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?

[Link] [Link] [Link]

Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached such questions – viral phenomena, beyond the biological.

This is such a refreshing and vital perspective for those interested in the future of the (academic) Humanities, when a growing crisis about their scope and character is centered precisely upon how we conceive of human being and its study – see my recent entry on declining numbers of students in the Humanities – [Link] also, more generally – [Link]. Too many want to retrench the Humanities in letters and the arts, in (high) culture, emphasizing the old distinctions between the Humanities and Sciences, worlds of people versus nature, culture versus technology. Repeated is the old and simple exhortation: read books, because they delve the depths of the human condition. OK, but so limiting.

This year I finished, with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Christopher Witmore, our book Archaeology: the Discipline of Things (University of California Press), and my own The Archaeological Imagination (Left Coast Press). Both follow Ben’s suspicion of Cartesian dualisms and treat human being as distributed through rich and indeterminate networks of people-and-things. This doesn’t square with our current disciplines and questions the very validity of the Humanities, but in a positive way – because a new Humanities focused upon hybrid human being will be central to any address to real-world issues that includes people, which means just about any issue that matters. I have commented much about human-centered design thinking, as practiced in our d.school, as a manifestation of such a new Humanities [Link]. Ironically perhaps, and as we point out in our book, the corollary of human-centered engineering is thing-centered Humanities that understands our materiality.

The Archaeological Imagination explores the world of eighteenth-century antiquarians in the Borders between England and Scotland before radical distinctions set in between disciplines in the Humanities and Sciences – mélanges of memories and material remains, human landscapes and physical geologies, natural histories of local plants and animals, family genealogies, collections of manuscripts and artifacts, itineraries through pasts-in-presents. Even in what became something of homage to Walter Scott, the antiquarian inventor of the historical novel, I couldn’t help but think of Ben, and the book is dedicated to him.

Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. First Edition, 1765. Ex Libris Michael Shanks.

The title page: “the work of poets endures”. It is, ironically, the voice and music’s notes that carry history; buildings fall into ruin and our writings disperse on the wind. And when the poet is vates, prophet and visionary, reading signs, past and present, of what is to come.

A great antiquarian debate in the eighteenth century concerned the essential role of poetic conjecture in what we now call scientific modeling – and this included historical reconstruction.

I have been photographing these old apple trees for over ten years now. Relics of an outdated rural economy.

Location – Mountain View Road, Boonville, Anderson Valley, northern California. The valley is now increasingly dominated by vineyards.

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]).

I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson.

Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past.

The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in a variety of sourrces, and it has been the subject of extensive historical research. But what remains today of the missile sites that once were a focus of world interest? What does a World Crisis in ruin look like? In order to find new ways of looking at the Crisis we conducted archaeological fieldwork, looking for memories in the ground as well as in people’s minds. The pictorial results of our efforts are presented in this book.

Related is Persistent Memories by Elin Andreasssen, Hein B. Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen – extraordinary and haunting archaeological fieldwork in the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden on Svalbard:

Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

Richard (Hingley) – discussing things Roman

To the right – garderobe (latrine), with a finely corbeled chute.

Barnard Castle, Teesdale UK, one of the great medieval fortresses of the north

I have been waiting for it to happen.

I take photos of the textures of everyday life.

Everyday life is under challenge. Ireland is on the brink of ruin. “We are back to the old three ‘Ps’ Michael”, someone says to me – “Pints, Ponies … and I can’t remember the third” … Heritage comes back to haunt the Tiger Celtic economy, now no more.

I am in Dublin in an old bar, somewhat twee and conservative, but definitively Dublin.

I take a photograph and a couple complain. Not to me, they are sitting next to me, but to “The Management”. The photo is not of them, but they object to an invasion of “privacy” – in this public space. And I had not yet presented them with the release form securing my right to publish the picture (irony – this is a deeply personal visual note, a memory never intended for distribution).

Worlds breaking apart.

Perhaps appropriately.

OK – here it is.

Cars are topic of academic inquiry at Stanford University program – Sacramento News.

