ask volunteers to explain their responses. Instead, we value the mysterious and elusive qualities of the uncommented returns themselves. Far from revealing an “objective” view on the situation, the Probes dramatize the difficulties of communicating with strangers.
• We are forced into a situation that calls for our own subjective interpretations. We have to see our volunteers in terms of our own experiences, understanding their responses empathetically, not intellectually.
• Rather than producing lists of facts about our volunteers, the Probes encourage us to tell stories about them, much as we tell stories about the people we know in daily life. They give us a feel for people, mingling observable facts with emotional reactions.
• the returns are layered with influence, ambiguity and indirection, demanding that we see the volunteers through ourselves to make any sense. This tension creates exactly the situation we believe is valuable for design, providing new perspectives that can constrain and open design ideas, while explicitly maintaining room for our own interests, understandings, and preferences.

• Asking unambiguous questions tends to give you what you already know, at least to the extent of reifying the ontology behind the questions. Posing open or absurd tasks, in contrast, ensures that the results will be surprising. 
• Summarizing returns tends to produce an “average” picture that may not reflect any individual well, and that filters out the unusual items that can be most inspiring. 
• Analyses are often used as mediating representations for raw data; they blunt the contact that designers can have with users through Probe returns. 
• Seeking for justifiable accounts of Probe returns constrains the imaginative engagement and story-telling which can be most useful for design.

We like this analogy. If Probes are collections of materials posing tasks to which people respond over time, then “probology” is an approach that uses Probes to encourage subjective engagement, empathetic interpretation, and a pervasive sense of uncertainty as positive values for design. We accept that Probes, the technique, may be appropriated for a variety of different ends. We hope, however, that other researchers and designers will embrace “probology” as well as Probes in pursuing design for everyday pleasure.

Opening Spaces of Possibility - The Enactive as a Qualitative Research Approach

Extracts from the original text by Johnna Haskell, Warren Linds & John Ippolito

"The world that is enacted is inseparable from how we act in it" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.140).

This approach implies that knowing emerges collectively through engagement in shared action. Embodied action brings forth an awareness of inquiry which is not attached to any one event or concept but is, rather, an un-grounding, as knowing is shaped by our actions with/in the world. Groundlessness is an exciting "space" where possibility arises for how we think about knowledge, cognition, and experience.

If knowledge and learning are not located in a body, but in the shifting movement of experiencing, new possibilities emerge for how researchers perceive, interpret, research, and interact within the world. We cannot imagine ourselves just "operating in" research settings, and then leaving the cultures of which we are part. Nor can we ignore the ethics of research, since research is also the site of an ongoing ethical event implicating all those involved.

If we take our partiality as researchers, the fact that we always influence the direction of our work, indeed, that our work is in many ways an expression of who we are and who we are becoming, we can interact with our connection to the research not as a liability to be guarded against, but as an opportunity to make the research more meaningful by more fully appreciating our part, as researchers, in it. [2]

When one lets go of objectivity as an unattainable and constraining icon then we begin to see our connection to the research as an asset. In what ways are the researcher, the research participants, and the research setting shaping each other? Are they distinct entities, or only possible in relation? How do we understand their mutual interaction? As research? As knowing? As experiencing? [3]

They refer to the "enactive view that cognition has no ultimate foundation or ground beyond its history of embodiment" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.xx). [4]

The enactive approach is best expressed as "the growing conviction that cognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs" (VARELA et al., 1991, p.9). [5]

Collective action, which can be none other than embodied action, is yet an awareness which is not attached to any one body or event or concept but is, rather, an un-grounding that VARELA, et al., refer to as "groundlessness." Groundlessness is an exciting "space" where possibility arises for how we think about knowledge, cognition, and experience. [7]

how, by engaging in our research in situated and concrete contexts, opportunities arise through shared, relational, and embodied interpretation practices. [9]

Enactive Approach:
We need to embrace the unpredictable and unexpected moments, the unfolding we are immersed with/in yet not graspable, in that they are constantly arising through action and not located in a self. If knowledge and learning are not located in the body or self but located in the shifting movement of experiencing, then this opens new possibilities for how we perceive, interpret and represent research.

Enactive inquiry is not some position, or set of questions, but a way of being "present" or open to the non-concrete. The best way to "record," relay, or interpret such spaces of inquiry is through our embodied listening, storying through photographs, and story telling or writing images (interactions) as they arise. [16]

"The role of the qualitative researcher, much like the artist/dancer's role, demands total involvement and commitment in a way that requires a total immersion of the senses in the experience. ... The researcher is connected to the participants in a most profound way, and that is how trust is established, which in turn allows for greater access to sources and which ensures an involvement on the part of participants that enables them to tell their respective stories. ...

