I have always liked Don Norman’s ideas and attitude. A couple of weeks ago at Core 77 he questioned the feasibility of human-centered design – [Link]

In today’s connected world and global market, he argues, culture matters little to design. Designers should center their effort less on establishing people’s needs and more on understanding activities:

A few decades ago, I believed that cultural differences were fundamental. Moreover, they were exciting and interesting. Today, I believe that cultural differences are still just as fundamental and exciting but they primarily exist in governing social interaction, the types of foods that are eaten and stylistic preferences. Modern products are designed to support particular activities, so that it is the activity itself that controls how they should be designed and used. Traditional activities are heavily determined by culture, but modern office practices, manufacturing, communication, financial accounts and transportation are dominated by the technology used to accomplish them, or in the cases of financial accounts, by world-wide standards intended to make transactions and accounting uniform. As a result, many of our activities are determined by the technologies we use, such as the automobile, computer, cellphone, train or airplane, or by the need to interact smoothly with other countries and cultures across the world. Once the technology determines the activity, the influence of culture dissipates.

These observations have important implications for design. Modern products are driven by technology, which in turn dictates the activity. Designers talk a lot about Human-Centered Design where it is important to design for the needs of the person. Well, this doesn’t work when the goal is millions of people all across the world. Computers and software, phones and applications, automobiles, kitchen appliances and housewares are intended for consumption by millions. Human-Centered Design can no longer apply: what does it mean to discover the precise needs of millions of people? Instead, I have argued for Activity-Centered Design, where the activity dictates the design.

Don is assuming, as many do, that culture accounts for human difference and individuality and can be radically separated from function, activity and technology. (see also his piece on activity-centered design a while back – [Link])

But what happens if we deny this separation of culture and technology? What happens if we question this model of what it is to be human? (See my previous comments on the nature of humanity – [Link])

As an archaeologist I work on the material remains of things, places, people and their activities in attempts to understand what was going on. For a long while many archaeologists have felt considerable guilt over their focus on things. Mortimer Wheeler, an influential archaeological character back in the 1950s and 60s and Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, famously declared in his book Archaeology from the Earth that the whole purpose of archaeology was to find out about the people behind things – societies and cultures are the true object of archaeology. This was archaeology’s higher purpose – to move beyond material goods and technologies to human-centered accounts of the past.

Many of my colleagues who are cultural anthropologists share such an embarrassment about things, holding that it is the world of cultural values and meanings that makes us truly human. Too much focus on material goods can be a symptom of commodity fetishism, of a reductionist materialism, or even of our consumerist modernity.

In contrast, my colleagues in design and engineering schools are rightly looking beyond their focus on materials and processes, beyond artifacts and things, to embrace human factors, interactions with things, experiences and emotions, putting people before technology, as Don says.

But while I usually play the role of an archaeological humanist and argue that engineers and designers do indeed need to understand how people get on with things, I also find myself making the opposite case to my archaeological and anthropological colleagues, arguing that they need to take artifacts and materialities more seriously and not put them in second place to cultural values and structures of meaning (see my new book about all this – [Link]).

This is a curious academic schizophrenia, and, of course, another manifestation of C.P.Snow’s old notion of two cultures – Science versus the Arts and Humanities. I believe we are still bedeviled by such a separation in our schools and colleges. In spite of all the calls to be inter-, multi-, trans-disciplinary, the norm is segregation. But I don’t want to elaborate on this here. I explore it enough elsewhere in this blog.

I suggest that design, as practiced and taught in the likes of our d.school, offers a modest resolution of the separation of humans and things, culture and technology, and also entails a quite radical redefinition of what it is to be human/inhuman.

The modest resolution comes from centering learning and education on practice, projects, and iteration rather than academic disciplines and schooling – practical worldly mixtures.

The radical redefinition of the human?

What makes us human is engagements with and through things. And, crucially, these practical engagements precede our definitions of person and artifact. Distinctions, and they are very real, between the likes of culture and technology, are not absolute, a priori, but achievements – local, historical, provisional.

My friend Cliff Nass wrote a book about some of about with Byron Reeves – The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media like Real People and Places [Link]. People treat their machines like people, because the distinction between things and people, between technology and the social or cultural is local and provisional, rather than abstract and absolute.

If being human is all about making and getting on with things, then human-centered design is simultaneously about activities and technologies, materials and processes, values and experiences, the tangible and intangible, individuals dispersed through networks of material flows, human being flowing through cultural assemblages of artifacts, people, values, architectures, landscapes, emotions …

So human-centered design is not about people and cultural differences, in contrast to other kinds of design that deal with materials and mechanics, activities and technologies.

