“Stanley” and “Junior” had competed and won two DARPA Challenges to build autonomous vehicles – cars capable of driving themselves in complex real-world environments.

(See Stanford Racing and Sebastian’s web pages – also DARPA’s own report.)

DARPA – the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency – only pursues radical innovation. Revolutionary, deep innovation. “DARPA hard” has become shorthand for seemingly impossible, intractable problems. DARPA hands out several billion dollars of sponsorship a year. Its projects can claim key roles in the development of the internet, user interface design, as well as a host of military technologies.

How does DARPA generate innovation? Plenty have their own answer to this question, but there have been few serious in-depth studies.

Today I heard Tamara Carleton present her doctoral research into the role of “vision” in DARPA innovation. I’ll let her present all the details of her fascinating work, but something grabbed me. It was that “consensus” plays little part. Peer review, for example, where experts are called on to criticize and judge the quality of research, only stifles innovation. This doesn’t mean that experts aren’t needed, just that vision and risk-taking leadership in the face of orthodox consensus are crucial to radical (technological) change.

I think this is more than a recap of the likes of Thomas Kuhn’s notion of normal science, established and institutionalized practice and discourse that excludes even the possibility of new questions.

There’s lots of caveats, of course. Nevertheless I was reminded of an argument I had with my Professor at Cambridge. Towards the end of his career, Grahame Clark reflected on a broad view of human history. He had produced a pioneering work of comparative history in his “World Prehistory” – first published in the 60s (and still available [Link]). In his work “Symbols of Excellence” (1986) he considered precious materials and art objects, connecting them to hierarchical and class society. He basically argued that “fine art”, original human creativity, usually occurs in highly structured and strongly divided societies.

This is what I took issue with. I think creativity and innovation are quite common. They are part of being human. What needs explanation is not why innovation occurs, but why there isn’t more.

Another aspect of Clark’s argument occurred to me again today – that of the recurring role of elite groups of individuals in creating history itself. History was invented by the kings of the Near Eastern city states. Lists of goods and lists of deeds, the topics of early writing systems, turn into the telling of the story of a king’s great deeds, surpassing all others, going where none had dared before, challenging, original, innovative.

It’s actually very difficult to establish just how innovative DARPA has been. Innovation comes with a story told. (See my comment on Cliff Nass’s work on narratology in venture capital – [Link])

Wider and familiar implications concern the origin of innovations – often coming from peripheries, or from sources considered wayward, even deranged by the majority. Chuck House, who was examining the dissertation with us, recalled Douglas Engelbart, pioneer of many computer innovations, including the mouse, often funded by ARPA (DARPA’s earlier incarnation), and quite barmy in the eyes of his funders.

I am at the Getty Center today at a symposium organized by Alain Schnapp. Some very distinguished experts brought together to discuss antiquarians.

Antiquarians?

Those fascinated, often passionate, about the collection, description, classification of the remains of the past. Artifacts and monuments, landscapes even, as evidence connecting us with the past.

Antiquarianism sounds arcane. It is. Not least because it got such a bad press. By the nineteenth century, calling someone an antiquarian was an insult, inferring they were an amateurish scholar at best, bookish, myopic, neurotically obsessed with dry and dusty relics of no interest to anyone else.

But a major reevaluation is taking place. This symposium is part of a deep rethinking of the history of antiquarian thought. The topic is nothing less than people’s attitudes towards the past, and particularly the presence of the past with us here now, and how we might deal with the remains. There’ll be a book later, backed by the Getty, a comparative history, comparing and contrasting antiquarians across different cultures.

Broadly we are dealing with people’s attachment to things and places, relationships with the life of things. It’s about memory, personal and collective, the way things make us who we are, traces and vestiges of times gone past, ruin and decay, entropy and mortality. Sarah Morris identified three key components: relics, reverence, revival. Collecting, organizing, caring for things, restoring and reviving. Major matters of common human concern.

My contribution is called “An antiquarian and his dog: Walter Scott in Pompeii”, looking at how all this was worked out in the Scottish borders at the end of the eighteenth century.

Here’s how I started:

Pompeii, February 16 1832.

Walter Scott, poet, literary antiquarian, magistrate, collector, best-selling inventor of the historical novel, was visiting the excavations in the company of William Gell, antiquarian, topographer, and representative of the Society of Dilettanti of London. Gell was in pain with his gout. Scott was dying and had to pushed around the ruins in a wheelchair.

Gell’s diary (reported by Lockhart, Scott’s biographer) contains the following entry:

“… I was sometimes enabled to call his attention to such objects as were the most worthy of remark. To these
observations, however, he seemed generally nearly insensible, viewing the whole and not the parts, with the eye, not of an antiquary, but a poet, and exclaiming frequently—” The City of the Dead,” without any other remark.”

