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

in class today – project notebooks as presentation/manifestation

click on image to enlarge

Here is a write-up in Fast Company – Storytree Wants Families To Spin, Share, And Save Good Yarns.

Storytree: Remember the Time from StoryTree on Vimeo.

A panel discussion with Marisa Gallagher of CNN. The topic was the future of journalism and the place of narrative. Mobile Media Design – Is the Medium Still the Message?.

The contemporary crisis in journalism is simple. With everyone able to witness and publish their experiences of newsworthy events, what role is there for the skilled, and expensive, journalist who is likely not present at the event?

Marisa showed us CNN’s superb new project – Open Stories – where anyone can make their own (online digital) contribution to an ongoing news event. [Link]

The role of the (CNN) journalist is here to

curate content.

I reiterated my now well-worn distinction between narrative and storytelling,
where narrative is the structure or grammar of character, plot and event, and

storytelling is the performance of narrative.

Storytelling – the articulation of performer/storyteller, place/event, audience/commentators, where narrative structure is (potentially) adapted to suit the particular performance. Storytelling can accommodate deep critique of the familiar formulaic frames that we all know so well and which shut down our appreciation of the unique human experience of place and event.

The (future) journalist – enabling, curating such performative events.

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.)

Superb performance last night from Gorillaz at Oakland Arena.

Their latest, Plastic Beach, has an environmentalist theme, but avoids trite treatment of such a common and pressing matter of concern. (The contrast with the likes of movie Avatar is stark.)

Human concern –

- Damon Albarn, graphic artist Jamie Hewlett, the 2D virtual members of the group (the 3D holograms weren’t here in Oakland), and their various musical collaborators (including Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash; and Bobby Womack – powerfully and uncannily present) wove a dense collection of metaphors, media allusions, narrative clips, through a syncretic and surrealist multimedia mélange that prompted all manner of reflection and reaction on this latest manifestation of

the human condition – real merging with the imaginary, the everyday with the spectral, flesh with machinery, utopian idyll and abject garbage …

Not so much human impacts on the environment as co-evolutionary entanglement in an out-of-control shared world.

I do see archaeology everywhere; it’s a neurosis of mine (and that’s what this blog is about ). The Halloween accent – zombie flesheater backing vocals, everyone in living-dead gothic horror – highlighted what I call the archaeological – the grubby mess that remains of human aspiration, the collusion of sentiment and fabrication, the fabulous assemblage of people and our “things”, our decaying thing-like material constitution that makes us all precisely human -

- the object of archaeological interest

No easy happy-ending stories, hopes of a sunny outlook …

Superfast Jellyfish – fastfood goes toxic nuclear -

Martin Parr – the luminous abject

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

Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link]

This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is recreating the oldest extant play in western drama: Aeschylus’s The Persians. The combination of the story and the setting ,with the sun slowly disappearing over the hills, is overwhelming.
The Persians

The play itself is extraordinary. Produced in 472BC, only eight years after the Persians had been routed at Salamis, it is the only Greek tragedy to be drawn from recent history rather than from legend. Obviously Aeschylus was celebrating Athenian victory. But what is astonishing is his sympathy for the vanquished. Atossa, mother of the defeated Xerxes, views the wreckage of her country with mounting horror. The ghost of Darius, her husband, rises from the grave to announce that grief is man’s lot and must be borne. Even “war-lusting” Xerxes himself, guilty of impetuously taking his country to war, is finally seen as an abject object of pity.

What is impressive about Mike Pearson’s production, however, is the totality of the experience. We assemble in a square in this deserted military village where the four-strong male chorus is rejoicing in war and announcing “no one can withstand this tsunami of the Persians in full rage.” We then march up a hill to sit in front of a four-storey house with the front cut away; and there we see, both in live action and on video, the tragedy enacted. There’s a wonderful moment when Atossa arrives in a white car to a blaze of trumpets. But, once she is in the house, a hand-held camera moves in close to watch the distintegration of her hopes as the news from Salamis arrives. And, with typical Pearson invention, that news is conveyed direct by video satellite.

Pearson puts the piece in contemporary clothes but makes no attempt to relate it directly to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead he and the translator, Kaite O’Reilly, focus on how war destroys the very fabric of people’s identity. At the beginning, the chorus praise Xerxes as “fierce as a dragon scaled in gold”; by the end, they are threatening to beat him to death with a hammer. Even Darius, ritually raised from the dead, starts out in Paul Rhys’s performance as a gently melancholy ghost, only to turn into a wrathful figure who talks of Xerxes as “a mortal playing God to gods”.

Sian Thomas, left, also puts in a tremendous performance as the queen, a woman of fiery splendour reduced to ululating agony as the disasters mount and she cries “this is the peak of my misery”. And the four strong chorus, in its turn, descends from arrogant state apparatchiks to figures writhing in torment.