Human centered design is as much inhuman as human, because for as long as we’ve been human we’ve been cyborgs!

“All is full of love” – video by Chris Cunningham for Björk – from Homegenic (1999) [Link]

from Nicole Kahn’s  (IDEO) talk last week about need finding and ethnography

in class today – project notebooks as presentation/manifestation

Our class in Stanford d.school is “Transformative Design” [Link] – design that makes a difference – design that changes things.

If we want design to change what people do, we need to understand why people do what they do.

While this is a very broad question that has generated many responses in many disciplines, it is not too difficult to gain some orientation by considering basic (philosophical) standpoints on what it is to be a person, and connecting these to research methods and theories.

Sociological standpoints, for example, emphasize how people are embedded in networks structured according to factors such as class and ethnicity. A cultural anthropologist may focus more on the way people make sense of their world, as lived, experienced, or imagined. The sociologist and cultural anthropologist differ somewhat in what they emphasize in attempting to understand why people act the way they do.

Human centered design has emerged through closer attention being paid to the way people get on with things – use, interaction, experiences of artifacts and their associations. This has mostly involved a focus upon psychological factors, ranging from ergonomics and ease of use, to the character of communicative interaction between people and things. The premise, implicit or explicit, is that what really matters in understanding people’s actions are these immediate experiences of perception, cognition and interaction with the material world – what should be called behavior, in contrast to action or practice, concepts that include broader factors such as agency and intentionality, and the ways that people reflect upon their own behavior. See my comments on a previous run of the class – [Link]

Today I presented a diagram that covers this question of what matters in understanding why people do what they do as a way of broadening our perspective.

(click on the diagram and then again in the new window to get the full picture)

It is easy to map onto the diagram different views of what makes people the way they are, and what is important in designing things for people.

Mention has just been made of cognitive science and its focus upon behavior. Understanding craft and vernacular architecture, for example, involves factors mainly to do with tacit knowledges, tradition and heritage, while urban planning usually focuses upon wider macro and structural issues.

Broad orientation can be gained on different approaches to design by locating them on the diagram. Classic twentieth century designers often focused more on styling artifacts; the most distinctive connected style to a philosophy or ideology of design (like the emphasis upon function and clean minimalist form promoted by Bauhaus), or a palette or “look” (Art Deco, for example). The Arts and Crafts movement connected style to the political economy of making and materials (in a criticism of mass-produced goods and experiences). Both were quite utopian, considering that orientation upon the future in relationship to the past and its heritage or legacy is a crucial component of the modern world.

I emphasize the importance of underlying notions, models of humanity, of what it is to be human.

Are we social actors performing roles, information processing systems, intentional individuals looking to exercise freedom of will and choice, or locked into determining forces and structures of society and culture? Do our intentions and emotions even matter in the big picture?

There is another, not on this list. A model of the human as hybrid, as machinic assemblage, as distributed through social and material worlds, as

cyborg

Confusing and disturbing distinctions between humans and things.

I will take this up in another post – [Link].

It is about the wonderful environment of the Peterson Building, home of the d.school, how it came to look the way it does, with its customized fittings, studios, prototyping facilities, spaces to meet and create. Scott and Scott were key figures in its design and offer, with the help of other d.schoolers, a menu of ideas about how to make creative spaces.

Flexible spaces that can be configured to the different stages in the design process.

The d.school’s enlightened White Room, Booth blanc, where you can write ideas on all the surfaces

I am particularly interested in just how environment affects what we think and do. My class on urban planning [Link] uses the design of ancient cities to define the human qualities at the heart of sustainable urban life – the way architecture interacts with creative urban experience.

Stanford Strategy Studio involved a series of experiments in staging conversations about matters of common and pressing human concern [Link]. We realized the power of saturated environments, places that resonate through rich ambience, staging, artifacts, media.

Crucial also is persistence – how certain spaces, with their artifacts, can maintain conversation, engagement with a task, shared experiences and findings, over time, by offering mnemonics

- rooms with memory

Our Revs Program is considering, under its aim of promoting a broad human-centered appreciation of automotive engineering and culture over the last 150 years, the way a museum can be a design space – offering artifacts and archives that inspire through their arrangement in a museological space,

artifacts reminding us, through their materiality, of where we have been, and hopes and prospects of realizing our projects to design a better world.