The challenge is how to bring forth such experiencing in such a way that it continues to be enactive and not set in a step by step process.

Dewey:
"Thinking is a process of inquiry ... all thinking is research, and all research is native, original, with [whomever] carries it on, even if everyone else in the world already is sure of what [he/she] is still looking for. It also follows that all thinking involves risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance" (p.148).

Theatre of the Oppressed is a popular theatre approach which proposes that knowledge emerging aesthetically through a series of theatre exercises and games is already in itself the beginning of a transformation.

My work involves enabling groups of people to create short plays together. Warmup or tune-up exercises are used to develop a sense of community and trust. These activities are also performative as they both develop, and carry, the relationship I have with participants as active sites of knowing and understanding.

"What we do is what we know, and ours is but one of many possible worlds. It is not a mirroring of the world, but a laying down of the world" (VARELA, 1987, p.62). In this process the researcher/facilitator becomes an adventurer, an experimenter, and a catalyst who invites, encourages and dares exploration with others. The participant is also a researcher as, both individually and collectively, they explore through their bodies the themes that emerge.

How can such an enactive7 view assist us in creating conditions where research continually takes into account the emerging networks of relationships that continually grow, change and respond to challenges? [38] I will explore in this essay the implications for inter-subjective forms of qualitative research of how the shaping of a dramatic structure is intertwined with our play within it as knowing emerges through a variety of forms of actions which are simultaneously the medium, subject and re-presentation of research.As facilitator/researcher I am capable of occupying many positions in the work,and don't rest with any. I am continuously learning with/in the workshop environment; I am not just directing participants on what to do. Rather, I am co-implicated in an exploration process and co-evolving alongside the participants in the process. Although I am a facilitator, and they are participants, I am co-implicated with them as a participant. I must be able to shift back and forth—facilitator as participant, participant as facilitator. The work is shaped by me and Iam shaped by it in a circular process.

Judith PIPPEN (1997)'s approach. "the dynamic inter-relationship of our bodyhood and its multidimensional relational space" (p.72), which overcomes bodymind, voice/movement splits in human relationships.

How can we help others learn reflective and mindful awareness that empowers them to access their intuitive and embodied abilities, as well as fuel their interpretive and imaginative powers in their research practice?

As in this exercise, research is a dialogical and social process. Things happen spontaneously as people play and inter-play with each other, finding and filling spaces for dialogue and interaction. Can we also play with the idea that these spaces are also spaces of the possible, enlarged through our interactions?

Complicity—being implicated in/with—moves us as researchers from managing a simplistic system of designed input-outcome-based inquiry towards one of dynamic engagement and interaction. This requires an attentiveness to our participation through events, engaging in knowingbeingdoing in a complex and forever unfolding world.

Fritjhof CAPRA's (1998) contrast of designed structures with emergent ones. Designed structures are formal structures and content, while emergent ones are the informal network of relationships that "continually grows, changes, and adapts to new situations" (p.47). An emergent structure incorporates a different form of relationship than that of a designed structure. Whereas a designed structure is based on rules and procedures, an emergent one facilitates the continual emergence of new structures by encouraging questioning and rewarding innovation. This fits in more with the idea of complicity which I have outlined whereby facilitating emergence requires us to pay attention to how the system operates in order to continually create conditions for it to flourish.

Research informed by and respectful of the complex worlds of these settings are not just "interventions" but instances of complicity whereby our research unfolds with communities-in-the-making through partnerships and interrelationships.

Thus, research means becoming attuned to such complicity, to be able to improvise within it and to realize that control doesn't reside with the researcher all the time, but is distributed amongst the participants from moment to moment. We have a responsibility to embody awareness of the intentions, values and beliefs emerging through such partnerships.

Creating the conditions for interactive inquiry in this light means that research is not the "finding" of some passive knowledge, preconceived, believed to be known in advance, "believed to be (exclusively) a given" (FELMAN, 1995, p.56). Research then becomes an "open space through which thing-flows are distributed rather than plotting out a close space for linear and solid things" (DELEUZE & GUATTARI, 1988, p.361). Such spaces are always emerging, but we must be aware of them when they do, attending "closely to my nonverbal experiences of the shifting landscape that surrounds me" (ABRAM, 1996, pp.59-60). [

I offer suggestions for actions as I guide the group. Not only do these actions bring forth an awareness of feelings in the group, they also bring me into contact with my own senses as the ripples of group action echo back to me.