This superb production, with atmospheric music by John Hardy, literally takes one on a journey. And, as one went back down the hill after, strange lamentations emerged from the deserted houses. Shivering slightly, one moved on, still hearing the aftermath of war in one’s ears.

Michael Billington

Charles Spencer in The Telegraph [Link]

This is extraordinary, one of the most imaginative, powerful and haunting theatrical events of the year … This rarely performed masterpiece, which taps so powerfully into our present concerns about the West’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be an event however it was staged.

But the director of this National Theatre of Wales production, Mike Pearson, has achieved an extraordinary coup by staging it in the military village of Cilieni, from which civilians are usually barred. Built during the Cold War, and perched high in the Brecon Beacons, it has a church, houses, a village square. From a distance it looks idyllic. But the breezeblock buildings have never been homes, and there are burnt out tanks in the deserted streets. This deeply creepy place is used to teach troops how to fight in built-up areas, which gives Cilieni its alternative, acronymic name of FIBUA.

Another Guardian review from Charlotte Higgins – [Link]

Kate Bassett in The Independent – [Link]

Video from the Guardian – music by John Hardy – [Link] -

The other day I was reflecting upon storytelling in connection with the pragmatics of design, seeing both as performative – located, time-based, adaptive – [Link] (see also on Odysseus and Hermes – [Link])

Today Cliff Nass joined us in class for a “fireside chat” about his work on how people get on with things, interaction and design. (Cliff’s website – [Link])

We started with his latest findings about media multi-tasking (running email, Facebook, Twitter all at the same time while watching a movie) – basically people can’t multitask in this way without their performance crashing. No way.

Cliff takes an experimental and social-psychological approach. But it didn’t surprise me to find that he has also worked on narrative and storytelling in the design process, and in people’s interaction with things. His approach is through narratology – that formal and systematic way of analyzing narrative structure that I mentioned in that earlier post [Link].

I particularly liked the study he did of what kinds of story work best with venture capitalists (stories about the need for a product), and the kinds of story about innovation that get people in developing countries to change their ways (confirming my view, I think, that innovation always in some way implies a take on tradition).

The stories things tell – making sense of the world.

Cliff Nass

In class: Robin Gianattassio-Malle (Blue Egg Media, Producer KQED’s Forum, with Michael Krasny). She made the case made for journalism being a field of design. It led to a fascinating discussion.

Journalism (the best): design with dialog and narrative (Robin said “with dialog and story”). Aim: to affect an audience, to elicit reflection, to generate insight and inspire change.

Narrative is a key component of journalism. If journalism is a pragmatic time-based and iterative process – design – it is crucial to distinguish narrative from storytelling.

Here’s my personal take on the distinction, coming from narratology. It is by no means the orthodoxy, though my emphasis on performance is commonplace.

Narrative refers to a set of formal properties of an account of a series of events. These typically include plot, event, agency, characters, points of view, and narrative often involves some kind of analysis and interpretation, implied or explicit, of causation – why things happened the way they did. Narrative begs narratology, the study of the structure and function of narrative as a kind of linguistic and communicative form – the themes, conventions and semiotics of narrative.

Story is sometimes used to mean narrative. I would let the word keep its broader and often more informal references.

Storytelling, for me, refers to the mobilization of narrative; it is located, time-based, performative, a relation between storyteller and audience. The best storytelling is responsive to changing qualities of the performer-audience relationship, as the storyteller adapts story to the reactions of the audience. Audience play an active role in shaping storytelling; conversations frequently involve storytelling, as does monologue, recounting to ourselves the narrative of experience, memory, hope.

We all easily recognize basic narrative forms. I am very fond of Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the formal properties, the basic morphology, the narrative components, of folk tales. Hayden White argued beautifully that there are only a few basic narrative forms in historiography. Tilley and I tried to do something similar for archaeology, showing that only a couple of narrative structures have been developed to account for changes in prehistory. (Just think of how often we recognize the plot and the characters in a movie or novel.) Narrative tends to lock things down in making sense of things, offering form in chaos.

Have all narratives been told? No – because storytelling introduces enactment and mobilization, the contingencies of specific connections between narrative form and the everyday experience. Storytelling often introduces doubt and reflection upon the neatness of narrative, the way narratives fail to cover everything. Good storytelling creates space for the listener to speculate and look for connections – it pulls you in, such that the story can become your own and shed new light.

Can there be new design solutions? Yes, because design is pragmatic and opportunistic, attending to local needs and desires in iterative and adaptive relationships between designer, maker, and user. Just like storytelling.

Robin talked about interviews as improvizations. Questioning, listening, probing, synthesizing, asking questions again … . Improvization, performance, ethnography.

Consider the potentiality now of new media – the facility for co-created stories. The ways blogs are impacting traditional journalism.

Mike Pearson – Esgair Fraith 1996 – storytelling against narrative – Theatre/Archaeology