Liquid architecture of thinking networks and thinking in the network

I came to an interesting study, which i cannot grasp fully as it is in italian, but it brings out the same aspects, what i have focused in the ecological knowledge ecosystem framework.

LE ARCHITETTURE LIQUIDE DALLE RETI DEL PENSIERO AL PENSIERO IN RETE
Liquid architecture of thinking networks and thinking in the network
Matteo Ciastellardi
2009

Ciastellardi writes that:

The more the body and mind extend into the world, more the world intrudes in the body and mind.

What changes in the context of current electronic forms is also a way of perceiving objects, environments, people, concepts and ideas. The book investigates the interaction between the canonical and rigid forms of a culture of information resources and networks multivocity of thought, reconstructing the paradigm of a model liquid architectures.
It is examining the particular hyper-cultural environment in a world.

The introjection of the external environment provides a sort of equivalence between matter and thought, between the outside and the inside of our body. This phenomenon leads not only to the consciousness of space, but to a different relationship that the man faces in a perspective of ‘different densities’ of the concept of space, and how to deploy it, and how to let explode his thoughts and actions in virtual extension.

Fluid hyper-culture is a new form of relationship among individuals, the media used, and unstructured environments and virtual network in which relations lose all sense of belonging and all forms of distance, in which thought is a place of reproduction of its reticular nature.

Ciastellardi references to Marcos Novak in his preface, that i like particularly:

Marcos Novak, “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace” from “Cyberspace: First Steps” edited by Michael Benedikt

“”If we described liquid architecture as a symphony in space, this description should still fall short of the promise. A symphony, though it varies within its duration, is still a fixed object and can be repeated. At its fullest expression a liquid architecture is more than that. It is a symphony of space, but a symphony that never repeats and continues to develop. If architecture is an extension of our bodies, shelter and actor for the fragile self, a liquid architecture is that self in the act of becoming its own changing shelter. Like us, it has an identity; but this identity is only revealed fully during the course of its lifetime.” — Marcos Novak

Novak creates, in cyberspace, three-dimensional objects, specifying a scheme for their relations and proportions. A change in the parameters of this scheme results in the transformation of all objects. Those changes are responsive to the viewer; they depend on the viewer.

With “liquid architectures,” the idea is to find an architecture that is based on motion; that unites virtual and physical; and that, through the use of information technology, creates spatial configurations that are constantly mutating. This advent in cyberspace has enforced the emergence of a new concept, one that characterizes the fusion of information, art, and architecture.
“Transarchitectures” is another concept created by Novak. It derives from “liquid architectures” and it emphasizes the idea of places becoming alien, of transforming themselves.
“Transarchitecture” is the intersection of information, in the form of algorithms, and the material world, as robotic prototypes. It is the intermingling of architecture and media, the combination of design and machine/computer.

Novak’s architectural approach to cyberspace creates new aesthetic forms that enable
new forms of action.

Silva assumes that phenomenology and poststructuralism are the most relevant postmodern thoughts on cyberspace.

Intermingling of the bodily presence and space of lived experience enables an opening to sensory approach and revelation of a new reality in architecture: the virtual reality of cyberspace.

Ontology becomes extremely relevant in the study of cyberspace, since it has to do with the experience of things and not with the things as such. This means that one should absorb from cyberspace a new sense of “being” before questioning the nature of the space itself.

The use of the senses, in cyberspace, is externalized through one’s simulated body. And it is through simulation that one deals with the metaphoric representation of space, thus with its liquidity. It is only through simulation that one can overcome the limits of space. Liquidity, or fluidity, is the metaphor used to dismantle those limits.

Another views to liquid, fluid and flowing i have briefly commented here.

Ontobranding: how reality promotes itself

Yesterday we had a meeting with Nello Barile and Andrea Miconi from Universitá IULM.

Nello’s paper “From post-human consumer to the ontobranding dimension” for forthcoming Mobile communication and social policy conference points to an interesting aspect how new social technologies together with consuming practices within these technologies can create certain ontobrands.

He writes:

To explain this connection between consuming, technology and geolocalized experience the theorists invented several formulas such as hyper-geography, hybrid ecologies and geotagging.

The idea of assigning an IP address to every square meter of our planet suggest that there will be a complete isomorphy between the net and the planet so that every movement in one dimension implies an immediate modification on the other. Every element of our urban and natural environment could be able to interact and dialogue with this integrated system and other system connected with it. In this way when the idea of a traditional branding strategy will be overcome by a sort of diffused kind of branding.