In the d.school the standard rule is to “reset” a studio after using it – tidy up, put the furniture and fittings back in storage, clean white boards, tidy up tools and materials. Wipe the space clean and erase the traces of what has been happening there. It means that most of the d.school, most of the time, looks remarkably clean, minimalist, and somewhat sterile – only ready-to-be-used.

From the studio of artist Terry Winters

I think that memory, history, the archaeology of a place, the embodiment of experience and event in a place, a building, a landscape, a studio is immensely important to creativity. Every artist’s studio I have encountered is saturated in such memory.

But we can drown in the past.

This is actually the manifestation of a classic conundrum of

an archaeological sensibility

- how much to conserve, how much to discard

Metamedia – my lab at Stanford – 2006/2007 – a saturated space here as an authoring studio, then
used for modeling conversations, now becoming again a studio space for the Revs Program.

“We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to say this (Terence having pipped him to the post back in the 2nd century BC) merely proved his point – a point which Macedonio Fernández took one step backwards when he sketched out a prequel to Genesis. God is just about to create everything. Suddenly a voice in the wilderness pipes up, interrupting the eternal silence of infinite space that so terrified Pascal: “Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done.” Rolling His eyes, the Almighty retorts (doing his best Morrissey impression) that he has heard this one before – many a time. He then presses ahead with the creation of the heavens and the earth and all the creepy-crawlies that creepeth and crawleth upon it. In the beginning was the word – and, word is, before that too.

In his most influential book, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom argued that the greatest Romantic poets misread their illustrious predecessors “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves”. …

(I like the Morrissey/Smiths reference, though it gives away Andrew’s own contemporary past! see below *)

This is a variation on my argument about actuality and the contemporary past – that we overemphasize the flow of time in our notions of history, forgetting that the past lingers, mutates, haunts, and constitutes our very being. This is the archaeological, the vitality of ruin, the impulse to arrest entropy, the shock of the old, when nothing happens twice, because it has already happened before (was this one of those wonderful aphorisms from Theodor Adorno?).

See my recent comments on the new translation of Laurent Olivier’s wonderful Sombre Abîme du Temps [Link], and my own forthcoming book The Archaeological Imagination [Link].

The past is all around us.

The implications apply also to any authoring or design -

Innovation and creativity are mostly about recycling, remixing, reworking.

Dryburgh Abbey, by Scott’s tomb.

*
Cemetery Gates – Morrissey – lyrics from The Smiths – The Queen is Dead (1986)

A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives
Where are they now?
With the loves and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived and then they died
Seems so unfair
And I want to cry

You say: “ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn”
And you claim these words as your own
But I’ve read well, and I’ve heard them said
A hundred times, maybe less, maybe more

If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
Don’t plagiarise or take “on loans”
There’s always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall …

click on image to enlarge

Design that makes a difference

.

A key challenge this time round – just what is it to change?

Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga.

The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally:

A week in California and a finger in the recessionary wind has shown me where the smart money is moving. It is from online towards “live experience”.

The example of the music business is already well-known. Earnings from recordings have been plummeting for a decade, while from live they are rising ever faster. Warner Brothers release albums free online to publicise forthcoming concerts. In Britain HMV is closing 40 shops while tickets for a Rihanna concert can cost £330, and for Coldplay £180. A seat for Madonna is more expensive than her entire recorded output. A top American performer would reckon to earn between 80% and 90% of revenue from live performance. In the US alone, touring revenue that grossed $1bn in 1995 rose to $4.6bn last year. The big money, goes the catchphrase, “is now at the gate”. Nor is this just a youth phenomenon. On the American music circuit, 96% of singers were reportedly over 40 and almost half were over 60.

The potency of experience extends far beyond the realm of music. The upsurge in live comedy began in the mid-90s with tours by Robert Newman and David Baddiel, but now has Michael McIntyre and others appearing weekly, with back-up teams that would staff a circus. Performers such as Stephen Fry have taken to reading their books in public, Dickens-style, and simulcasting to hundreds of local cinemas. Close to a million people worldwide watch the Met Opera live in cinemas.

The most carefully researched audience activity, American politics, has swung from advertising and staged events to the archaic political form of active debate. The Republican primary campaign has seen 23 debates, winning unprecedented television audiences of 5-6 million …

The issue is the convergence of authenticity and mediation in what Joe Pine calls the experience economy. People matter in the world of (industrial) design and cultural production in a way that we haven’t seen for a long while. As I was recently commenting [link], the values at the heart of this human-centered design ultimately come down to relationships between people, their artifacts, and, crucially, both in the context of what Jenkins calls “civility”. (Recall the etymology – this is the world of the civis, the citizen – what I am calling res publica.)

