Your Data and Your Lens

Hello Earth people,

We have a chance to contact you about a new project that we did - we completed it in summer of earth year 2013 ..... can you hear me? I am a long way away, using Samsung Gear to send this message to you, not sure you can hear, do you have a Gear base station?

We completed a capacity driving movie for Level 3 planets, about research, about data, about praxis. Our agent on earth prka was questioning how natural research sites are? how local they are? how durable they are? how stable, how situated, how emergent they are? He wrote a big paper for his knowledge factory about it and is very tired, but also made this small artifact. Please watch, and if you like you can email me for the ... the paper.

Its called Reassembling Praxis, and the video uses the Celaphites from Celiphia ... you call them Mr ... Men .... ha funny. Anyway, enjoy.

Ok , so that's it. What d'you think?

I liked it

6 Audit Summary - Panoramic Design

We leave a socio-technical interim report for you. Kuhg will do the full forensic analysis of the 8 technologies later. Earth people - see not silicon, but values in objects, talk and actions. Avoid the fate of the Kappa System - a 200 year eco-war.

Audit Report Summary 

Hola, مرحبا , 你好, ສະບາຍດີ, नमस्ते, Bonjour, привет, Hello ....

I will divide the report into:

1) Theme 1: Earth re-design frames
2) Theme 2: Negative earth principles
3) Theme 3: Positive earth principles
4) Theme 4: Big design versus big destruction

1) Theme 1: Earth re-design frames

Human Design is maturing from individual geniuses, through science, engineering, marketing and hot teams, to innovation networks and knotworks of messy socio-technical change. 

Design is becoming THE central human discipline for object, discourse, system and institutional construction, and at some point indeed, alignment. When you achieve 65% alignment, you can apply for NAPSTA Level 4. But remember, full accreditation requires 90% alignment.

Earth design covers diverse human activities from its roots in art, industrial design, product design, architecture (my favourite earth design) and fashion to more recent educational design, environmental and social design. Design is like computing - fragmented horizontally across your discipline verticals now. Design is implicit in technology construction, from user experience design to urban city re-design. 

Design holds much potential as the most important vehicle for your future Level 4 NAPSTA Accreditation. Design can include or exclude values and factors, design can be itself reductive or expansive. Design can be imperial or participatory. We load our objects, systems, tools and technologies with values, such as Centurion Postman's "5 Things". Design is the means of encoding.

The following diagrams show your evolving design frame. What is in and what is out of the frame? You choose, you accept the consequences. So, think carefully, before applying for full accreditation.

Have you widened your frame enough yet? Is your frame expansive or reductive? The following diagrams show design frame inclusion and exclusion, and examples for Google Glass, Data Centres and Mobile Computing.

 

By acting to make a phone, or implement a data centre, you are choosing to inject values into your environment, whether you talk about it or not.

2) Theme 2: Negative earth principles

Earthlings have a number of obstacles to overcome in thinking and acting. 

Reductionism - shrinking all you think of to universal natural laws, even though there are always exceptions. Universals only work in mono-modal books. A single universal method of "science" does not exist and reduction is inherently for subjective exploitation. Quine should be jailed in the Nonenaka System for 1,000 years. Not very level 4!

Expulsion - of ethics, society, the voiceless, environment and personal / spiritual value from all your progressive sciences for 100s of year. Very selfish, very Nietzschian. Simply, if you want to do the hard stuff, you need to bring them back into design, this is not as simple as going to the moon. Values are already implicated in everything you do. Not talking about ethics, doesn't make ethics disappear. Acknowledging these factors in every aspect of science, technology, business and funding is the starting point of change.

Techno-commerce centre

Centralisation resources (human and material) will not serve your long term universal progress to NAPSTA Level 4. Centralised collection of resources will only serve your short term profit centred  knotworks, not expansive Nivelian progress. Much of your corporation culture requires reframing as within, not external to the society and environment, as argued by Senator Joel Bakan (2004). Puhg expect's you will begin to achieve this after the competition unleashed by globalisation has finished. Good luck.