Our research method is intertwined with the content of our research. This is a phenomenological approach to research method, not as a series of steps but one where I must listen (in an embodied way) to the content or focus of my research and the appropriate method will emerge through my interaction with the research I engage in. Isn't the traditional approach that your research question determines your method. I think what we are suggesting is a much more interactive and holistic process.

Performance theorist Peggy PHELAN explains performance as "honoring the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterwards"

So, rather than having the research question determine the method, my interaction with teachers and students informs my approach and specifies my direction.

This brings us back to the origins of the word research. One root of the French word (rechercher) is the old (1080) word "recerchier", meaning "parcourir en cherchant" ("to travel while searching"). Research as such a journey into knowing means, as John puts it, there are no fixed start or ending points—we are always in the middle of something.

Workshop 3 exercises

Extracted from Really, Really Small: The Palpability of the Invisible by Thecla Schiphorst

Augusto Boal [4] terms these types of experiential exercise de-specialization. He states that in our every day lives “the senses suffer. And we start to feel very little of what we touch, to listen to very little of what we hear, and to see very little of what we look at. We feel, listen and see according to our specialty. The adaptation is [both] atrophy and hypertrophy. In order for the body to be able to send out and receive all possible messages, it has to be reharmonized [through] exercises and games that focus on despecialization.” Boal’s goals in theatre are to create imaginative, social and political agency. His work is premised on the notion that agency at the bodily level (agency of the self) enables agency at the social and political level. Many exercises in Somatics and performance focus on this idea of retraining attention in order to increase awareness and agency through the body, and can be applied to many levels of awareness that extend beyond the personal.

By depriving the body of its external hearing it can become aware of the internal sound otherwise made invisible by the louder external sounds. We are removed from our own ears, but not from our hearing. In performance, artists like Pauline Oliveros and Augusto Boal have created practices such as “deep listening”, and “listening to what we hear”, which probe and access these very same questions of experience. The responses to the very simple question on the cards: What did you hear? focus on access to this level or resolution of experience. Responses indicated the participants’ discovery of the internal soundscape.

At the beginning of the workshop, the participants were asked to move in slow motion, as slowly as possible. They were then left to move very slowly for 10 minutes without speaking.

In Dance practices such as Butoh, this technique is utilized to enable the body to shift its attention to an immersive state in relation to its environment, what Csikszentmihalyi would term ‘flow’, where attention is intensified, and sensory details are sharpened. In neurophysiology and psychology [41] experimental studies show that the slowing or stopping of movement changes the conscious states we normally have and allows for observing the constant shifts of thought, sensation, or expands the ability to observe characteristics of basic experiencing [20].

Translations / De-scriptions in Workshop1

Inscribing Sensitivities into Design

This is the title of my next paper. Here is the abstract:

This research aims to develop an approach to design in order to support relational nature of human capacity for action. Supporting relationality asks for a different approach or sensitivity to the ways we perform design practice. Rather than trying to control, predict or prescribe actions and relations of users, designers may design for actions more emergent and relations more fluid. Moreover, designers need to consider the performative aspects of design that require a broader notion of design process, which extends the scope of design to include design-in-use. In this broader landscape of design, designers also need to revisit their roles and the traditional boundaries between designers and users. The study follows a research through design approach and synthesizes various perspectives and approaches from feminist Science and Technology Studies, Participatory Design, Seamful Design and Actor-Network Theory. In the paper, we introduce an analysis of previous design cases and approaches that demonstrate different ways of addressing the relational character of human capacity for action. As a result of our analysis, we suggest six qualities to sensitize design: visibility, multiplicity, relationality, accountability, duality and configurability. Finally, we discuss some strategies to inscribe these qualities into design process. Our analysis involves design cases only from interaction design field, but we see a broader relevance to other design domains.

Opening up to possibilities rather than probabilities: A relational constructionist approach

Extracts from Hosking and Pluut's original text:
(Re)constructing Reflexivity: A Relational Constructionist Approach

relational constructionist perspective which radically re-conceptualizes reflexivity:
(a) as a local and co-constructed process oriented towards the question
(b) how are we ‘going on’ together, and therefore paying attention to
(c) the realities and relations we are co-creating during the research process and so
(d) is concerned with local pragmatic and ethical issues (Gergen & Hosking, 2006; McNamee, 1994) rather than with the quality of truth claims.