Jenkins only comments on the significance of authenticity, of presence, of liveness. He doesn’t delve into the workings. A forthcoming book edited with Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye does just this kind of exploration with some performance artists and academics.

Presence, trace, record, media, document, archive … it is one of the culminations of our five year long “presence project”:

[Link] – Amazon

We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much of our artifactual world – surface treatment.

After the likes of Owen Jones (Grammar of Ornament -[Link]), there are few works like Gombrich’s Sense of Order [Link] that take pattern seriously and liberate it from the fine art :: decorative craft distinction. (Though I also constantly return to Alois Riegl, Henri Focillon and George Kubler.)

The topic fascinated me in my own study of ancient Corinthian ceramics (at the beginnings of the Mediterranean city state), where I refused the distinction and dealt with surface treatment, including both figurative painting as well as geometric and floral pattern, in a contextual study of design [Link]. My broad point now is that ornament/pattern is precisely the worked ground against which subject matter is set, even to the point where ground is more significant and eclipses apparent subject matter (this a variation on my obsession with signal-noise relationships in the history of design).

But how can so much be encompassed in a single synoptic view? Diana and Christina offer a bold thematics, set in a timeline, from antiquity to modernity. Their wonderful topics include: flamboyant gothic, glowing grotesques, the dramatic and the divine, floral perfection, compositions of refinement, patterns of richness, bold colors and abstracts, tartan grids, all accompanied by acute commentary and contextual reference.

This is a reminder of just how much analytic attention we still need to apply to the world of design and making, and how hampered we are by the narrowness of art and design history, even when they mobilize the likes of semiotics (as Tilley and I attempted as part of our contribution to the emerging field of material culture studies in the 80s [Link]).

Quick recap.

For some time I have been interested in the notion of the “T character” – an attitude or disposition, a skill set, that facilitates the kind of interdisciplinary practice that is the heart of good design, bridging the different expertise and interests in a team.

This is how I put it last year [Link]:

Real world problems don’t fit into neat disciplinary categories. We hear much about the importance of interdisciplinary or even transdisciplinary work. (Multidisciplinary implies keeping the disciplinary distinctions we need to bridge?)

Stanford d.school ‘s mission is to promote design thinking as such a bridging field. And one that involves close attention to the human component in addressing real world problems.

Tom Kelley and Tim Brown have outlined the character types they think are the heart of design thinking [Link]. The kinds of people who contribute to innovative design.

One is the “T” character – able to combine in-depth knowledge of a particular field or method (the vertical in the “T”) with an ability to connect across specialist expertise (the lateral). And Tom and Tim identify design thinking with this creative, human-centered work of connection.

I have described how design thinking is a kind of pragmatism [Link] and this notion of a “T” character intrigues me. I want to sharpen up the idea, but am not sure how. Is it really a character type?

Well, yes and no.

Bridging different interests is all about diplomacy and translation, sensitivity, being mindful of others; it is about representing different interest groups.

Last summer, at EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) in Tokyo [Link], I suggested that we should think of the things we design as

… assemblages, bundles of materials, features, potentials, affordances, values, even different times – think of how they gather and connect people and possibility.

Message – think of the human as being distributed through these assemblies and gatherings.

(This is why it is so right to hold that better design will come from an emphasis not so much on a particular product as on what it may offer – focus more on experience, interaction, service, platform – the assemblages.)

A word that means “thing” and captures all this is the Latin RES.

And it is entirely right to think in a collective way – RES PUBLICA is the commonwealth, the state, the assembly of the people and their goods, cultural and political ecologies. Keep in mind the missing masses in these assemblies that are our human being – not just things, but other species too, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses.

Have a look at the range of meanings and usage of RES – [Link]

In such an ontology of distributed human being, the apparent substantiality of a person or artifact is simultaneously vacancy, emptiness, openness perhaps; and the past haunts, present in its absence. We are no longer faced with the problem of connecting, for example, tangible and intangible, materials and immaterial values, pasts and presents, functions and emotions, people and their goods: these are already connected. The task is to discover how.

Under such an ontology, how do we perform research? What is the way, the DŌ of ethnography, in the terms of the conference theme?