Nello claims that : “branding becomes a flexible and spread technology”.

He writes:

If the traditional branding was just a tool in the hands of companies to build their own image and positioning in the collective mind, the selfbrandig approach demonstrates how the marketing thought is a state of mind that produces an existential positioning

Unfortunately, Nello does not define clearly his ‘ontobranding’ idea, but i can see that it is exactly what we were doing in our Hybrid Narrative Ecosystem studies.

We wrote with Mauri in our forthcoming book-chapter for IGI Gobal “Participatory design experiment: Storytelling Swarm in Hybrid Narrative Ecosystem” that one representation of hybrid ecosystem is ontospace, which consists of ontodimensions – descriptive features of an entity within a domain of information (eg. cool, expensive, cheap, nice).
People take perspectives of ontodimensions that can be fixed with ontocoordinates in this ontological space (eg. i can prefer more cool but cheap dimensions).
Niche is such a range of ontodimension perspectives that certain community members jointly define in ontospace, that effectively meets their understandings, expectations, and behaviour. Practically, niche is an abstract communality of community members personal preferences and perspectives.
Niche defines a subspace in ontospace that constrains the personal selection of perspectives of each community member. (simply you don’t fit to this community if your perspective is out of this range).
We also claim that every person evokes affordances as perceived perspectives in ontospace when they interact within this hybrid space. So they are simultaneously keeping and shifting the community subspace in ontospace. (This can be imagined as brand shift, changes in fashion).
However, this activity is not centrally coordinated, but may appear in the swarming kind of behaviours. In swarming each individual relies on signals left by swarm members into the ecosystem (practically the geotagged content). Again, the more strong is the signal, the more likely it will be picked up and it becomes a brand.

For me this is how the ontobrand can appear. I don’t know if Nello Barile will agree with this explanation

Anyway, i think we can continue discussions with him.

Modelling spaces for self-organized learners

Today i found that the special number of Journal of Educational Technology & Society “Technology Support for Self-Organized Learners” has been published. There are two articles from Tallinn workgroup of Educational Technology.

Mine is about Modelling spaces for self-organized learners
http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_3/4.pdf

Terje Väljataga and Sebastian Fiedler write about the course that we did in iCamp project “Supporting students to self-direct intentional learning projects with social media”
http://www.ifets.info/journals/12_3/6.pdf

Hybrid ecosystem of narratives

Many (that i refer below) have already assumed that learning through developing and discussing narratives in social web spaces has become a new innovative form of learning.

We have developed and tested the course Hybrid ecosystem of narratives in Tallinn University as one approach to understand how narratives appear in hybrid (real + virtual + social) Web 2.0 space.

When we started this course we had no answer to the students’ questions about “what is this space that we (me and Anatole-Pierre Fuksas) have named the hybrid ecosystem of narratives. How it emerges, and how it develops through the interplay of various interactions, was to be investigated through the participatory design with these same students.

In the end of 2008 Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine summarized in the whitepaper: Web 2.0 storytelling: emergence of the new genre – web 2.0 storytelling in education serves as composition platform and as curricular object.

First, Web 2.0 storytelling is a useful composition platform whenever storytelling is appropriate. The second possible application for Web 2.0 storytelling in higher education is its use as curricular object.

They encouraged educators as follows: the best approach for educators is simply to give Web 2.0 storytelling a try and see what happens. We invite you to jump down the rabbit hole.

I refer only one interesting aspect what they mention about what web 2.0 storytelling: It is a distributed art form that can range beyond the immediate control of a creator.

So it is clear that the web 2.0 narrative courses are emergent and cannot be precisely planned using some clear design what people should do (because then we will violate the nature of the system itself). The courses must follow certain participatory and design-based approaches to capture what is true.

From the Learncom study “Pedagogical innovations in new ICT-facilitated learning communities” draft report ” Review of lifelong learning” by Kirsti Ala-Mutka (2009) i picked three innovative aspects of online communities:

- ICT­enabled communities are enabling different ways for learning (narratives, discovery, experimentation, observing, reflection),
- social support for learning (peer support, apprenticeship and situated learning, social acknowledgement of learning, social knowledge management),
- new ways to access and organize learning (applying community models for courses, organizations, linking communities to learning and education in new ways).

The report mentions Bruner’s (1996) cultural­phychological approach to education that emphasises narratives as vehicles for meaning making. He suggests that education should help those growing up in a culture find an identity within that culture, in order to be able to make meaning.