Pompeii was, of course, newly excavated: the spectacular, tangible and evocative remains of catastrophe, trauma, and aftermath.

Scott talked more about Gell’s dog – it reminded him of his own back at Abbotsford on the Tweed in Scotland.

Why was it simply the city of the dead to Scott?

Rather than pursue any interest in Roman antiquities, Scott, again according to Lockhart and his own diary, feverishly collected local manuscripts and started writing a novel about bandits!

Why was Scott, whose antiquarian imagination fired up a generation of readers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not interested in the most spectacular of archaeological ruins?

You can find my answer here –

For me antiquarian thought is distinctively contemporary. We can see this argument made so well by Walter Benjamin, his take on the figure of the collector, the ruin of history in modernity, his great final project, the Passagenwerk, to create an (antiquarian) history of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, composed as an archival commentary on a cultural miscellany.

I came to work on antiquaries because of my fieldwork in the borders, centered on our new excavations of the Roman town of Binchester (VINOVIVM.org). Put to one side the caricatures and, in antiquarianism, you find the most intelligent and creative of approaches to studying a region – addressing questions of how you represent a region, handling sources, remains, texts, memories, echoes, mortality, people’s impacts on the land and on history, stories and narratives.

Peter Miller (see his superb study of Peiresc) summed up with a very astute point that the academic marginalization of antiquarian study in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is precisely that, a particular partisan exclusion from the academy of certain interests, attitudes and practices. Antiquarianism didn’t go away. It wasn’t a pre-modern and inferior precursor to archaeology, geography and cultural studies. Antiquarianism is more alive than ever. Just we don’t call it antiquarianism.

Actually, I think I’m a neo-antiquarian.

Members of CARS (Center for Automotive Research at Stanford), now including myself, talked about the past, present, and future of auto-mobility. Great presentations came from Sebastian Thrun (robotic cars and Google), Chris Gerdes (driving at the limits – he brought his drive-by-wire Audi TT-S) and Cliff Nass (“the John Nash of the group”).

Clinton Stark has run a very entertaining (and informative) summary on his blog – StarkSilverCreek – All Things West Coast.

“The one hour presentation wasn’t so much a soup-to-nuts prognostication of all things cars, as it was an entertaining cross-section of what researchers are working on deep within the Stanford labs …

Some sound bites astonished me. For example, “Even during peak, 92% of a highway remains unoccupied.” We learn that this inefficiency results from the infrastructure required to support modern roadways. Also, automotive deaths and injuries impact global GDP anywhere from 1-3% annually.

The stakes are no doubt high. So what would the panelists propose about the future of autos? And, I wondered: how long would it take before the conversation turned to the electric vehicle?

Turns out that latter question would not be explored until the session had almost ended. Thankfully! It was a breath of fresh air. Not because I don’t have interest in electric and hybrid cars, or believe they are a potential part of a larger environmental solution, I just wanted to hear something different for a change.

Each of four panelists was given about 5-10 minutes to present. Then the session concluded with an informative Q&A moderated by the Jeremy Clarkson-like archaeologist (of course!) Michael Shanks …”

Our point – human centered design covers engineering, psychology, math, computer science … and, yes, archaeology!

“I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”

Manhattan

(see also archaeography.com)

And the romance of the railway.

Just found a wonderful site called “Forgotten relics” – it has a page on a favorite village of mine (the castle straight out of Scott’s “Marmion”) on a branch line in the Scottish borders – Norham Station.

See also on Thomas the Tank, Ealing comedies and technicolor – [Link]

This evening – a group of friends and colleagues discussing education and schooling with Tony Wagner. Our warm and welcoming hosts were Joan Lonergan and John Merrow at Castilleja School.

Topics: skills needed for life today – creativity, problem solving – the challenge of overcoming disciplinary divisions – entrepreneurial skills and business in a globalist 21st century – are US schools and the academy failing to prepare students?

Tony has made a strong case for schooling to shift from teaching to tests to teaching skills – have a look at his great books [The Global Achievement Gap] and [Making the Grade: Reinventing America's Schools].

Tony Wagner’s Seven Surivival Skills for Careers, College, and Citizenship in the 21st Century

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

2. Collaboration Across Networks and Leading by Influence

3. Agility and Adaptability

4. Initiative and Entrepreneurship

5. Effective Oral and Written Communication

6. Accessing and Analyzing Information

7. Curiosity and Imagination

We talked about innovation. Entrepreneurial skills look to be an instinctive human trait, reckoned Paul (Holland).

My response – creativity may well indeed be a human trait. Another way of putting this is that it’s not creativity that we need to explain in human history, but why there isn’t more. Of necessity, people remake their worlds constantly in every smallest act. We are born into a world that makes us what we are – tangible environments, intangible values – yet we also constantly (re)make that world through living it.