• look to the qualities of human being – the quiddities and haecceities, the qualities of sustainable human living, and tell their story, lest we forget

• methodology – don’t look for tight systematics – plunge IN MEDIAS RES, into the imbroglios – be pragmatic and opportunistic

• the challenge is one of re-presentation (in the political sense too), of giving voice, speaking-for, witnessing

• consider research (ethnographic, design, contextual, whatever) as intervention in the RES PUBLICA

• intervention in cycles of ideation/design/manufacture | exchange and distribution | consumption | reuse | discard – a political economy

Here then is a diagram that aims to capture this. Experts in teams drill down into a design problem. One connection is precisely the messiness of problems – they don’t fit into disciplines. And things don’t fit either. Issues and themes offer connection – this is often how we configure messy spaces – according to themes such as sustainability, or health and wellbeing (see my comments on the Durham conference last year on “Water in Antiquity” [Link]).

Design thinking, as an iterative process or pragmatics [Link], offers a connecting medium. And theory enables translation across radically different fields. Praxis is a term that refers to such thoughtful practice.

Crucial also is how we get on with others, a constitutional arrangement that enables sensitive, mindful respect and care for others.

This is the human in human-centered design

I was going to talk about this at the COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) Conference in Basel last week [Link], but a family emergency stopped me going. There are some fascinating matters being raised in relation to this political economy of design by social software – collaborative and cocreative authoring worlds.

Gordon was chief designer for the Brabham Formula One team from 1969 to ’86, and Technical Officer for the McLaren team from ’87 to 2006. His remarkably innovative designs of supercars included the infamous road-going McLaren F1 and the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren.

But Gordon wasn’t here to talk about high-end racing. Gordon is now working on a new kind of supercar – a small, light, cheap city car based upon a radically new modular approach to vehicle manufacture. The T-25 and T-27, based around the iStream platform and production process.

Gordon’s obsession with design from first principles applied to light and agile cars.

Formula One experience and expertise translated into a people’s car!

I am fascinated by this translation and I got a chance to quiz him about his approach to design (see also Nigel Cross’s insightful new book about design thinking – [Link]).

Gordon himself doesn’t drive the likes of a McLaren F-1 everyday. His main car is a Smart Roadster, the small, light and very agile sports version of the Smart Car.

Why? – because it is fun to drive (the combination of power-weight ratio, distribution and wheelbase), and makes sense around a congested city like London in the same terms of size, weight, and fuel consumption.

Gordon begins with this human experience. He has an obsession with weight as a fundamental principle in car design, and points out the madness we see all the time around California of mom’s taking kids to kindergarten in a multi-ton steel monster of an SUV. Of course, it was also a fundamental concern when he was designing racing cars. There he developed another obsession – with composite materials. This involved learning from other industries, like aero-astro, where weight and strength were also major concerns. Carbon fiber, various kinds of plastics and metals, and combined in various ways, offer all sorts of new design and manufacturing possibilities, because of the properties of the material and the way you handle manufacture with such materials.

Inherited, of course, from millennia-old design of wheeled transportation, cars first adopted the design principle of combining a frame (chassis, power train, steering) with body work (seating and exterior added by coachbuilders). The second half of the twentieth century saw the adoption of monocoque bodies made of welded stamped steel panels that did away with the frame/body combination. The iStream process under development by Gordon abandons both for a structure comprising lightweight tubing and integral composite panels. It is a modular platform because many different kinds of vehicle components (engines, gear boxes, seating) can be inserted into the same structure.

Contrast current vehicle manufacture where a single model production line based upon stamped steel panels will cost around $400 million to set up, and $100 million to retool and modify when the model receives a facelift. The iStream production line costs a fraction because it’s not based upon combining many stamped steel panels into a specialized monocoque that can be used for a few models at most. The iStream city cars are small and efficient, as well as open to all sorts of styling and individual personalization, because the design is precisely a platform of potential as much as a finished item.

This is why iStream is disruptive design.

It’s an example of what Gordon calls designing from first principles, rather than from accepted solutions and the search for incremental improvement.

So I asked Gordon whether he designed cars. He hesitated – the iStream is process and platform.

When he was with Brabham, Gordon introduced the practice of planned pit stops in a race. Previously cars carried as much fuel as possible to cut down on time lost in the pits refueling and to keep the cars doing what they are supposed to do – race. But races are not just cars driven at high speed. There’s also the logistics of supplying the car with what it needs – research and development, expert driver, maintenance crew, transport too and from races, and then the apparently simple matter of adding fuel and tires. Fuel adds weight. Gordon figured that a lighter car, carrying less fuel, would accelerate faster and be more agile. If the time in the pits could be reduced, the increase in acceleration and agility could be a winning advantage. So the team looked to replacing tires and getting 100 liters of fuel into a car as quickly as possible, and even heating up tires to maintain performance.