The Program was at Laguna Seca again this weekend – working on the Abarth Porsche:

This evening he lectured about the way his new institute is approaching heritage.

Heritage – the footprint of memory and oblivion – a metacultural process that accords value to things, places, experiences.

INCIPIT has been set up to research this process of establishing and transferring value – to find out how it works.

What makes this such a fascinating and powerful prospect is that INCIPIT is making a claim to be object-oriented, to stretch somewhat that term as it applies to software design. What I mean is that the research methodology is not taken directly from a disciplinary field such as sociology or economics, investigating, foe example, the relationship of heritage to class and demography, or analyzing the economic value of heritage sites in tourism. Instead, INCIPIT is setting out to bring together researchers, students and communities in collaborative application to actual cases of the (co-)construction of heritage “objects” – knowledges, experiences, sites, artifacts. Instead of research tasks and procedures that have their immediate origin in disciplinary methodology, INCIPIT is focused on heritage objects – practices, relationships, artifacts, representations – that collectively structure this transdisciplinary field. Practice as research [Link].

Heritage research is here being treated as a design process, the production of the past-in-the-present, in the way I have been describing such process in this blog [Link]. Involved is a distinctive turn away from heritage as cultural property, with attendant issues of access, ownership and stewardship, and toward heritage as dynamic and creative process that brings together quite diverse interests. Foregrounded is the need to understand just how people agree and differ in the production of heritage experiences – matters of representation, negotiation, and the translation of different interests [Link].

The pragmatics at the heart of design thinking, drawing upon ethnography and interpretive science [Link], is the means to pursue this end.

(This is the report on our previously noted visit – [Link])

Bianca Carpeneti and Michael Shanks visiting Alan Campbell MP at the House of Commons

Our current work on the archaeological project at Binchester UK includes a major focus on cultural resource management (CRM), as it gets called in the US. We’ve spent a great deal of time visiting people and sites around the Northeast in an effort to get a sense of the region and how it handles a landscape that is so saturated with historical and cultural sites. We welcome local volunteers (our key partner, Durham County Council, receives a grant for this from English Heritage). Our project is also somewhat unusual in that it is a research excavation (rather than prompted by real estate development), and serves as a summer school, while also explicitly aiming to develop cultural facilities (visitor access to the Roman past) in an economically depressed region. We are particularly interested in how an area — be it town, county, or region — incorporates stakeholder communities into this management process. We’re very much aware of recent moves in the world of heritage management, such as the Faro Convention (Council of Europe 2005) (see the entries last year in this blog [Link] and [Link]), that are shifting attention to sharing and disseminating cultural assets, as much as protecting and preserving tangible and intangible heritage. We want to explore how these changing attitudes play out in practice.

In pursuit of that, we went to London to meet with Alan Campbell MP for lunch in the House of Commons. As a member of the last Labour UK Government, a leading political representative in the north east of England, and a historian, Alan offered a valuable perspective on our research. Our discussion focused on local and regional identity, culture and economic development in the region. In particular, we were concerned with how these topics inform our excavation at Binchester and our archaeological survey of the Roman borders.

As we see it, CRM is fundamentally about the relation of economic interest to personal experience – the shape of people’s experiences, stories of people’s lives, how and what sources and records are acquired, what is made of these records. We believe these things direct an individual’s cultural values. Ultimately, we must ask: where are these different cultural values taking us?

We took up the topic of cultural value and put it to Campbell – what role for history and archaeology in regional development, in a region like the north east of England? To frame our discussion, it is worth highlighting several of the notable movements in the world of CRM, especially in the Northeast.

The likes of John Schofield, our colleague at the University of York and latterly with English Heritage, the government agency responsible for archaeology in the UK, have stressed the connections between heritage and tourism. Tourism is a service sector that contributes about £7.5 billion to the UK’s GDP (contrast the motor industry – £5.5 billion). Heritage is here quite an asset. We might aim to make Binchester a tourist honey-pot, along the lines, perhaps, of Vindolanda to the north. John also points to a more dynamic notion of heritage that we very much support.