Narratives are essential in constructing an identity and finding a place in one’s culture.

Narratives are a powerful way of learning, providing means to situated oneself in the culture and make meaning.

Bruner, J.S. (1996). The culture of education. Harward Univesity Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The report refers to Mayer (2003) who found that conversational narratives combined with animations contributed to a personalization effect, where the students developed significantly more creative solutions than through conventional instruction and explanations. Secondly, Carbonaro et al. (2008) showed that multimedia storytelling allowed students to engage in learning by design.

Mayer, R. (2003). The promise of multimedia learning: using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13, 125- 139.

Carbonaro, M., Cutumisu, M., Duff, H., Gillis, S., Onuczko, C., Siegel, J., Scheffer, J., Schumacher, A., Szafron, D & Waugh, K. (2008). Interactive story authoring: a viable form of creative expression for the classroom. Computers and Education, 15, 687-707.

The study points out that narratives serve as the mediators for externalizing tacit knowledge without writer’s full consciousness.

Recently i found an interesting paper to the same direction, where tacit knowledge was automatically collected from work narratives and used for composing certain more suitable narratives (community suggestions) that could be used in decision-making:

A computational narrative construction method with applications in organizational learning of social service organizations
W.M. Wang, C.F. Cheung, W.B. Lee, S.K. Kwok
Expert Systems with Applications 36 (2009) 8093–8102

Anyway, the boom of various narrative centred learning environments is evident and there is not enough information how people naturally use such environments.

I believe that if there is narrative ecosystem, there must exist something (narratives itself) that the communities will use as a feedback from these ecologies to adjust themselves to their ecosystem parametres.

How narratives function in the ecosystem as the ecosystem feedback and can the community have some analysis means to enhance this feedback within ecosystem?

After analyzing the course data I would say that storytelling has become part of our new way of sensing in hybrid environments.

Storytelling is a new form of hybrid sensing. Web 2.0 storytellers are extending themselves beyond their body borders and using this extended self as the tool. The hybrid stories enable to be more adjusted with the real and virtual hybridized surroundings, extracting dimensions for personal activity and emotions within which they can operate. People are constantly embodying themselves, entangling and detangling themselves to the hybrid systems, while enacting with it.

And at certain moments collaboration appears over the narratives binding persons in the ecosystem, forming certain food-chains, consumerism and other nice ecological phenomena that needs to be brought to light in new systems.

Some ideas are apparent in the dataset that we collected and extracted with the students:

Team as my tool

Last spring we run in Tallinn University an international course ‘eLearning’ in the frames of the IST 6th Framework project iCamp (http://icamp.eu). One of the students’ weekly tasks was to write reflections of their individual and group-work.

We aimed to investigate the occurrence of self-direction in these reflective postings and developed a categorization scheme with Sonja Merisalo, a master student of Tallinn University.

An elaborated Activity system framework provided a model to illustrate self-direction categories.

The most interesting in this model is that it enables to see three types of mediators of action (‘tools’) that individuals use to achieve their objectives:

- material tools, services and resources (any kind of social software for example)
- self-direction as a cognitive tool
- team as a tool

The first type of tools is following Vygotsky’s (1978) account of mediation by tools, which is also including words as sign-tools.
For the second type of tools, Wegerif (2007) has suggested it’s not just the use of explicit reasoning but the ability to change one’s mind and see things from a new perspective, that is essential for learning.
Second and third type of tools also follow Bakhtin’s (1986) account of mediation by the voices and perspectives of others (dialogic).

In a book chapter Knowledge Media Tools to Foster Social Learning (Okada et al. 2009) wrote:

The boundary between subjects is not therefore a demarcation line, or an external link between self and other, but an inclusive ‘space’ within which self and other mutually construct and re-construct each other

This becomes also apparent from the figure in which self as a tool and team as a tool have the moving, perceptional borderline.

Another interesting thought is that several kinds of ruptured situations become visible. Ruptured situations are usually assumed to be the triggers of self-reflection.

We used the categories to analyze the weekly progress of students, and statistical analyses demonstrated that the categorization system has a very good internal logic… so now we are quite enthusiastic of writing these data.

One more idea is to demonstrate how the perception of your learning environment and tools (here i mean all three types of ‘tools’) is changing when learning in social settings, and designing something in teamwork.