So what hinders innovation and change?

Sometimes it’s schooling.

Design thinking encompasses many of Tony’s skills. As Bernie (Roth) says – “design is living” [Link]

I shared a concern of mine expressed a few times recently in this blog – [Link] – that design, as one field that emphasizes innovation and creativity, can be too focused on behavior, on what people do and how they perform. And Tony’s list of crucial life skills is quite abstract: it similarly makes little reference to culture, human values, history and the qualities of human life.

Human centered design, for that is what design thinking is, should be critically asking – just what is the human? Living is more than what people do.

Tim (Brown), of design consultancy IDEO, asked what difference such questioning would make to design practice. He posed a great question – aren’t designers just the stone masons of the modern world?

Absolutely! There’s a double edge to this observation. On the one hand masons may indeed get on with the job, apply their skills to stone and build, leaving questions of life and cosmos to philosophers, theologians, academics. On the other hand, the masons responsible for the cathedrals of mediaeval Europe embodied human vision and divine utopia in their work in stone. Richard Sennett has captured the deeply human character of work in his book The Craftsman – hand, heart and mind combined.

Isn’t every act of making an argument, better or worse, for a world immanent or transcendent, an argument for “the good life”?

To understand creativity, problem solving, innovation, collaboration, I argue we should look as much to culture. Culture – processes of making and building worlds, the core of human creativity.

To our list of crucial human skills should be added

cultural literacy

Of course, this then begs the question of just what cultural literacy is! Linda (Yates), instantly connected it with the way language carries culture, identity and experience (see the image below).

And how can human-centered design encompass such expanded and often contentious notions of what it means to be human?

Our work in Stanford Strategy Studio aims to bring Humanities insight into what it is to be human to bear on matters of common pressing concern, such as environmental change, education, globalism.

I talked about the implementation of broad principles and policies in heritage management, represented in the likes of the convention, at the fabulous new Gallo-Romeins Museum at Tongeren (the size and splendor of the museum a testament to the significance of the past and of “heritage” in this town of but 30,000 people) – [Link]

Binchester – VINOVIVM.org

I presented a pragmatics for running field projects. I explained the idea of such a pragmatics in my commentary on our team taught class in the d.school [Link]

My argument is that archaeology is a creative field, working on what remains of the past – designing the past. The convention supplies a framework, an attitude  towards participatory heritage, one that, albeit implicitly, recognizes the multivalency of the concept. It is a kind of design brief. Archaeological field projects are not only about researching the past. They are typically connected with much broader agendas relating to regional development, conservation, legislative instruments that protect the past, aspirations, stands taken in a cultural politics, like the Faro Convention, to recognize the importance of the past to the present and future, to enrichen, and to open it up to people.

Scientific methodology isn’t therefore enough. Archaeological project design is always located, “actualistic”, dealing with specific conjunctures between past and present. It needs to be iterative and adaptive, a flexible process.

Here is a synopsis of the pragmatics I presented for our Binchester field project, the imagery and a copy of the Faro Convention – [Link].

Faro – (Spanish, Italian, Portuguese) – lighthouse (after the Pharos of Alexandria, with its cultural beacons – the Library and Museum).

Faro, Portugal – The European Convention of Faro: Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (Council of Europe, 2005) – [Link].

FARO – the NGO cultural agency/consultancy in Flanders dedicated to promoting cultural heritage within the spirit and terms of the FARO convention.

Faro – an extraordinary sweetened and quintessentially Belgian ale based upon spontaneously fermented lambic.

I am back after a visit to Brussels and Tongeren (Limburg, Flanders, or technically, the Flemish Community) exploring the future of heritage – that powerful and contentious notion of cultural legacy.

Questions about the role of the past in the present, what to do with historical and archaeological sources and sites, museum collections, and especially in this part of the world, questions of the links between nation state and people, the region and “Europe”. Policy and agendas in this most important of cultural fields.

I was with FARO, the agency in the Flemish Community charged with integrating cultural heritage policy, stimulating qualitative management, long term sustainability and the unlocking of the cultural heritage. FARO is at the heart of a network of cultural heritage organizations designed to cultivate, to represent, to acknowledge and to valorise the different ways the public participates in and experiences cultural heritage. Under Marc Jacobs they are doing a superb job across several hundred museums organizations, local history societies, community groups. I heard about a year of events organized around the notion of “the fake”, a massive regional assessment of just what “heritage” is in the Flemish Community, managed through a new and open online database, plans for the annual week of taste – celebrations of cuisine and locality.

In particular FARO looks to implement the Council of Europe’s Faro Convention of 2005, as its name suggests. This is human-centered heritage (as distinct from focused upon sites and collections), particpatory, dynamic and negotiated, with cultural values and memory practices at the heart of quality of life and sustainable society, that is, looking forward as much as back. My long-standing argument that archaeology is as much about the future as the past.