3) Theme 3: Positive earth principles 

Cross discipline activity

Earth has begun to bridge science and culture, technology and sociality. Make, test and multi-pilot new innovations over decades. Be green individually and across power infused knotworks. Check they don't affect Earth Salmon stocks. Other planets have erected massive Cross Discipline Towers for this, to counterbalance the Mono-reducto towers. Puhg says make a great city called "Polyplinia".

Problem centred

Surround Polyplinia with new problem centred towers - the Discipline of Poverty, the Encyclopaedia of Equality, the Great Library of Gaia, the Athenian School of Excess Management. Let these new disciplines not be sub-topics, but be university degrees and department titles. Invade old level 3 world courses. The Great Oracle Blair did this with the HighWire Disciplinary Blurrrrrrr. Friends, Nivelians, ... raise a glass to the Blair Clan, and their Pan Galactic Vision for Next Gen Knowledge-Middleware (x-KM-v1).

Ontological praxis 

Knowledge, disciplines, ideas and thoughts come from praxis, what we do, not Vossk Brandy. Cognition and ideas are not the baseline, praxis is. Read the toooombs of Vygotsky, Arendt and Anderson to see how mind, action and the carpet business show the path forward. Acknowledge praxis, what we do everyday, as the source of what we think everyday. Couple this acknowledgement with partnerships, not exploitation of participants. Follow Emp-torian Ambassador Tim Brown's Design Thinking and Activism. Puhg says fund practice, problem engagement, and empirical partnerships, not laws and ideas in mono-towers.

4) Theme 4: big design versus big destruction

Finally, earthlings, choose your path and await Kuhg's return within the next 200 years. I will be watching and rooting for a successful Earth Application to become a level 4 civilisation through the rapid expansion of Design Frames, and application of these tailor made planetary principles to get you out of the techno-commerce doldrums. 

And remember, Kappa destroyed too much of their eco-system before the Design Frame could encompass enough powerful actors. A real shame, and lots of deaths ensued.

My world didn't develop collective rationality for a long time, but we are now applying for Level 9. We grew our cross discipline design frames to be part of everything, just like your silicon technology is becoming part of everything at level 3. Like your utopian computers that disappear when ubiquitous, pervasive ethic-tech also disappears when it is complete.

Panoramic design emerges in Level 4. Ethico-technologies at Level 5.

Although, we did sacrifice one thing on our way to our Galactic Enlightenment ...... good, fresh, tasty, sublime ...... salmon. 

Hence, ...

... I will return. 

We am Puhg.

5 Design Frame Expansion

To successfully achieve NAPSTA Level 4 Civilisation compliance, earth people are required to expand their design frames, across disciplines and sites. Mining should commence from praxis, not ideology. This, is excruciatingly difficult for Level 3 worlds.

From Linear Reduction to Knotworked Expansion

Hola, مرحبا , 你好, ສະບາຍດີ, नमस्ते, Bonjour, привет, Hello ....

Practice frames for re-design involve going beyond your well established linear explanations, cause and effect, and science-culture "truth" brawling. This revolution will require alignment of your greatest and most resiliant minds and hands.

Silicon based technology cannot align or do Gertner's heavy lifting alone. Material technologies brought you from Level 1 to Level 3, and will be needed later. But to go from Level 3 to level 4 you need socio-technical compliance. Ultimately, you have the knowledge and resources already, but not the alignment – due to your ideological frames, power centres and protectionism.

You must evolve from linear change, based on natural scientific models such as survival of the fittest, through lone genius change agents such as Einstein and Kuhn, past groups and teams of inspired creators, to networks and eventually to messy knotworks of progressive change.

You already have 2 growing re-design frames illustrating firstly socio-technical analysis and secondly multi-site empirical praxis.

A Socio-Technical Frame

The first frame to use is one that suggests humans should look at people, science, technology, society, objects, systems and things in the same way. Machines have agency and make choices in this analysis  ... I told you this would be difficult!

