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.  

Agency Sensitive Evaluation of Luscious Apparatus Performance Workshop

I attended to a workshop and assist Lian Loke in a research study called Luscious Apparatus at Critical Path. I'm planning to use it as a case for my research as well.

This will be an analysis and evaluation work.
I will investigate:
- How agency-sensitive design qualities are embodied or not
- How are different materialities negotiated?
-- For visibility:
visibility in design phase (visibility of processes, participants, artifacts, roles, aims, procedures), visibility targeted to be materialized n use phase  (still needs to be considered in design phase, any consideration of making visible the interactions, structural elements of context, infrastructure or technological artefacts. or increasing awareness of participants towards themselves, others, artefacts or environment.)
if actants can see or perceive the environment and other actants in it (related to his interests acc to the case), this brings a possibility of creating a connection between perceiving and perceived actants. This connection is the starting point of relational agency. By means of making visible all the actants in a design case, we can facilitate the emergence of different forms of agency (i.e. each temporary assemblage with different configurations may lead to a different capacity and series of effects and we can consider them different forms of agency). it is directly related with increasing the awareness of one actant towards self, others and environment. if an actant has awareness, it can get connected.

> What to make visible? actants, artefacts, processes, roles, infrastructure (any contextual element. however, too much visibility might create confusion and may invade privacy, it should be carefully managed. for instance, peripheral or ambient awareness/visibility might be a suitable way. )

> When to make visible?  visibility in production phase (for cognitive justice(initial step, more needed), for recognition of roles and contributions and for  explicating possibilities of new couplings or assemblages ) and visibility in use phase (more control and care are needed for preserving privacy, but explicit interaction at some degree can still be beneficial for accountability and emergent, improvised and collective action)

> How to make visible? focus/nimbus model, SEAMs, accounts, awareness literature, public availability of resources, co(a)gents, stuvidpi, self-disclosure, infrastructure awareness systems.

-- Multiplicity:

• Flat Design hierarchy: no expert privileges.
• Multiplicity in representation: diversity and participation.  also participation of artefacts. participation of artefacts can mean different things in production and use phases. for instance, in a participatory workshop, any material used or engaged can influence the design process differently.  consideration of these different materialities and their effects on perception and construction of design problem and solution space. Although we usually quite conscious about our selection and design of participatory activities and artefacts involved in those activities. We need to further think bout our choices and consider what kind of perceptions and actions are inhibited while we encourage some particular kinds. (are there any examples considering effects of different materialities?? if there exists some, how to find them?)
• Cognitive Justice: The concept of cognitive justice is based on the recognition of the plurality of knowledge and expresses the right of the different forms of knowledge to co-exist. Co-exist in design and use. involving different users with different backgrounds who will be part of the future assemblage/the system. if possible some indirect stakeholders who are likely to be affected by use  or non-use of the system.
• valorizing marginal views or assumptions: it is strategy of Critical Technical Practice and Reflective Design as well. 

--      Relationality:

relatedness over separation and autonomy

> Understanding of mutual influence, shaping and co-constitution of actants

> Embracing emergence and improvisation: enabling supporting ongoing configurations, appropriation, and interpretive flexibility, acknowledging performative aspects of design and their convergence or tuning towards specific representations.

> Consideration of system as assemblage or ecology of actants, collective hybrids, support the redrawing boundaries between actants by actants themselves in prod and use.

>> the iterative, continuous and open-ended character of design and implementation processes.

 Should not prioritize humans or technologies. The key point is to remember possibilities as well as hindrances. Both of these can take many forms. Trying to facilitate tuning processes, designing, is a multifaceted task. If design means trying to facilitate complex tuning process between heterogeneous materials, deterministic approaches are bound to miss half the story. They always place all of the action or agency on one side of the human machine divide. Partial translations or processes of tuning remain invisible. It would become necessary to remember the performative aspects of design, and their convergence or tuning towards specific representations simultaneously and continually.

--       Accountability:

> awareness of our position and knowledge in the assemblage

> awareness of others’ position and knowledge in the assemblage

> recognizing limited power of any actors

--       Duality:

> Consideration of dual characteristics of design decisions:

- positive and negative effects

- invited and inhibited actions

- amplified and diminished perception

--       Configurability: 

      - ongoing negotiations, tuning processes, customization, performative aspects of design.