 

• Our relational constructionist meta-theory implies that the processes that some call “research” are processes in which the identities of researcher, research object and related realities are in ongoing re-construction.
•  The centring of construction invites a view of research as intervention, the centring of relating implies that ethics and responsibility be re-constructed and centred e.g., through reflexive dialogues, and talk of multiple forms of life invites attention to multiple local ways of knowing and “power to.”
• Research as intervention:
• our relational premises imply that participating in inquiry inevitably (re)constructs peoples' lives in some degree (McNamee, 1994) and imply that all participants – including scientific researchers – construct and reconstruct their local (community-based) knowledges, identities and relations. From this it follows that research may be practised in ways that construct researchers as copractitioners and practitioners as co-researchers (Cunliffe & Shotter, 2006). Viewing research (or, as we prefer to call it, inquiry) as intervention, and shifting reflexive attention to the research process itself, enables a relational conception of ethics and responsibility.

• Relational ethics/ Relation responsibility
• our relational premises imply that inquiry is intervention.
• Sheila McNamee speaks of this as a matter of relational (rather than individual) responsibility (McNamee, 2004) – relational responsibility for the research process – and the kinds of people and worlds it (re)produces.

• Ongoing Reflexive Dialogues Directed at the Research Process
• Gergen outlined three important "overtures to innovation."
• deconstruction - “wherein all presumptions of the true, the rational, and the good are open to suspicion” (Gergen, 1994, p. 62).
• democratization or "relational responsibility",
• reconstruction – “wherein new realities and practices are fashioned for cultural transformation” (Gergen, 1994, p. 63).

• Reflexive dialogues are a way of putting these "overtures" to work in research. This can be done by inviting communal reflection (Gergen & Gergen, 1991) throughout the inquiry.

• Reporting strategies:
• Meta-theoretical assumptions offer a different view – the process is the product (Brown & Hosking, 1986)
• Alternatively, the style, form and content of the reporting strategy can be more open and, for example, oriented towards processes, possibilities and generative theorising.
• Another possibility is that full and equal participation is attempted in the
  writing of the report. Participative research practices can be extended to include "cogenerated reports" (Allard-Poesi, 2005)
• Notions of symmetry: all research participants to share responsibility for learning.
• Instead it becomes an ongoing relational process of “turning back” on the construction
  of the ”inquiry.” Reflexive dialogues, directed at the research process, can open up
  new ways of going on together by mobilizing local knowledges and communally
  reflecting on research identities and relations.
• These dialogues can all be considered attempts to construct soft self-other differentiation. In this way reflexivity is not a slide into infinite regress, but an opening up to multiple local forms of life and to possibilities rather than probabilities (Gergen, 1994; Hosking, 2008).

Expressing and legitimating ‘actionable knowledge’ from within ‘the moment of acting’

Some extracts from the original text by John Shotter:

Expressing and legitimating‘actionable knowledge’ from within ‘the moment of acting’

"In this paper I distinguish between two kinds of speech/writing: ‘withness (dialogic)’ -talk and ‘aboutness (monologic)’ -talk . Crucial in this distinction is our spontaneous, expressive, living, bodily responsiveness.While monological aboutness-talk is unresponsive to the activities of the others around us, dialogical withness-talk is not. In being spontaneously responsive both to the expressions of others, as well as our own, as I show in the paper, it engenders in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do"

"To turn to Bakhtin’s (1986) contribution first: He introduces us to the idea of a previously unnoticed kind of understanding spontaneously occurring within our ongoing involvements in our ordinary, everyday, practical activities, a relationally-responsive understanding, that can contrasted with the representational- referential forms currently more familiar to us."

"It is a kind of thinking that takes place, not like geometric reasoning, in episodic moments in terms of static, spatially arrayed shapes and forms; nor in terms of measuring spatial like up against spatial like to achieve a correspondence or not. Indeed, it is a style of thought that, metaphorically, is not best described as a kind of ‘seeing’ at all. Instead, it is a style of thought that only takes place in motion, that works in terms of felt, living, inner, expressive-responsive ‘movements’ unfolding in time—above, I have called it ‘withness’- thinking to contrast it with our more usual style of ‘aboutness’-thinking."