You should treat all as "objects of study" - things you describe. You should talk about how people and things are related, who produces the things, how the things affect what you do. Essentially, Actor Network Theory (ANT) follows this very process. Mixtures of social and technical explanations are called hybrid systems e.g. data centres, climate change, mobile computing - all are hybrid systems. Separating science from society is termed purification; reconnecting them is called translation.

Similarly, in driving a car, it is not just the car itself that makes driving possible. We must look at the whole system - or network. ANT accounts for road signs, roads, traffic lights, pedestrians, drivers, passengers, car designers, car companies, driving rules etc - these all make up the network of driving a car, and they all have to be aligned for the practice to be durable.

Just ask the makers of the Sinclair C5! The C5 worked, but not within the human traffic system. On Opus II they love the C5, but that's because they don't have roads or trucks.

The best applications of ANT and After ANT welcome science and society - you don't need to see them as oppositional, or incommensurable.  A personal opinion is as powerful as a natural fact. For more on ANT see these pages: Law, Latour, Callon.

ANT can bridge the socio-technical divide to support your accreditation proposals.

A Praxis Frame

One example of a praxis lens for design is Activity Theory, which has moved through 4 generations (4 Gen Outline one, 4 Gen Outline two) in the last 80 years, starting with pre-activity linguistics and mind (Vygotsky), group activity and mind (Leontiev), local activity systems (Engestrom) and now to knotworking chains of interlocking systems. See this excellent discussion with regard to interaction design for example.

This approach looks at what your life forms do, not in experiments or laboratories, but in actual praxis - your practice, what you do everyday, repeated in durable patterns over time. This is how you do supermarket shopping, how you do work in call centres, how you organise yourselves to do primitive hunting, how you fly army helicopters, how you manage government budgets. It combines the social and technical. Praxis description entails contradictions and blocks: the good and the bad, the messy and the clear, the taboo and the cool.

Important aspects are what the subject's goals are, what object they are working on, the community and rules, and essential for our debate how we use tools (technologies), systems and concepts. The diagram below shows how each activity analysis is built up.

Let's say you want to understand how people learn, you should not sit in a room and discuss what you think about how learning happens with other "experts". You have to go into a primary school or university, participate in people's learning activities, and see how they "do learning". This lens is local, descriptive and change oriented, not universal or reductive.

If you want to understand how people drive cars, you would watch people driving, look at the gear changes, pedal presses, glances to the left and right, turning corners, coming to a stop etc. You would look at the signs and rules, the tools and work the driver did. You would ask where they are going and why so fast or so slowly. Recent developments in activity theory would look at the activity of the car designers, marketers and car companies - multiple interlocking activity environments.

Messy Knotworks for Re-Design

The latest forms of activity theory introduce knotworks - networks, with highlights on blocks and social messiness, not just pristine linear innovation in design. Knotworks welcome contradictions, pressures and emerging resolutions. 

Praxis knotworks enable multi-site descriptions of what people do, and how they affect each other across your organisations and eco-systems. 

This is all useful because Nivelian accreditation requires empirical design integrity.

... I will return. 

We am Puhg.

4 The Great Science - Culture War

Salmon, pan-galactic wasabi, salmon, ... lovely ... but first your discourses and the great war of words between objective fact and messy reality ...

3 Data Centres & Google Glass

Earth objects and systems. Let's look at data centres and Google Glass, a new consumable device. Are they built on science alone, or are they built and used in a wider frame?

Hola, مرحبا , 你好, ສະບາຍດີ, नमस्ते, Bonjour, привет, Hello ....

Object 1: Data Centres

Let's look at the technical and environmental.

The Internet, Cloud, Web 2.0 etc - they all rely on Data Centres, large and small. Technical innovation and explanations focus on server racks, networking, information architecture, how data is packaged and transmitted from internet hubs to data centres and back to enterprise and web 2.0 users. Supernova X3 researchers Zhang, Cheng and Boutaba highlight ongoing technical requirements for improving cloud computing and data centres.