The Faro Convention places a premium on heritage as cultural action, that is, how heritage is best utilized in a variety of contexts, from vocational training to local planning and sustainable management of the environment. Moreover, cultural enrichment is proposed to go hand in hand with economic development. This notion and its implications should not be overlooked; cultural enrichment is not an incidental by-product but a catalyst for economic progress. That said, we must also be realistic about the challenges facing such proposals. Below, we outline some of the most pressing ones.

We discussed two major impediments to the UK even signing the convention, never mind implementing its recommendations. The first is the significant opposition, particularly on the political right, to seeing the UK as part of a European cultural landscape in the first place; and notions of UK national sovereignty and identity are invoked against policies coming from European agencies.

One of the most significant challenges to initiatives like Faro, though, is the current economic downturn that so many institutions (public and private) are struggling with. When push comes to shove, it is much easier to cut spending for a visitor center than a nursery school. As a result, regional development agencies are being abolished and instead regional development in the UK is now being focused on public-business partnerships. This throws into sharper focus the choice: just who is going to pay for a new story of the Roman north? Different values indeed.

Alan particularly raised the question of how regions are changing in the UK as well as in Europe (typically taken as a continent of regions that don’t neatly fit into nation states). The Northeast is one of the few distinctive regions left in the UK, given social mobility, a post-industrial economy centered on financial services in the south east of England, and globalization. But just what is an authentic north east regional identity? Is it knowing the song “The Blaydon Races”, or cherishing stories of Roman frontiers, border reivers, and latter-day north eastern industrialists like the Stevensons and Armstrong? Alan rightly, in our view, questions aspects of “Geordie” identity, many of which can be argued as being quite artificial eighteenth and nineteenth century inventions (Hobsbawn and Ranger’s classic work “The Invention of Tradition” is very pertinent here [Link]), or connected with broader global historical trends, particularly industrialization. He is much more concerned to look beyond regionality to more fluid articulations that lie at the heart of identity politics. We like this.

Alan pointed to the crucial changes in class culture over the last 40 years that informed, for example, the rise of New Labour in the 1990s. The occupational class communities that lay behind the political parties of most of the twentieth century have dissipated. New Labour shifted attention from old and static notions of identity (shipbuilding = industrial working class = Labour) to aspiration – you could still be Labour while aspiring to achieve what were traditionally seen as middle class and even conservative ambitions and values. The promise was to give people the space to shape their own identities, freeing values from inherited ideologies, looking forwards not backwards, harnessing identity (class membership, political affiliation) to hope and improvement.

Crucial changes might well be echoed in areas besides class culture. The old extractive and manufacturing industries of the north east, which gave the region so much of its character, have gone. Alan’s constituency is North Shields, home to some of the great shipyards of the River Tyne. Shouldn’t a government contract for a new Royal Navy carrier come to the Tyne? But we live in a post-industrial world of a knowledge and experience economy. Ships are not just welded steel and great engines. It would make more economic sense to build the actual hull somewhere cheaper and instead have the IT systems, that are now the core of the military, designed and built in the UK. This requires fostering links between knowledge institutions like universities with business corporations as well as government agencies. A knowledge economy begs the question of the role of knowledge/research institutions and suggests attention to the transfer of knowledge.

Is there any room in this scenario for archaeological and historical heritage? Not as long as we continue to design and think of cultural projects in subject specific terms. Instead, we need to re-think the way that CRM happens and design projects that are more intimately tied to such broader trends, as Faro actually suggests.

A successful knowledge economy is tied to innovation and creativity. The related shift to delivering not products but experiences, in what Joe Pine first called our experience economy [Link], throws emphasis upon how people desire rich cultural experiences and will choose one product over another on that basis. Innovation, creativity, rich human experiences are rooted in certain kinds of environments or, more accurately, cultural ecologies. Some cities, for example, have long offered such a cosmopolitan milieu that fosters innovation through vivid cultural experiences and opportunities.

