Much of the academic and commercial work which seeks to innovate around technology has been dismissed as "solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist or ignores the complexity of personal, political and environmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism" critique to its origins in city planning and highlights the original concern with imaging and representation in the design process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to create compelling and seductive images of concept designs, which sell solutions and presume problems. We consider a range of strategies, which explicitly reject the search for "solutions". These include design fiction and critical design but also less well-known techniques, which aim for unuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present two examples of "magic machine" workshops where participants are encouraged to reject realistic premises for possible technological interventions and create absurd propositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that such practices may help researchers resist the impulse towards solutionism and suggest that attention to representation during the ideation process is a key strategy for this.

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Anti-Solutionist Strategies: Seriously Silly Design Fiction

This article develops and applies a holistic approach to structure smartphone use. It builds on an understanding of the smartphone as a metamedium containing a multitude of “constituent media” that are applicable in an unprecedented range of contexts. We elaborate on the smartphone’s structure and its uses from two theoretical venture points: an ecological understanding of the evolving media landscape within the metamedium and a mobile phone–centered perspective on differential uses and gratifications of the metamedium as a whole within different contexts. Gibson’s affordance theory permits us to integrate these perspectives to account for smartphone structure and use in terms of niches that emerge out of embodiments and enactments of affordances in varying contexts of use.

Smartphones as Metamedia: A Framework for Identifying the Niches Structuring Smartphone Use

How can we design experiences that explore ideas and notions of the unknown? The aim of the work outlined here is to create short, intense, workshop-like experiences that generate strong commitment ...

Making Magic Machines

Taking it's origin from the notion of the cargo cult as an elaborate misunderstanding, this paper suggests a series of exploratory design methods to support users in generating requirements and scenarios-of-use for technological objects that do not yet exist. Strategies from fields such as art and performance are used to create experiences of user-involvement centered on the making of non-functional mock-ups. These can then act as props through which the participant can express their intuitions and concerns with a given technological notion. The processes described makes use of a broad range of cultural drivers to engage users in playful misunderstandings that facilitate new, out of the ordinary, interpretations of objects. The paper outlines the basis of three projects, discuss the drivers behind each project and suggests guidelines for creating these kinds of exploratory embodied experiences.

The deliberate cargo cult

Sumario da Licao apresentado para Provas de Agregacao em Linguas e Literaturas Modernas, na especialidade de Literatura Inglesa, da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra

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The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines

This paper outlines a set of experiments designed to explore how we can embed memories in objects augmented with non-discernable nanotechnological interfaces It explores whether the object can successfully embody a wish or fear and how the participant experiences living with a physical reminder of these secrets As such the experiments draw on more traditional paper-prototyping and body-storming techniques The goal is to assess if the introduction of nanotechnology as a magical unknown can be used to seed and affect our relationships to objects and archived memories

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Tassophonics: Nanotechnology as the Magical Unknown

This paper examines the notion of network affordance within the context of network art. We expand on the notion of affordances, (Gibson, 1977; Gaver, 1996) to include ecological and computational parameters of unpredictability. We illustrate the notion of unpredictability by considering four specific works that were included in a network art exhibition, SPEED SHOW [2.0] Hong Kong (2013). The paper discusses how the artworks are contingent upon the parametric relations (Parisi, 2013) of the network. We introduce network affordance as a dynamic framework that could articulate the experience of tension arising from the (visible) symbolic representation of computational processes and its hidden occurrences.

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Network Affordances: Unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW

Selfies, email archives, twitter posts, likes, places, late night chat logs, health insurance records, bank transfers, search histories… all those bits of identity, involuntarily immortalised as personality profiles in corporate server farms. Could erasure offer some respite from endless datafication? This “undead media” (Chun 134) not only facilitates the surveillance apparatus, the persistence of data also affects how we remember. Digital death (post-mortem digital data ownership concerns) exemplifies how the structure and inner workings of network technologies and software platforms affect our experience in a tangible way. The following research is concerned with what kind of role the materiality of Internet technologies plays in post-mortem digital legacy, and how it bleeds into our mourning practices. It explores these questions by examining how Facebook and Google deal with digital death, and what kind of consequences the materiality of the network entails. The notions of materiality are understood here as a space of interaction between code and hardware (Hayles) and perceived materialization of phenomena iteratively configured by dynamics of “intra-actions” (Barad 140). In the examples considered I look at how terms of agreement apply to memory in the form of externalised tertiary retention in the process of “grammatization” (Stiegler 3). The research also looks at the biological human memory’s materiality and its need to forget (Kirschenbaum). I discuss the ne.me.quittes.pas project as a means to propose digital data funerals as an artistic strategy to make data tangible and to explore how these layers of stockpiled data constantly re-configure our identities. I argue that digital data funerals offer a symbolic ritualised gesture that draws attention to the materiality of data through tangible and physical degradation, in an attempt to surpass post-mortem datafication, and surveillance.

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Erasure, an attempt to surpass datafication

This chapter considers the disposal of digital artefacts that are reshaping the materialities of death through the case study of digital data funeral workshops, or funerary rituals for paraselves that address cultural anxieties about the afterlife of information. It introduces the notion of network affordance to describe the experience of the network based on ecological and computational parameters of unpredictability as defined by Luciana Parisi in 2013. The chapter explores the main concerns and affordances in materialities of death, embodiment of data, and hybrid memory. The first workshop took place in London in the spring of 2015 called Posthumans n Postburials, Digital Data Funeral Design, at the London College of Communication. The goal of the workshop from a research perspective was to creatively fuel the digital data funeral design process, and to get further insight into how people feel about deletion with respect to digital death.

Audrey Samson

Papers

Tassophonics: Nanotechnology as the Magical Unknown

Network Affordances: Unpredictable parameters of a Hong Kong SPEED SHOW

Erasure, an attempt to surpass datafication

Digital data funerals