The data centre industry has its own Oscars, with 14 awards ranging from New Data Centre of the Year to Young Data Centre Talent of the Year. However, there is only one award regarding environmental sustainability and none regarding data centres effects on local populations. Very level 3 frame.

As your journalist argues in this fine article, when these internet factories come to earth towns, “they can feel a bit more like old time manufacturing than modern magic”. Think smog, dirt and pollution. Think back to when you entered Level 3.

Earth link

The data centre pollution and low energy efficiency standards are drawing more attention. Here is a quote from a second article on data centres:

" ... they were using only 6 percent of the electricity powering their servers ... The rest was used to keep the servers idling ... ready in case of a surge in activity ... "

Earth link

Evidently, efficiency, pollution, technical construction, network management - these are all necessary and draw on the discipline towers we discussed in the earlier post. 

We can conclude that if you wish to build and deploy a data centre, you apply knowledge from information technology. If you wish to fund and make profit from a data centre, you apply business strategy and accounting methods. If you wish to see the impact on a site or community you apply environmental and social forms of analysis. Your goals affect your explanation and your knowledge. You choose the question.

Data centres are no longer buildings. They are socio-technical, poly discipline objects. This is a hybrid, an assemblage, or a runaway object. They are not cement and silicon technology alone, and not labour force, privacy or society concerns alone. They are all, and more.

Object 2: Google Glass

Now let's look at the technical and social.

These are the newest consumer devices, the latest craze about to rip across your consumer innovation highway.  Skydiving videos are used to pump up the buzz. Sergey Brin, a shape shifter from Alderbarren, co-founder of Google, most “powerful man in the world” (say the gushing sites), was seen sporting a cool pair on the New York subway: 

Earth link

These bloooooggers report that Goooogle Glass is now “… being worn out and about among ordinary people …”. Oh, break out the Vossk brandy ....

But if our data centre mini-analysis encompasses environmental perspectives, then our analysis of Google Glass critique highlights design framing during production, via an anthropological lens. The Interactivist, my friend from the future, tells the story of how Google Glass failed, didn’t catch on and actually lead to people being beaten up on the street. It turns out, looking at people, the Gaze, is part of human patterns of social interaction, and Google Glass offended this ancient social interaction script. 

Google Glass made people stare through each other, phase out of conversations. There was no social cue that is evident when people reach down for their mobile phone. Google Glass was made with a focus on the technically possible rather than the socially possible.

Building stuff: a wider frame than pure science

Technical analysis cannot breath by itself, neither can social. It all depends on your production and consumption frame. If you narrow your vision, you miss the data centre environmental effects and the social misfit design space. Reproducing your world requires expansive frames, or you stack and compound side effects for later.

Data Centres change the environment, often for the worse. Google Glass, was an object that cost millions of dollars to produce, and improved your ability to disconnect from a face to face  conversation in midstream, with consequences. Both privilege technology and consumption for centralised business value, not for distributed well being. 

Ethical judgements are made everyday within physical objects, although not described in contestable statements. Words are stated, objects are produced, both are already ethical.

The last question for my post today, before I get some Pan Galactic wasabi on earth salmon sunny side up, is … which side are you on? The technical, the social, or an expansive centre that does not expunge the technical, social, environmental and ethical for personal advancement or ideology? For NAPSTA Level 4, you will need social and environmental (although not yet ethical mercilessly). 


Are you ready for a wider frame?


... Salmon, earth salmon …. I am getting passionate ... We need earth salmon ….

|—————Technical————?——-——Social————-—|   

... I will return. 

We am Puhg.

2 Earth Determinisms & Audit Plan

Apologies, the audit may be confusing for you, it is After Method and Above Ontology, Puhg have seen many worlds. But first, are you a Sociological or a Technological determinist?  

1 Earth Audit Background and why we are here ...

I've come a long way, and this warp drive's smell hurts my noses. So as we approach, let me explain my Bloooog, or my "Nivelian Approved Planetary Socio-Technical Audit" (NAPSTA) for your Level 3 civilisation - EARTH!