This was an approach to racing as a system and process distributed in many fields beyond the car driven around a track at high speed.

Some other points about the work of the designer emerged in this encounter with Gordon’s world.

Gordon is a charmer. Open, human, communicative. A persuader who roams freely across mechanics, materials science, industrial process, the necessity of sustainable design in a world facing unprecedented challenges precipitated by two centuries and more of industrial urbanization, business viability. He emphasizes the teamwork in design – the sociality, the need to involve everyone in a transparent community of innovating and making.

When I asked him about motivation, he immediately referred to the qualities of human experience in mobility and driving – that’s where it starts and ends. Crucial also is real-world pressure to deliver. The constraints of the rules at the heart of Formula One precipitate highly innovative solutions to getting a car round a track as fast as possible. Constraints and limitations inspire and motivate. The necessity of going from idea to implementation (it has to happen before the end of the race) is an emphasis on practice and trial, getting on with things, combining first principles (weight) with analytics (time and motion in a pitstop) with rehearsal and delivery (making the pressured fuel delivery system, the tire heaters, practicing the moves).

All this has given me much food for thinking again about the T-character in the design process [Link] [Link] – I’ll follow up on this in another post. [Link]

Carrie Bobier, Stanford Dynamic Design Lab, and Gordon Murray in a student experimental vehicle at VAIL (Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory), home of the Revs Program

Coordinated effort to document the driving experience – historic cars – and the community who cherish automotive heritage.

Raising the profile of automotive studies, taking seriously this vital iconic part of the contemporary past.

As Mark Gessler – HVA (Historic Vehicle Association) and FIVA (Fédeartion Internationale des Véhicules Anciens) – puts it – from hobby to history

Preparing the Eddie Hall Bentley – car instrumented to record performance variables

Murray Smith at the wheel – wired up to track his actions and responses

The Bentley on the track

Instrumenting the 1960 Porsche-Abarth 356B Carrera GTL and the 1967 Porsche 910/6

Talking with John Morton in the pits – driving the Porsche-Abarth

(photos by Chris Lowman)

We, the Revs Program at Stanford, are exploring how to capture the experience – in every sense.

Instrumenting car and driver.

Miles Collier will have two of his Porsches with us, racing with driver and vehicle instrumented as part of our effort to understand the driving experience.

Michael Lynch (San Francisco) has a nice piece about us and the Collier Collection in the latest edition of Veloce Today: [Link].

Here is the Collier Porsche-Abarth 356B Carrera GTL that will be at the Rolex Reunion. It is pictured at Goodwood in 1960, where it won the GT Class with Graham Hill and Huschke von Hanstein

Eddie Hall’s Bentley in Naples, Florida

The aim of our Program is to create a new transdisciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile, bridging the Humanities, Social Sciences, Design, and Engineering, centered upon the human experiences of designing, making, driving, being driven, living with, dreaming of the automobile.

The Revs Institute of Naples Florida, one of the world’s finest car collections, library and archive of automotive history and design is our partner. Stanford Revs Program nestles within CARS – the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford.

The ultimate goal is to create a new kind of museum of the car, working closely with Stanford Libraries to build cutting edge digital collections management and delivery systems.

Automotive Archaeology

With me fronting the Program are Chris Gerdes (Engineer), Cliff Nass (Psychologist and Cognitive Scientist), and Sven Beiker (Executive Director and liaison with the car industry).

After introductions from Provost John Etchemendy, Cliff Nass, and Miles Collier (Business Executive, Artist and Philanthropist), whose generous multi-million dollar gift is starting up the Program, came vignettes from the car’s life. Bianca Carpeneti, Gary Devore and Chris Lowman (Archaeology, Heritage Management and Design Research, my Metamedia Lab) dealt with cultures of speed and performance in the 1930s, engineering in the run up to WWII, and choices faced when the car retired from racing and became a collector’s item. Michelle Mederos (Product Design Program and Cliff’s CHIMe Lab – Communications between Humans and Interactive Media) and Lassi “Al” Likkanen (Cognitive Science and CHIMe Lab) showed how we might instrument and quantify experiences of driving. John Kegelman (Mechanical Engineering and Chris’s Dynamic Design Lab) focused on the car itself and how we can instrument and quantify our experience of its performance.