I imagine the course as some kind of timeline-pipe for learning in which the flow of initiating the use of certain types of ‘tools’ fluctuates and is regulated by the availability of some types of ruptured situations that the learners notice in the environment. The ruptured situations trigger and constrain the use of ‘tools’, the use of these ‘tools’ puts more attention on noticing and creating the ruptured situations.

Anyway, if i find time i try to formulate it better.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986/1978). Speech genres and other late essays. In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the mind: A sociocultural approach to mediated action. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Wegerif, R. B. (2007). Dialogic, Education and Technology: Expanding the Space of Learning. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Narrative ecology course ending and restarting

From end of January until mid March we I and Anatole-Pierre Fuksas run a course “Ecology of Narratives”.

This course was composed as a design experiment aiming to try out what happens with narratives and what we perceive in hybrid ecologies.

Course ‘window’ in the ‘Ecology of Narratives blog’ gives some overview, what happened.

We will run the short version of the course again between April 27th and May, 5th, because we will have visitors from ITIN, (IT Institute – Cergy Pontoise – France).

Course info is HERE

This time we have lectures and seminars of the updated theory part and the start of the design experiment on 27th of April. Between 27.04-4.05 we write narratives intensively, simultaneous with French students’ explorations of Estonia.
The final day is 5th of May when the experiment data are finalized.
Participants are not constrained locatively with where they write narratives.

I hope it will be same much of fun as the ending course.

‘Narrative ecology’ tag-space

Tomorrow is the last day of the Narrative ecology course.

I have explored a bit my own data from the blog.

I have written three stories:
- ‘an ecology story’ is about my perceptions related to theory of narrative ecology;
- ‘an invasion story’ is about natural world invading as artifacts; and
- ‘ sustainable message story’ is about messages that are recycled on artifacts.

Here is the tag-space of my stories. There are still some problems with this exploration tool, but i think it really extracted the three stories.

Another way to look at the tag data at dendrogram shows also three clasters, so actually i WAS writing three stories.

Timespace, what else

I have been running with some students an experiment of hybrid narratives.

We have been writing personal narratives and collaborating in the non-determined manner, presumably we have simulated something swarm-like.

Now we are in the phase of collecting data and looking ideas for analysing what we experienced. There are many ways. Today i came to one of my old blog posting about time-space, which seems to visualize what i always imagine as the activity and meaning paths within one ecology.

Here is the idea of personal time-space from a paper.

I think what is possible to do on the basis of our dataset is to show something similar. I am still thinking how to put on one figure places, experienced entities and their transformations.

Let’s imagine places are real locative spots from where i collected content.
In the next layer (Brightkite) this content did a permutation. In the more next layer (in Flickr) it changed one more time. And in Blog as well.

Instead of time, i could use the quantity of impressions or objects from this spot.

And i think i also need something for distinguishing my favourite categories of objects, either by meaning, activity, narrative or so.

For example my favourites may be trees, birds, shadows. Or some particular tags that i use distinguish my categories.

It is still not clear how i will visualise it…
My data are currently in excel format.

If i could map more than one person into this space, i could see something similar to ant-road in our little narrative ecology swarm.

#narrativeecology

Recently we launched with Anatole Fuksas a course Ecology of narratives. Actually, this course is an experiment for exploring the properties of narrative hybrid ecologies.

First day we played a bit around the conceptual ideas and then suggested a simple environment for swarm-like story-writing.

From then on the experiment is running until middle of March. The central place is Tallinn but we soon realized that the narrative itself directs the story. The course people is the core, but actually the ecology is open for any participants.
The story is pulled together using #narrativeecology tag

We also have an aggregated blog that has been quite effective for detecting some activity traces: http://ecologyofnarratives.wordpress.com/

The hardest part as i predicted is detecting the stories. Since the idea is not to force us work similarly, some more favoured standards can be described as a result.

So far it is quite fun. I have started to write a story of writing hybrid narratives. Notes..maybe..i hope this is really helpful when we analyze what happened. Ideas are so easy to be forgotten.

Binding affordances and GIS in hybrid places

There is an interesting paper that provides some ideas how to use affordances together with geographical coordinates. This would enable the practical exploration of geolocative spaces.

However, this framework is yet limited in describing hybrid places – the various virtual artifacts and meanings and action cules that are simultaneously mapped geolocatively must be part of the place description with affordances.

The affordances are individually or culturally defined. This duality of bottom up definition and top-down use of such affordance-rich coordinates should be part of the technical platforms of mapping and exploring hybrid places.