Creating such rich environments is the work of the urban planner and designer (see the recent entry on the City and Port of Rotterdam – [Link]). History and heritage, as well as research and educational institutions, are crucial components, as is widely acknowledged. Introduce a dynamic notion of identity, such as we have sketched, and there emerge some fresh suggestions for archaeological projects such as ours.

Let’s work through an example.

We give support at Binchester to a very active reenactment community – enthusiasts who, on their weekends, dress and act like Romans. Most are very concerned about accuracy and authenticity: they have just the right gear. The narrative frame for their performance is typically the old one of empire and military occupation – Roman soldiers and attendant communities at the frontier. In spite of the authenticity of the reenactment (accurate details of dress and accoutrement), what we often witness is, arguably, a misinterpretation of life in the Roman north, a misunderstanding of the military in antiquity. Certainly the likes of Richard Hingley (one of our Principal Investigators at Binchester) and David Mattingley are questioning the nature of the Roman empire. Richard has headed a project, Tales of the Frontier [Link], that explicitly aimed to share this reevaluation. Michael is writing a text book with Gary (Devore, another Binchester PI), presenting a new model of the ancient political community. We see Binchester as part of such a reevaluation.

We really need to ask – What has any story of Roman times got to do with (regional) identity in the Northeast? This question opens up many possible avenues, given that people construct identity within such a wide and varied network of encounters: as they actually experience themselves, their memories and identities, their commitment to local life, their sense of prosperity, or not. How do such stories enrich the local cultural ecology, in the sense above?

Icons of identity? Romans in the north (?) and the Durham Miners’ Gala (2010) – [Link]

Bianca is suspicious of focusing our heritage work on the presentation of collections of artifacts, with attendant stock narratives, shoehorning people into stories of “the way things were”, as authorized by academic authorities. If we connect identity to aspiration, and not “the way things were”, we should establish what people’s aspirations are and offer history and archaeology that informs and enriches the future. Telling the story of Binchester begins and ends with contemporary people.

This is precisely a political process of representing a constituency. Listening – so that our academic expertise in working on the evidence of past lives speaks to people now. More than listening – we are putting the case for deep ethnography of an archaeological project, locating it within its contemporary cultural landscape. And acting – delivering cultural goods fitted to enrich people’s experiences.

This is just that kind of process of human-centered design promoted by this blog [Link - see the category design matters]. We suggest that seeing archaeological heritage management as a design process gives actionable form to the growing acknowledgement that community involvement and the consultation of stakeholder interests are central to heritage management.

The past is only vital when future oriented. And, symmetrically, the past is the basis of vital innovation, creativity and cultural prosperity. We should see archaeological sites and collections less as objects of stewardship, subject to protection and conservation, and more as cultural infrastructures – places, resources, facilities that foster creativity and innovation, because they help orient our aspirations and hopes for the future.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London was established to inspire industrial design. In our Revs Program at Stanford [Link] and [Link] we aim, within the context of our engineering and design schools, to create a car museum that is simultaneously a design studio. This is how disciplines like history and archaeology can connect with a knowledge and experience economy – the academy as a studio for human centered design, and where the human necessarily involves the academic Humanities and Arts.

Textures of everyday life? An interior at Beamish Museum of the Living North [Link] [Link]

Thus far, our exploration of the northeast continues to affirm the idea that it is the “human-centered”-ness, the humanity of the past that makes it resonate today. The reenacting Romans we met this year at Binchester were actually more interested in the textures of everyday life than in an historical narrative of conquest and occupation. They were humorous and very human, rather than historical, in their performances. At Beamish, the Living Museum of the North [Link], there is little reference to chronology or historical drama in a visit to its reconstructed farms and town from the last couple of centuries; instead there is a very poignant and human experience of lifeways and quotidian texture now lost and gone. Andrew Birley, heading the excavations at Vindolanda [Link], has focused the new site museum less on the history of the Romans in the north, and more on just these kinds of texture. Because this is the humanity of the past that connects and enriches our appreciation of what we have, what we have lost, and what we stand to gain.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it well in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941), their diatribe against the rationalizations of modernity and the coming horrors of European world war:

What is needed is not the preservation of the past, but the redemption of past hopes.