"that when someone acts, their activity cannot be accounted as wholly their own activity—for a person’s acts are partly ‘shaped’ by the acts of all the others around them. Thus, because the overall outcome of any exchange cannot be traced back to the intentions of any of the individuals involved, the ‘dialogical reality’ or ‘space’ constructed between them is experienced as an ‘external reality’, a ‘third agency’ (an ‘it’, a ‘something’) with its own (ethical) demands and requirements: “The word is a drama in which three characters participate (it is not a duet, but a trio)” (Bakhtin 1986: 122)—in other words, it is as if this third agency, this something, has a ‘voice’ of its own to which dialogue participants must also respond. This is where all the strangeness of the dialogical begins."

"such inter-activity cannot be simply described as a sequence of actions (for it is not done by individuals; and cannot be explained by giving people’s reasons ), nor can it be simply described as behavior (as it cannot be explained in terms of causal principles either); it constitutes a distinct, third sphere of dynamically intertwined activity, sui generis , with its own distinctive properties. It involves a special kind of nonrepresentational, sensuous or embodied form of practical-moral (Bernstein 1983) understanding, which, in being constitutive of people’s social and personal identities, is prior to and determines all the other ways of knowing available to us. What is produced in such dialogical exchanges is a very complex ‘orchestration’ of not wholly reconcilable influences — as Bakhtin (1981) remarks, both ‘centripetal’ tendencies inward toward order and unity at the center, as well as ‘centrifugal’ ones outward toward diversity and difference on the borders or margins."

Their complex intertwined nature makes it very difficult for us to characterize them: they have neither a fully orderly nor a fully disorderly structure, neither a completely stable nor an easily changed organization, neither a fully subjective nor fully objective character. As a complex dynamic ‘orchestration’ of many different kinds of influences, they lack specificity, they are only partially determined: they are just as much material as mental; just as much felt as thought; in being ‘spread out’ amongst all those participating in them, they are ‘non-locatable’; they are neither ‘inside’ people, but nor are they ‘outside’ them; they are located in a ‘dialogical space’ where ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are, seemingly paradoxically, one. Due to their living continuity, they do not allow for the spatialization of time into a sequence of events each with a separate ‘before’ and ‘after’ (Bergson), nor do they allow for separable agencies or effects; they consist only in meaningful wholes which cannot divide themselves into separable parts."

"Indeed, it is precisely their lack of any pre-determined order, and thus their openness to being specified or determined by those participating within them in practice (while usually remaining quite unaware of having done so), that is their central defining feature."

"this is precisely what makes this sphere of activity interesting to us, for at least the two following reasons: (1) to do with in situ practical investigations, i.e., action research, into how people actually do in fact manage to ‘work things out’ effectively between themselves, and the part played by the ways of talking/ writing we interweave into them in so doing; but also (2) for how we might refine and elaborate these spheres of talk intertwined activity, and how by an appropriate use of such talk, we might extend them into novel spheres as yet unknown to us."

"I began with a comparison of two styles of writing: 3rd-person reportings and 1st-person tellings, a comparison between talk/writing that leaves us ‘unmoved’ with that which ‘moves’ us. While objective, reporting-style of writing may serve an important authoritative function in setting the outside limits, so to speak, within which an institution must function. To the extent that action research has to operate within the ordinary, ongoing, everyday life activities of organizations, institutions, businesses, and all the other everyday spheres of worklife, each unique in its own way, it is the second telling-style that will give rise to actionable knowledge.While the first style attempts to capture the nature of life in another world independent of us, it is the second that enables us to enter into another world, with a life of its own, not independent of us, but in relation to us —thus to gain a sense of its movements relative to ours."

"While 3rd-person reports of research, represent important regularities and de-contextualized universals, i.e., facts, about the groups in question researched into by outsiders to the groups, 1st-person tellings work in a different way. They are related to the experiences of insiders to those groups, and they work so that in their telling they ‘move’ listeners into paying attention to previously unnoticed particularities within the ‘world’ of the insiders—and it is in this way, in making the unnoticed noticeable, that, although the cases described might seem to be utterly unique and particular, they can in their telling give rise, nonetheless, to transferrable or actionable knowledge."