Doug Nye (Motor Racing Journalist and Historian) took us back to the 1930s with some remarkable restored film footage – racing at mad speeds along the country lanes and through the towns of the Northern Ireland Ards circuit for the RAC Tourist Trophy.

In a session on the human interface with machines, Joy Taylor (Clinical Psychiatrist, Associate Clinical Professor (Affiliated), Stanford University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science) and Cliff Nass unpacked some of the emotional and cognitive interfaces with artifacts. Chris Gerdes took us into the future with intelligent and autonomous vehicles, and a movie showing Shelley, Stanford’s autonomous vehicle, going through its paces. David Kelley (Mechanical Engineering, Stanford d.school, and founder of IDEO, the design consultancy) is one of our key supporters, but had to miss his presentation.

Julia Landauer (Stanford Freshman and Auto Racer) and Duncan Dayton (Auto Racer and American Le Mans Series Team Owner), interviewed by Murray Smith (Bibliophile, Sporting Motorist, Automotive Archaeologist), shared with us their first-hand experience of extreme human-machine interactions.

This theme of the cyborg driver came up again with presentations on how we can deal with the cultural history of automobility from Fred Turner (incoming Director of our Program in Science, Technology and Society) and Ursula Heise (Professor of English and Director of the Program in Modern Thought & Literature). Fred flagged up a crucial issue we wish to tackle – the mediation of experience – how experiences are documented, represented, visualized.

Chris (Gerdes) wired up for driving the Bentley

Lawyer Dan Siciliano (Senior Lecturer in Law and Associate Dean for Executive Education and Special Program) raised the question of when a car is not a car – when it’s treated by the law as a horse (or horse-less carriage) – and now the car is increasingly a platform or system. Sven covered the different institutional connections across the history of the car. Miles Collier talked about the intellectual world of the car collector – issues of authenticity, conservation and restoration, connoisseurship and authority.

The Library involvement in the Program was explored by Stu Snydman (Libraries Manager, Digital Production/Web Application Development) – outlining the development of open source systems for organizing, searching, and sharing collections, of books, papers, cars!

Archaeology of the recent and contemporary past

Let me say a little more about the archaeological agenda in the Program.

We’re developing and expanding the anthropological archaeology of Material Culture Studies. We’re taking up again what Bill Rathje called “the archaeology of us”, and taking seriously what, ironically, has been overlooked – the car as popular culture, as icon of modernity, as a key moment in twentieth century engineering and industrial design.

The expanded scope is a design perspective – a focus on human-centered design. Design – informed by history, archaeology, ethnography, as well as engineering, science, technology, psychology, cognitive science – starting and ending with human experiences in the richest sense.

And the legacy of the material past – where the museum becomes a design studio.

What will a discipline of things, encompassing this Program centered on the car, look like?

I see three components:

All three rooted in the histories, genealogies and archaeologies of what we’re calling Archive 3.0 – the animated archive of digitally enabled interactive stores of sources, knowledge and collaborative exchange. We’ll be sharing everything we can and inviting contribution, reaching out to that community fascinated by this major part of our contemporary heritage.

Revs at Stanford – a project in human-centered design – where archaeology and history inform design, where the museum and the archive combine with the design studio.

Press and publicity links -

New York Times

Automotive News

KQED – PBS News

Stanford Report

Press and publicity links -

New York Times

Automotive News

KQED – PBS News

Stanford Report

I am heading the faculty effort with Cliff Nass and Chris Gerdes.

Here is a press report from Andrew Myers in Stanford Engineering.

Anyone who knows my work will recognize that we are launching here an archaeology of the contemporary past with an exploration of the life of an artifact, in this case a remarkable Bentley raced by Eddie Hall in the 1930s and then again in 1950.

In The Great Gatsby, it was a murder weapon. In The Graduate, it was a symbol of youthful rebellion. In countless songs it has served as a metaphor for everything from sexuality to social status. It has shaped our cities and morphed our history. It has expanded our horizons and determined our politics.

It is the automobile.

No other invention has defined (and redefined) the past century more fully or more profoundly than the automobile, but there is a dearth of scholarly work focused on the car.

“The automobile is surprisingly under-studied by scholars,” said Professor Clifford Nass, a director of the Revs Program at Stanford, a new multidisciplinary center dedicated solely to the study of cars.

“But this cultural icon is worthy of – and overdue for – deep understanding on every front.”