For my part, I talked about the archaeological imagination, animating the archive, and ways of cocreating cultural heritage.

This was the first time I encountered the detail of the Faro Convention. It is quite a visionary document, very much worth sharing and discussion.

Not a long document: here are the highlights, as I see them.

Preamble
Recognising the need to put people and human values at the centre of an enlarged and crossdisciplinary concept of cultural heritage;

Emphasising the value and potential of cultural heritage wisely used as a resource for sustainable development and quality of life in a constantly evolving society;

Recognising that every person has a right to engage with the cultural heritage of their choice, while respecting the rights and freedoms of others, as an aspect of the right freely to participate in cultural life enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and guaranteed by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966);

Convinced of the need to involve everyone in society in the ongoing process of defining and managing cultural heritage;

…

Article 1 Aims

c. emphasise that the conservation of cultural heritage and its sustainable use have human development and quality of life as their goal;

d. take the necessary steps to apply the provisions of this Convention concerning:
– the role of cultural heritage in the construction of a peaceful and democratic society, and in the processes of sustainable development and the promotion of cultural diversity;

Article 2 Definitions

a. cultural heritage is a group of resources inherited from the past which people identify, independently of ownership, as a reflection and expression of their constantly evolving values, beliefs, knowledge and traditions. It includes all aspects of the environment resulting from the interaction between people and places through time;

Article 3 refers to different forms of cultural heritage that together constitute a shared source of remembrance, understanding, identity, cohesion and creativity.

Article 5 – Cultural heritage law and policies

The Parties undertake to:

a. recognize public interest, enhancing value through identification, study, interpretation, protection, conservation and presentation;

c. ensure, in the specific context of each Party, that legislative provisions exist for exercising the right to cultural heritage as defined in Article 4;

d. foster an economic and social climate which supports participation in cultural heritage activities;

e. promote cultural heritage protection as a central factor in the mutually supporting objectives of sustainable development, cultural diversity and contemporary creativity;

Section II – Contribution of cultural heritage to society and human development

Article 7 – Cultural heritage and dialogue

The Parties undertake, through the public authorities and other competent bodies, to:

a. encourage reflection on the ethics and methods of presentation of the cultural heritage, as well as respect for diversity of interpretations;

d. integrate these approaches into all aspects of lifelong education and training.

Article 8 – Environment, heritage and quality of life

Here is recognition of the complementarity of cultural, biological, geological and landscape diversity

and 8c refers to the importance of “place”

Article 9 is about sustainability – cultural heritage as an essential component of change

d. … promote the use of materials, techniques and skills based on tradition, and explore their potential for contemporary applications;

Section III – Shared responsibility for cultural heritage and public participation

This section is about the importance of participation and access, especially among young people – including encouraging constructive criticism of policy.

Article 13 – Cultural heritage and knowledge

a. facilitate the inclusion of the cultural heritage dimension at all levels of education, not necessarily as a subject of study in its own right, but as a fertile source for studies in other subjects;

b. strengthen the link between cultural heritage education and vocational training;

c. encourage interdisciplinary research on cultural heritage, heritage communities, the environment and their inter-relationship;

Article 14 – Cultural heritage and the information society

The Parties undertake to develop the use of digital technology to enhance access to cultural heritage and the benefits which derive from it, by:

a. encouraging initiatives which promote the quality of contents and endeavour to secure diversity of languages and cultures in the information society;

This begs development of participatory, collaborative and social software and networks.

Implementation?

Broad and visionary, yes, with questions immediately raised of implementation. That’s what we are trying in the Binchester project, and this is what I talked about at Tongeren, with a group of heritage managers and academics at the Gallo-Romeins Museum [Link] and [Link].

Brussels.

Here to explore European initiatives in cultural heritage policy – [Link].

The central (medieval) square – destroyed by French bombardment in 1695, rebuilt by 1699, sacked by revolutionaries in the late 1700s, heavily restored in the late nineteenth century.

Considered something of a fake by the natives of Brugge and Antwerp, with their “authentic” medieval squares.

An undecidable – fitting neither side of an opposition such as authentic | fake.

[Link - the Hill of Tara]

Steam-powered computer mice, clockwork hearts, brass goggles, and the latest state-of-the-art eye-pod?

Enter “steampunk”. Subject of an exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, UK.

My daughter Molly is familiar with all this – “The Subtle Knife” was one of her favorite novels.

Think too of Jules Verne, and the way he imagined the future.

Counterfactuals combined with the futurology of earlier times. Retro futures. Anachronistic utopias. When archaeological materialities meet science fiction.

Here is the museum’s introduction to the fabulous exhibition of contemporary art.

Exhibition blog – [Link]

Staying with Christina (Unwin) and Richard (Hingley).