"a distinction between ‘withness-‘ and ‘aboutness-thinking/talking/writing’: Withness (dialogic)- thinking is a form of reflective interaction that involves coming into living contact with an other’s living being, with their utterances, their bodily expressions, their words, their ‘works’. It gives rise, not to a ‘seeing’, for what is ‘sensed’ is invisible; nor to an interpretation, for our responses occur spontaneously and directly in our living encounters with an other’s expressions; but to a ‘shaped‘ and ‘vectored‘ sense of our moment-by-moment changing placement in our current surroundings—engendering in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do.While aboutness (monologic)-thinking, however, is unresponsive to another’s expressions; it works simply in terms of a thinker’s ‘theoretical pictures’—but, even when we ‘get the picture’, we still have to interpret it, and to decide, intellectually, on a right course of action"

"While Sacks’s account works in terms of unfinished, fluid or flexible varieties of possibilities. And while he leaves it open as to how Dr P. might respond—for he issues invitations not commands—it is the relation of Dr P’s unique responses to Sacks’s invitations, that are revealing of the unique nature of Dr P.’ s ‘world’.  Furthermore, in engaging us, Sacks’s style of writing is ‘moving’, we are ‘moved’ by it in the sense that provides us with a shaped and vectored sense of Dr P.’ s ‘world’, i.e., a sense of how, practically, to find out ‘way about’ within it, thus to ‘go on’ with him in practical ways that make sense to him (Wittgenstein 1953)."

"In dialogical-prospective-relational styles of writing, however, we would be talking/writing to our readers of the character of our ongoing involvements with certain other people, as if from within that involvement - while both looking back on what had been achieved so far, and forward prospectively, toward the possibilities open to us for our next ‘steps’. Our concern in such talk/writing would be with attempting to ‘show’ or ‘make manifest’ to readers (metaphorically) how they might, justifiably , be able to make sense of the character of such involvements."

"People’s sense of their own responsibility for their actions is, then, at the very basis of science itself. Scientists lacking any sense of their own participation in events occurring around them would be unable to do experiments. So, although Sacks’s style of writing may seem ‘anecdotal’, may seem to be merely about single, peculiar particularities, it is an unavoidable style of communication that all scientists must indulge in, if they are to instruct one another in how the categories of their theories should be used and applied—for the categories of such un-involving, such ‘non-moving’ forms of talk, do not apply themselves."

Voloshinov's dialogical approach by John Shotter

Some extracts from the original text by John Shotter:
"INSTEAD OF THEORY CRITIQUE AND DEBATE:  VOLOSHINOV'S UNENDING, DIALOGICALLY-STRUCTURED PARTICIPATORY MODE OF INQUIRY"

"what is important for the speaker about a linguistic form is not that it is a stable and always self-equivalent signal but that it is an always changeable and adaptable sign."

"Listeners, also, do not look for identical forms in order to make sense of a speaker's talk. In the real-life practice of social exchange, a second person simply shows their understanding of the expressions of a first in how they spontaneously respond to them. The task of understanding a verbal utterance "does not basically amount to recognizing the form used, but rather to understanding it in a particular, concrete context,... i.e., it amounts to understanding its novelty and not to recognizing its identity"

""Individuals do not receive a ready-made language at all," claims Voloshinov (1986), "rather, they enter upon the stream of verbal communication; indeed, only in this stream does their consciousness first begin to operate" (p.81). Initially, that is all that matters: being able to enter into the spontaneously responsive stream of activity already occurring amongst those around us."

"Instead of taking people's willful and intellectual acts as basic, and looking back to discover a supposed already existing but hidden source of organization with ourselves, he starts by considering people's activities prior to their individual willful and intellectual acts. And furthermore, rather than inward and backward, he looks outward and forward, toward how people responsively create ways to 'go on' in their spontaneous and non-deliberate acts."

Designing the technology vs Designing the design process

I need to be clear on what the next workshop series will be about.

• Is it a design/research project for developing a technology for supporting different forms of "togetherness" ? or

• Is it a design/research project for exploring designing for relational agency?

the focus might be on designing the design process for the emergence and negotiation of different forms of "relations" between humans and technology.
or
how to design for relations?

exploring the ways the design process might support relationality of agency and its diversity in production and use of technologies.

Critical point: embodying agency-sensitive qualities in a successful way may not necessarily lead to have technologies that are agency-sensitive (i.e modular, open, flexible, configurable??) so do we need to add another design phase to tune the outcomes of the participatory design sessions? or should we assume that if the process involves agency-sensitive qualities, this will lead to agency-sensitive technologies, which may be in many different forms according to the cases? or may agency-sensitive products have some more general properties or may they have particular properties for every case? may be this is also part of the research...

Three Paradigms of HCI

A very good article by Harrison et al 2006

Harrison, S., Tatar, D., and Sengers, P. The three paradigms of HCI. In Alt. chi, Proc CHI '07. ACM Press (2006). 

My research is situated in Paradigm 3. I think I can structure my discussions on approach according to these three paradigms.