As Michael Shanks, a Stanford professor of archaeology, puts it: “With the automobile, everyone has a story that deserves to be told.”

The kick-off event

On April 7, during an all-day event called “Celebrating the Automobile,” devotees, experts, collectors, archaeologists, social scientists, engineers, designers, humanists, legal scholars and race-car drivers will gather as Stanford launches the Revs Program to secure a place for the automobile in a broader cultural, historical and technological context.

“Our primary goal for the Revs Program at Stanford is to create a vital and much-deserved intellectual community around the car as technological and aesthetic artifact and cultural symbol,” said Nass.

Stanford was the logical home for the Revs Program, according to Sven Beiker, its executive director and a lecturer at Stanford’s School of Engineering. “Over the last few decades, as our cars have grown more complex, more computerized and more connected, Silicon Valley has become increasingly important for automotive innovation,” he said.

Stanford is involved in a range of automotive research, from autonomous cars to driver psychology to design, history and culture, he said.

An “auto” biography

The centerpiece of the April 7 kick-off event will be a 1933 Bentley, a sports racer that belonged to English sporting legend Eddie Ramsden Hall. The car is a 4.25-liter, boat-tailed beauty in British racing green that is the envy of car collectors the world over.

Experts in automotive history have been busy tracing its remarkable history to the last detail – part of the process known at the Revs Program as an “auto-biography,” which explores archaeology, psychology, engineering and design.

“These cars are works of art as well as marvelous and influential machines: they should be examined with the care of any great historical artifact – with exacting attention to detail and thorough documentation,” Nass said. “There is no center, anywhere, doing this breadth and depth of work.”

A hive of activity

The Revs Program will be a hive of interdisciplinary activity for studying every aspect of the automobile, including the seemingly endless stream of literature, film and song.

“Our challenge is to dive deep into a human-centered understanding of the design of the car – an understanding that gives priority to the experiences of people who engineer and drive them, love them and hate them,” Shanks said.

Added Nass: “The automobile is machine and metaphor. It is art. It is at the core of understanding the 20th century and the 21st. The Revs Program at Stanford is inspired by these challenges.”

I got thinking seriously about its themes this weekend at a fund-raising event organized by Castilleja School, where Helen teaches and Molly learns, on the theme of “Optimism” – engaging possibility. Optimism at the heart of social change.

Not inappropriate in these times.

Zainah Anwar shared with us her great effort to create a feminist caucus in Islam.

Jill Tarter gave us a cosmic perspective with thoughts about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life (an optimistic counter to “The Day the Earth Stood Still”).

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, foregrounded listening in any address to social hardship. Classic anecdote – he visits a senior resident in a run-down housing project, wanting to offer help. She takes him out into the neighborhood and asks him to describe what he sees. Cory lists the problems, hardship, poverty, urban ruin, and, as he does, she grows more and more impatient with him, eventually saying he can do nothing for her. Why? Because, if that is what he sees in the neighborhood, that is what he will perpetuate. He needs to see the potential and possibility.

We heard Tim Brown (IDEO) on design thinking and the crucial importance of empathy, collaboration and risk taking, making mistakes – all key components of optimism.

Elizabeth Vargas, Anchor journalist with ABC News, did a fine job of interviewing.

Anna Deavere Smith wound up the inspiring evening with three of her monologues (she interviews and listens to people then acts out their words). They were about the way that struggle is at the heart of optimism – a mid-west rodeo rider’s experiences of medical care (a flat rate of 1200 dollars to sort out the kidney the steer kicked), a medic in a charity hospital abandoned by state and federal agencies in the wake of hurricane Katrina, a feisty feminist governor of Texas facing cancer.

This is extraordinary “documentary theater”. Anna is precisely the “representative” – listening, respecting, conveying, authentically witnessing those whom she represents, in her own voice. It is a model of political representation

(Inspiring for the class – listen and witness in your design work, and also resonant for me, because my new book on the archaeological imagination has an extended discussion of eighteenth century debates about authenticity in the voice from the past.)

Fuel cap. Bentley B35AE, built at the Rolls Royce Derby works in 1933. Raced by Eddie Ramsden Hall in the 1930s and then again at LeMans in 1950. Now part of the Collier Collection in Naples, Florida.

My lab is working towards the launch of a new initiative at Stanford, the Revs Program, which will explore the history of car culture and design through the world’s finest collection of cars and library of automobility.

Archaeology of the contemporary past meets human centered design