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Checking out Hadrian’s Wall for our summer tour.

Chorography – checking out the car parks!

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

Anthropometrics – part of human factors design. Its roots lie in nineteenth century anthropological science, and forensics. Measuring the distances between eyebrows for evidence of criminality, correlating shapes of skulls with ethnicity, classifying fingerprints to aid forensic detection.

Today Nicole (Coleman) sent me news of the reopening of the Museo Cesare Lombardo in Turin.

Here’s how Nautilus describes it:

The Museum of Criminal Anthropology, dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, has reopened after years of restoration and access to specialist researchers only. The institution was founded by Lombroso in 1898 under the name “the Museum of Psychiatry and Criminology”, documenting his beliefs and research into detecting criminality through physiognomy.

The 400 skulls in his collection, including one belonging to the brigand Giuseppe Villella, were used by Lombroso to develop his theory of the “median occipital fossa”, a cranial anomaly that he believed contributed to deviant behaviour.

On show are drawings, photos, criminal evidence, anatomical sections of “madmen and criminals” and work produced by criminals in the last century. The exhibits also include the Gallows of Turin, which were in use until the city’s final hanging in 1865 and the possessions of a man known as White Stag, a renowned impostor who convinced Europe he was a great Native American chief. “But it is not a museum of horrors,” insisted Giacomo Giacobini, coordinator of the “Museum of Man” project that the Lombroso collection will be part of. Rather, the museum is intended to recall positivistic era in science, in which Turin played a key role, starting with Cesare Lombroso’s work.

Deathmask

The creation of the museum collections involved extensive interdisciplinary research by Lombroso in the fields of criminology, anatomy, psychiatry,psychology, sociology, ethnology, anthropology,linguistics, law, fine arts and medicine.

Lombroso’s own head is also on display, a century down the line, perfectly preserved in a glass chamber.

[Link: the official museum website]

[Link: Wikipedia on Anthropometrics]

From Alphonse Bertillon’s Identification Anthropométrique (1893)

Nicole picked this up from a fascinating site – Morbid Anatomy – its topics include medical museums, anatomical art, collectors and collecting, cabinets of curiosity, the history of medicine, death and mortality, memorial practice, art and natural history, arcane media … . Wonderful!

A wonderful talk this evening from Alain Schnapp in our Archaeology Center.

It was about “ruin” as an intellectual artifact.

Through a kaleidoscope of quotes and vignettes about ruin from antiquity to modernity, Alain reflected upon broad human experiences at the heart of our sense of history, memory practices, collection, temporality.

Goethe among the ruins of humanity’s childhood

I was tempted to synthesize, from this mélange, some elements of a theory of ruin.

Vectors

Articulation Between past and present; flows and continuities, also interruptions. Actuality, as the conjunction of past/present. Temporal topology, the non-linear folding of pasts and presents. Presences, and absences, voids.

Materialization Artifacts and architectures as the metonymic and metaphoric materialization of past in the present.

Inscription Epigraphy, engraving, iconography as a particular presence of the past. Token or icon? Textual sources as ruins. The contrast between inscription and mute relics.

Categorization Catalogs of things. Attributions to date, place, to the makers in systems of order that make sense of entropic ruins and fragments.

Quantification Just how much remains? Can there be too much memory? Ruin and letting go of the past.

Collection Gatherings of ruins and fragments. The collection as microcosm.

Authentication Is the relic genuine, or a fake? What is such authenticity?

Historicity The power to preserve, to commit to memory, to narrative; active processes of recovery, conservation and destruction or elimination. Historicity as our sense of place in historical narrative. The role of hindsight. Agency – the ability to articulate past and present, to (re)construct, to repair the ruin.

Reflection Self consciousness of time and entropy. The ruin as memento mori.

Theatre/archaeology – the re-articulation of fragments of the past as real-time event – from Brith Gof Theatre – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995 – [Link]

[Link] - The Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria – my project with Alain and colleagues.

Everyday detritus – Roman – the indeterminate quotidian

Today I ran a session about archaeology and design. (A tighter focus than my recent case for pragmatology and pragmatogony – [Link])

I think I took on too much, tried to say too much. There’s so much ground work that needs to be laid before we can communicate across the spaces that separate the likes of industrial design and archaeology. I decided to pull together some rather abstract points.

Here they are, with something of a case study (an ancient Corinthian perfume jar).

1. Archaeology is as much a design process itself as it is the study of the history of design – archaeologists work with what is left of the past to make knowledges, experiences, narratives … . This is not a superficial observation; it involves the pragmatic methodologies and disposition of archaeology, captured in the concept of abductive reasoning.

2. Archaeology best understands things through a pragmatic methodology, both analytic and interpretive, of immersion in medias res. Like design thinking.