 

An updated, extended and refined version of Harrison et al's article has been published at Interacting with Computers Journal: Making epistemological trouble: Third-paradigm HCI as successor science.

C&C Paper

• How might a relational view of agency help fostering improvised and emergent actions, non-prescriptive ways of knowing and relating?
• Distributed cognition
• Extended mind
• ANT
• Feminist STS
• Participatory Design
• How might we design for relational agency? how might we design for relational agency in order to facilitate creativity in design and use phase?
• What might be the qualities needed for designing for agency? how might we sensitize our design process to embody those qualities? towards Agency Sensitive Design...
• What are the examples of existing projects with Agency Sensitive qualities?
• in IXD: 
• Critical Technical Practice- general
• Reflective Design - leisure and museum
• Cultural Probes - inspiration
• Ludic Design - elderly
• Seamful Design- game
• Affector- leisure
• Aanestad's work- medical
• Goodwin's work- medical
• Femtedit-Educational
• more examples from Suchman, Barad, Bardzell and Corina Bath

• in Art:
• Xin Wei
• Schiphorst
• Loke
• Manning
• Jacucci

• not a total solution or absolute formula but some tuning operations in design and use!
• micro adjustments

Materiality of Learning - Spatial Imaginaries

Some extracts from Estrid Sørensen's book Materiality of Learning

"... instead of predefining the specific ways in which humans and materials relate to one another, I analyse the particular forms of technology, knowledge and presence that are performed out of particular socio-material arrangements.The question of how parts relate to one another is an empirical question."

"a minimal methodology, which applies the theoretical technologies of imaginaries, performance and participation. I develop the notion of spatial imaginaries as a sensitivity to describing how participants relate and what spatial formation is thereby created. The spatial imaginary of a socio-material arrangement describes the pattern, landscape, or shape that is formed spatially by and through relations and the parts they connect.
It is a methodology that attempts to know as little as possible in advance.
Definitions are results, not beginnings."

"Spatial metaphors, suggested by Mol and Law (2001), help characterize the different patterns of relation in which the computer program and other materials participated in practice.
1. the metaphor of network indicates the connectedness
2. fluid, the varying character of the ways in which components are related
3. region, the grouping of elements in containers.
One particular aspect of spatial imaginaries is that they enable us to describe how one technology participates in different ways, forming different patterns of relations. "

"
Participation: is the concept that allows us to ask how material and other participants participate in practice. We should not focus on participants; instead we should follow participation, which is the way in which components take part in practice. Is the relationship between the pupil and the room really "noticing"?
Performance: allows us to ask what is achieved through an arrangement of interrelating parts, of participations. If the relationship between the boy and the room is of "noticing", we may say that through this relationship he is performed as "observer" and his knowledge of the room is performed as "impression."
Imaginary: Concepts and sensitivities are thus developed in the course of research process, not as representational knowledge about the empirical practice but as methodological concepts that embody and translate the empirical experiences. .. appreciation for the materiality of doing research
"

Knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision

Extracts from the book called After Method: Mess in Social Science Research

• This book is about what happens social science tries to describe things that are complex, diffuse and messy. .. it tends to make a mess of it.. This is because simple clear descriptions don't work if what if what they are describing is not itself very coherent. the very attempt to be clear simply increases the mess. The aim is to remake social science in ways better equipped to deal with mess, confusion and relative disorder.
• Parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity.
• If much of the world is vague, diffuse or unspecific, slippery, emotional, ephemeral, elusive or indistinct, changes like a kaleidoscope, or doesn’t really have much of a pattern at all… How might we catch some of the realities we are currently missing? Can we know them? Should we know them? Is "knowing" the metaphor that we need? And if it isn't, then how might we relate to them? 
• No single response to these questions. The book is intended as an opening rather than a closing. In any case, if much of reality is ephemeral and elusive, then we cannot expect single answers. If the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we're going to have to give up on simplicities.
• If we want to think about the messes of the reality at all then we are going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate and to know in new ways. We will need to teach our selves to know some of the realities of the world using methods unusual to or unknown in social science.
• Perhaps we will need to know them through hungers, tastes, discomforts, or pains of our bodies. These would be forms of knowing as embodiment.
• Perhaps we will need to know them through 'private emotions' that open us to worlds of sensibilities, passions, fears and betrayals. These would be forms of knowing as emotionality or apprehension.
• Perhaps we will need to rethink our ideas of clarity and rigour, and find ways of knowing the indistinct and slippery without trying to grasp and hold them tight. Here knowing would become possible through techniques of deliberate imprecision.
• Perhaps we will need to rethink how far whatever it is that we know travels and whether it still makes sense in other locations, and if so how.This would be knowing as situated inquiry.
• We will need to think hard about our relations with whatever it is we know, and ask how far the process of knowing it brings it into being. 
• and we should certainly be asking ourselves whether 'knowing' is the metaphor we need.
• a way of thinking about method that is broader, looser, more generous and in certain respects quite different to that of many of the conventional understandings.
• While standard methods are often extremely good at what they do, they are badly adapted to the study of the ephemeral. the indefinite and irregular. The problem is not so much the standard research methods themselves, but the normativities that are attached to them in discourses about method. We are being told how we must see and what we must do and when we investigate.
• It is that methods, their rules, and even more methods' practices, not only describe but also help to produce the reality that they understand.
• Particular sets of rules and procedures may be questioned and debated, but the overall need for proper rules and procedures is not. It is taken for granted that these are necessary. The kinds of facts we need to gather and the appropriate techniques for gathering and theorising data. 
• The task is to imagine methods when they no longer seek the definite, the repeatable, the more or less stable.
• Events and processes are not simply complex in the sense that they are technically difficult to grasp (though it is certainly often the case). Rather they are also complex because they necessarily exceed our capacity to know them.