An Affordance-Based Model of Place in GIS
Troy Jordan, Martin Raubal*, Bryce Gartrell, and Max J. Egenhofer

This paper presents a methodology to model places with affordances.
Modeling places with affordances integrates cognitive and engineering aspects, therefore leading to a knowledge-representation that comes closer to the user.
The integration of affordance-based models of places into future GIS will lead to a better communication between users and systems.

We advocate the use of affordances—those things which an object, an assemblage of objects, or an environment enables one to do—for modeling place within GIS.
In order to come up with a scientific concept of place it is necessary to accommodate the relatively objective view of the theoretical scientist (i.e., a decentered view) as well as the subjective view of the individual (i.e., a centered view) who directly experiences a specific place.

Tuan (1977): place is space infused with human meaning.
Experiences of places involve perception, cognition, and affection. Therefore, a place cannot simply be described as the location of one object relative to others. The concept of place has to integrate both its location and its meaning in the context of human action.

The geographical concept of place refers to the areal context of events, objects, and actions, and includes both natural elements and human constructions. It also incorporates the notion of change through time.
Places are a human invention, engendered by naming, applying typologies (eg. suburb, ghetto), picking out symbols (eg Pyramids-Egipt), telling stories, and doing things.
Mapping space by GIS, though useful, does not always match the way people think about their world.
Integrating a model of how people conceptualize and perceive places into GIS will enable to use GIS to make important decisions about places.

We use the following interpretation of the means-end hierarchy for a place (Rasmussen and Pejtersen 1995):

Functional Purpose: purposes and values

Abstract Function: flow of mass, energy, information, people and monetary value

Generalized Function: general work activities

Physical function: specific work processes and physical processes

Physical form: Appearance, Location and configuration of Material Objects

Zaff (1995): “Affordances are measurable aspects of the environment that can only be measured in terms of the individual.
Particularly, it is important to understand the action relevant properties of the environment in terms of values intrinsic to the agent.

Affordances, therefore, play a key role in an experiential view of space (Kuhn, 1996) and place, because they offer a user-centered perspective.

Affordances of physical space can be grouped into four categories reflecting different task situations (Kuhn, 1996):

affordances for an individual user (e.g., move),

a user and an individual entity (e.g., objectify),

a user and multiple entities (e.(e.g., communicate)

We suggest the following 6 aspects of Place:

Physical features: Places consist of collections of objects. Each person perceives some set of affordances for a given small-scale object or collection of objects in large-scale space.

Actions: People perform actions in places. As we have seen, actions are one of the most
important aspects that gives meaning to a place. By defining the relationships between intentions, functions, and physical features, we uncover which actions are possible, and which are constrained.

Narrative: Stories are told in order to help characterize the uniqueness of a place as we define normative/acceptable behavior, by revealing the past actions of others. Establish a historical record: What a place looked like, who was there, what they did, and why theydid it.

Symbolic representations/Names: Certain places are referenced by symbols (e.g., New York City is often referenced as the “Big Apple”) having symbolic and/or mythical meanings. Users can represent complex objects with a simpler (abstract) representation.

(why not tags?)

Socioeconomic and Cultural factors: People identify themselves with places socioeconomically. Different cultures afford different behavior in places.

Typologies: People categorize places in order to understand what is new, in terms of what is already understood.

We suggest that the integration of places into GIS would lead to a better match with people’s real-world spatial interactions than do coordinate-based models and, therefore, to a more user-friendly GIS. Our approach outlines the broad categories of information that must be gathered in order to successfully answer place-based queries. The actual work of establishing a useful affordance hierarchy is formidable. Much work needs to be done to consider the perceptual aspaffordances, especially as they need to be mapped into the electronic domain of GIS.

Kuhn W. (1996). Handling Data Spatially: Spatializing User Interfaces. in: Kraak M. and Molenaar M. (Eds.), SDH’96, Advances in GIS Research II, Proceedings. 2, pp. 13B.1-13B.23, International Geographical Union, Delft.
Rasmussen J. and Pejtersen A. M. (1995). Virtual Ecology of Work. In Flack J., Hancock P., Caird J., Vicente K. (Eds.) Global Perspectives on the Ecology ofNew Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Tuan Y. (1977). Space and Place. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Zaff B. (1995). Designing with Affordances in Mind. In Flack J., Hancock P., Caird J., Vicente K. (Eds.) Global Perspectives on the Ecology of Human-Machine Systems (volume 1), pp. 121-156. Hillsdale, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.