3. The key concept of assemblage. The thing as a gathering. The primacy of dispersal and distribution. You have to do a look of work to understand needs and functions.

4. The ubiquitous character of human innovation and creativity. Rooted in the duality of structure, that society is both the medium and outcome of human practice. Every action reproduces society, and simultaneously holds the potential of change.

5. Innovation and creativity cannot be understood without relation to the active processes of tradition. Given the creativity of human practice, tradition is the active management and suppression of change.

6. Fallacies of expression and context. Things are active and don’t just express something else like society or culture of the intentions of their maker. Making things makes people. Focus on processes – not objects with attributes. [Link]

7. Indeterminacy and underdetermination. Making is underdetermined by the designer’s intentions and knowledge of the world and of people. Our human lifeworlds are not reducible to causal and determinate systems.

Much of what I have to say can be found summarized in a piece I wrote called “Nine archaeological theses on design” – [Link] Included are two detailed case studies.

Here is one. I know I am off the central point of our class- to share the process of design thinking directed at changing behavior. But our mission is also to cross borders and pull together diverse approaches to our world of things. There’s a lot of ground work to be laid. We have to take diversions to get to our goal. I hope this one is worthwhile. It describes research I did in the 1990s. It is kind of a reverse-engineering of an ancient perfume jar.

It is about the work that things can perform in changing the world. Things connect; and the task of a designer is to manage these articulations.

The Macmillan aryballos – a perfume jar

Art and material culture have long been seen as direct evidence of the cultural miracle of ancient Greece. Corinth, on the isthmus of Greece, in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, was one notable place in this time of urbanization, as city states crystallized across the Mediterranean, and within only a few decades. Conventional accounts place the Corinthians at the heart of this process of innovation. This has been seen as finding expression in material culture: the potters of Corinth produced high quality goods for an export market (even if we question the existence then of a fully functioning international market, the fine wares do certainly travel far and wide). Corinthians have also been seen to be at the forefront of the developments in political economy, with their early centralized tyranny. And a vanguard in the fine arts: since the late eighteenth century ancient Greek ceramics has been treated as fine art. The Corinthians led the way with a resurgence of figurative design, drawing on Near Eastern forms and schemata.

This research project of mine aimed to understand the design of ceramics at what has been taken as a pivotal historical juncture—the beginnings of classical Greek art.

By 750 BCE the walls of a typical wine cup made in Corinth were eggshell thin, pale buff and covered with ruled black lines, reserved spaces for triangles, outlined lozenges, schematic water birds lined in soldier files. It was a tight and terse visual vocabulary. The firing process, to effect dark on light surface, required careful manipulation of kiln atmosphere. With regulated techniques, expert kiln management and using multiple brushes and a turntable, the potters had the making of ceramics well worked out—risk and experiment minimized in producing the finest wares of their time.

And then, within a generation, the potters did something radically new. First, they made miniatures a specialty, particularly the famous perfume jars (aryballoi) that were sent all over the Mediterranean to be dedicated as gifts to gods in temple sanctuaries, and to be laid down with the dead in so many colonial and provincial cemeteries. Second, they began painting polychrome figures free hand and with details incised through the paint. At risk of messing up the design with the slip of the super-fine brush dipped in clay slip, the potters made daring displays of technical facility in tiny scenes of animals, monsters, men fighting, stylized flowers. In the terms of David Pye, they shifted from a workmanship of certainty to one of risk.

The changes

This is conventionally termed Protocorinthian pottery. The ubiquity of the Protocorinthian perfume jar, the aryballos, makes it a type fossil and chronological index for much of the Mediterranean in the mid first millennium BCE. Find an aryballos and its distinctive style will give you the date of the find spot.

Previous study has been almost entirely within an art historical tradition, with Protocorinthian positioned in the developmental sequence of Greek art as a new inception of figurative design. Most of this work has aimed to identify chronological sequence through the comparison of stylistic traits. Protocorinthian is thus phased as early, middle and late, and takes special position in the traditional ancient Greek design sequence of geometric, orientalizing, archaic, and classical, as geometric receives external inspiration on the way to classical florescence. The figurative scenes have attracted iconographic interpretation—attempts to identify characters and narratives, especially from Greek myth, through comparative examples. This has assumed a separation of iconography and decoration, certain scenes bearing meaning, others, especially the floral patterns, treated as devoid of meaning—”decorative”. Following paradigms of nineteenth century connoisseurship, attempts have also been made to relate the stylistic sequence to individual artists; the orthodox art historical narrative here is one of the genius of Greek artists reconfiguring the stylistic vocabularies of the stagnant and despotic Near East.