• The need, then, is for heterogeneity and variation. "~playing with the capacity to think six impossible things before breakfast." 
• It is about creating metaphors and images for what is impossible or barely possible, unthinkable or almost unthinkable. 
• Slippery, indistinct, elusive, complex, diffuse, messy, textured, vague, unspecific, confused, disordered, emotional, painful, pleasurable, hopeful, horrific, lost, redeemed, visionary, angelic, demonic, mundane, intuitive, sliding and unpredictable. Each of these metaphors is a way of trying to open space for the indefinite. Each is a way of apprehending or appreciating displacement. Each is a possible image of the world, of our experience of the world and indeed of ourselves. But so too is their combination
• The world as a generative flux that produces realities.

• To remake methods that imagine and participate in politics and other forms of the "good" in novel and creative ways; and that start to do this by escaping the postulate of singularity and responding creatively to a world that is taken to be composed of an excess of generative forces and relations.
• to do this, we will need to unmake many of our methodological habits! including
• the desire for certainty;
• the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are;
• the belief that as researchers we have special insights that allow us to see further that others into certain parts of social reality; 
• the expectations of generality that are wrapped up in what is often called 'universalism'
• but first of all we need to unmake our desire and expectation for security.

• Method hopes to act as a set of short-circuits that link us in the best possible way with reality, and allow us to return more or less quickly from that reality to our place of study with findings that are reasonably secure. But this, most of all, is what we need to unlearn. Method, I am proposing, will often be slow and uncertain. A risky and troubling process, it will take time and effort to make realities and hold them steady for a moment against a background of flux and indeterminacy. 
• it takes longer to do things
• it takes longer to understand, to make sense of things.
• it, stop, erodes the idea that by taking in the distance at a glance we can get an overview of a single reality. So the stop has costs. We will learn less about certain kinds of things. But we will learn a lot more about a far wider range of realities. And we will participate in the making of those realities.

• Method is not a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality. Rather it is performative. It helps to produce realities. Enactments and the realities that they produce do not automatically stay in place. Instead they are made and remade. Thus they can, at least in principle, be remade in other ways.
• One way or another, it makes things more or less different. The issue becomes how to make things different, and what to make!
• What would it be to practise methods that were slow, uncertain, that stuttered to the stop.. attention to process? What would it be to practise quiet method? Method with fewer guarantees? Method less caught up in a logic of means and ends? Method that was more generous?
• So what are the kinds of issues we might debate?
• Process
• Symmetry
• Multiplicity
• Reflexivity
• Goods
• Imaginaries
• Materialities
• Indefiniteness
• Re-enchantment

• What realities are being made manifest or Othered in this or that mode of inquiry? Why do we make realities in this way or that?
• After the subdivision of the universal we need quite other metaphors for imagining our worlds and our responsibilities to those worlds. Localities. Specificities. Enactments. Multiplicities. Fractionalities. Goods. Resonances. Gatherings. Forms of craftings. Processes of weaving. Spirals. Vortices. Indefiniteness. Condensates. Dances. Imaginaries. Passions. Interferences. That is metaphors for quiet and more generous versions of method.