Historical textures of the everyday.

I first wrote about Beamish in my book with Chris Tilley – ReConstructing Archaeology (1987) [Link] Focusing on the narrative that frames the museum, I hated the clichéed, static, and ideological experience it presented of the north-east of England.

There is actually little narrative. For better or worse. What now impresses me is the wealth of incidental quotidian texture.

A remarkable culinary experience in Rotterdam [Link]

The kind of exploration of qualities of experience I keep going on about.

This is the Humanities (or should be!!)

Some summary points from my keynote.

How could I not respond to Kenya Hara’s wonderful opening keynote and his emphasis on the dialectic of making and its deep connection with human being? [Link]

The range of research techniques and methods that I have seen gathered under the headings of design thinking, design research, design anthropology, ethnography in industry and similar terms is truly impressive (a neat introduction is the IDEO method cards – [Link] available as an iPhone App – [Link]). The expertise of so many practitioners is exemplary. Academic anthropology can look very narrow and complacent in comparison.

I followed Kenya in focusing less on these processes of research and more on the object of ethnographic research – people, things, places. After all, a most significant drive to research is to improve human-centered design.

I have set myself something of a mission over the last year or so to raise questions about just what the human in human-centered design is. And I suggest that there’s no better place to start than with the Humanities, that treasure house of study of human qualities, experiences and cultural achievement. Questions then of ontology – of human being.

Corinthian aryballos (7th century BCE) – a total social fact – the distribution of human being through things

Archaeology encompasses the Arts and Humanities, the Social, Human and Natural Sciences, and offers a long term perspective. I told a few archaeological stories about things like this little perfume jar (to be found also on my wiki web site – [Link])

Message – think of things 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

I ended with an exhortation to keep in focus the human in human-centered design – a purpose, a care to enrich human being.

Vesalius (16th century) – inhabitation – dissection reveals the architecture of human life, set in the ruins of the past

Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later.

Birky Hill

I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty years ago – his lifetime’s recording of Northumberland’s rock art is available online – [Link] See also the superb work of the Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot (NADRAP) Project (managed by Northumberland and Durham County Councils and funded by English Heritage). Their website and database (English Rock Art – ERA) build on and incorporate the Newcastle University Beckensall Archive.

INORA, the International Newsletter on Rock Art is available online – [Link]

Of course, Victorian London didn’t look like this, but maybe it should have?

Surprisingly perhaps, the official film stills don’t capture this look:

Victorian backstreets

Holmes needed a shave

But the posters for the movie are completely in such an aesthetic:

Maybe this is a kind of media quiddity? The habitus of a medium, as I have described it – [Link].

A good long while ago I commented on the family photos of a friend and the way they seemed to embody the look of changing pasts – [Link]. Not just the changing styles and quotidian “period” detail, but the way a camera, its lens and film, translate a moment, an event, a life, a world.

More notes – the color of nostalgia, the patina of preservation, the innocence of the rural, and rural nostalgia.

Landscapes of the 1980s and 1990s will be remembered in the saturated color space of Fuji Velvia – [Link] and [Link], even when the images were not produced using this film.

I have been working on a portfolio of photos I had put to one side. They are of the old covered markets in Thessaloniki. I was visiting Kostas Kotsakis in April 2006.

More at archaeographer.com

Boontberry Farm – organic produce