I started my research with the stylistic sequence. Unfortunately I found the fine chronologies suspect due to a lack of independent stratigraphical substantiation (a problem of context), and because the phasing was dependent upon a presupposition of stylistic development (early, mature, late) handed down from the kind of eighteenth century art history popularized by Winckelmann and others. Understanding design in orthodox archaeological treatment of classical ceramics is dependent upon iconology and a model of art workshops commonly associated with post renaissance art history, as well as Beazley’s Classical archaeological connoisseurship in the tradition of Morelli. I proposed that the conventional categorization of Protocorinthian be abandoned and the iconology be recognized as useful but narrow. Another argument against classical art history concerned the inadequacy of the distinction between meaningful iconography and meaningless decoration—was meaning only to be found in attribution of narrative and character?

Archaeological approaches to understanding style and design, in the project of what has come to be called social archaeology, have long stressed the importance of context and quantification. This was the next major component of my research. I studied a sample of 2000 aryballoi found in over 90 locations. The project was a contextual treatment in that it addressed processes of origination, manufacture, distribution, consumption and discard in these times of the development of the city state. I tracked the lifecycle of these pots, from manufacture to discard, connecting particularly with political economy, the consolidation of a citizen body of yeoman farmers.

Were the great changes in Greek society responsible for the changes in the production of pottery? If so, how? What were the motivations of the potters? What incentives lay behind the changes? Were the means of distribution a relevant factor in the design of the ceramics? How attuned to patterns of consumption were the potters? And yes—was it down to the genius of the Greeks, both to invent the city state and also the wonders of figurative Greek art? Are we encountering a manifestation of an archaic Greek kunstwollen?

So I presented the context for the design and production of these pots in the way of a narrative of the development of a particular polity form, the Corinthian polis. This was a systemic model of design in such an early state form, with the motivations of producers and consumers related to class culture, and with ceramics produced in a reshaping of class definitions, ideologies and identities. I connected the miniature jars with their use in new kinds of sanctuaries and for the dead, showing scenes from the ideological world of the new state.

But the typical categories, in this argument, of rank, wealth and resources, trade, state formation, urbanization, market and manufacture I found too connected with long standing tendencies to emplot archaeological material in standardized metanarratives (here of the expansion of certain kinds of polity associated with the city state and as a component of an ancient Mediterranean ecology). These interpretive and analytical categories for understanding the context of production of items such as these aryballoi are just too broad and too blunt (on this see my book “Social Theory and Archaeology”). This connected with an old tendency to subsume histories of material culture beneath those established by textual sources, features of the context of production being defined by textual sources. Archaeology has often been seen as “the handmaiden of history” and this period of history is dominated by narratives developed by that nineteenth century historiography normally labelled altertumswissenschaft.

So I adopted another methodology. I started again with simply one vessel and followed lines of investigation arising from its particular life cycle. Instead of treating the aryballos as a discrete artifact, I focused on practice and process, opening, as it were, the black box that is an artifact to see what work is being performing, that is, what connections are established by its attributes and contexts of origination, manufacture, distribution and consumption. I attempted to let the pot lead me into its world, following networks of empirical, statistical, metaphorical, narrative, conceptual, causal, systemic association; it was a project of re-articulation.

It would go like this: a scene of monsters of combined animal, bird and human parts, lion and soldier citizen (hoplite) raised themes figure of the partible body, and, through an opposed figure of a hoplite, a contrast with the armored body, that is one encased in metal. Animal metaphors of experience are also a topic— the hero seen as lion, for example. The probability that this was a jar of perfumed oil (somewhat substantiated by trace element analysis of other aryballoi), and the deposition of aryballoi in graves, led to further questions of the material body in the early city state, its grooming, trauma and decay, in relation to the citizen male and the experience of fighting as individual, or as a member of the citizen body in phalanx formation. Floral decoration, stylized designs from the east, brought in themes of cultural affiliation with other states and class groups … .

So, in addition to a model of household production and changing definitions of class identity, the material led me into a quite different, but clearly complementary story of animals, corporeality, faces, potters’ wheels and brushes, physical and imagined mobility, flowers, food and consumption, sanctuary dining rooms, sovereignty, gender, ships, clothing.

Let me give a flavor of this.

Dining and the sanctuary. To be a sovereign member of the community of the city state of Corinth, a citizen, was to take the boat across the gulf to the sanctuary of the goddess Hera at Perachora for the annual festival. There to eat in style—dining was a principle cult activity; and, perhaps, to leave as gift for the divinity a perfume jar painted with eastern designs and images of the soldier citizen.

The soldier citizen and the hoplite body. To be a member of the community was to bear arms—80 pounds of bronze, iron and leather. A cuirass was often molded as torso; it accompanied shield, stabbing spear, helmet. Beaten from a single sheet of bronze, the Corinthian helmet is a remarkable achievement of the metalworkers’ craft. All have attachments for crests of display. Encasing the head, the helmet gives protection at the expense of hearing and visibility. The face becomes a system of holes and slits. Cheek pieces frame the nose guard between eyes cut out from the sheet metal. Illustrations of this new form of fighting first appear on these pots. Hoplites, anonymous in helmets, apart from shield devices, sometimes lined up in phalanx formation, fight each other, as well as monsters and animals; there are also birds and flowers, robed figures. There are virtually no women painted on the pots.

The importance of the eyes: a late eighth century grave in Argos excavated in 1971 contained a bronze helmet with two extra eyes embossed upon the forehead. Faces are modeled on some aryballoi, and are painted on shields.

Lined up fellow citizen hoplites in the standardized equipment all look alike on the summer field chosen for battle. They stare at each other over the rims of shields: the experience of fighting is focused upon this gaze—the only mark of the individual, apart from shield devices and things done that mark out the doer as special. There is pushing and jostling; the spears come over or below the shields. Typical wounds are to the neck, face and groin. And afterwards, the bodies lay hours or even days in the sun before they are recovered. Disfigured by the wounds to the face and with bloated bodies cooked in the cuirass, there were always problems of identification.

Proxemics and the body. The miniature jar—suitable for transport, containing oil for dressing the body, a suitable gift for divinity or for the dead, displaying figures in tiny scenes, a fraction of an inch high, of grand events, to be held and scrutinized in the palm of your hand.

Sites of innovation: standing close in the phalanx. The new shield is called Argive, the new helmet Corinthian. It has long been clear that the cites of Argos and Corinth in the north east Peloponnese were at the center of innovation in warfare in these times. But it is more than just warfare.

In a scene upon a perfume jar found at Perachora, soldiers fight to the accompaniment of a piper. The Spartan poet Alkman (Davies 41) describes it like this: “counterbalanced against the iron of the spear is sweet lyre-playing”. Archilochus, a traveling mercenary in the seventh century, connects his life with the way one should eat and drink: “By spear is kneaded the bread I eat, by spear my Ismaric wine is won, which I drink, leaning upon my spear” (West 2). The word he uses for leaning (upon his spear) is the same as that used for reclining (on a couch to eat). He says: “I would as soon fight with you as drink when I’m thirsty” (West 125). War is his lifestyle. For a man to bear arms is to claim civic representation, to have the right of participation in cult, to eat and drink in the way one should.

Wine cups carried such pictures too. And at about this time it became the style to recline on couches to eat, an eastern custom.

The deportment of the leisured citizen: to walk and stand in public. They showed it in the scenes upon the pots—in about 650 there is a change of fashion when the sword disappears as an item of civilian dress. A new type of cloak, the himation, appears, men carry spears, and swords are reserved for battle. The himation is not pinned and requires constant attention, hitching it up and holding it in place. It is an item that prevents much activity—except watching, listening, talking, and taking decisions. The cloak enforces and proclaims leisure—you are not a slave or artisan, but a landowning soldier citizen.

Perfumed, embalmed bodies. A few aryballoi, with heads modeled upon the top, are distinctively like canopic jars from New Kingdom Egypt and after that contained the intestines and inner organs of the deceased. The modeled hairstyles too are eastern, seen also on some of the paintings—a layered coiffure that German scholars called Etagenperücke. We know from contemporary poetry that there was something of a style war between those who flaunted their wealth with eastern flair and perfumed hair, and those who saw such habrosune (an aesthete’s fondness for fine goods) as decadent and superficial.

The topology of design. The making and illustration harks backwards and forwards, folded into the life of forms and processes. Notoriously it prefigures, literally, the achievements of classical Greek figurative art. But the iconography has an ancient genealogy. Iconographic elements can be traced through the Near East back for centuries and even millennia (lions, geometrics. lotus and palmette). The slip and oxide paint combined with skilled manipulation of kiln atmosphere (alternating reducing and oxidizing) was also an ancient process. This is why I use the term topology—to emphasize the percolation of forms and techniques, rather than their linear development.

These are just indications of the kinds of association and translation running through the artifact and configured in this rhizomatic method. Connect them with the city of Corinth at its beginnings. Here are some components of a materialist narrative.

My research was to track and rearticulate this distributed networking. Following the connections suggested to me that it is not enough to conceive of the design of an aryballos as representing something else, such as a change in economy, in ways of fighting, or of legends and myths. Nor can the design be simply understood as a relay carrying a message from potter to buyer, or between consumers. Such views treat the aryballos as a secondary representation or expression of something more primary, or real, or material. Instead we can treat the design of an aryballos as located within the work of potter, acts of exchange and consumption, rituals of death and dedication. The design is a material part of what it may be showing us. Archaic Corinthian society, its ideologies, aspirations of potters or citizens, are not experienced directly and in-themselves, for what would that reality be? They appear sphinx-like in the riddles of the object seen as a bundle of such processes. These are its design.

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)