BRENDA LAUREL ENGAGES HEAD-ON WITH POP CULTURE. SHE CONSTRUCTS INTERACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS THAT CHALLENGE US TO LOOK BEYOND OUR NEXT CONSUMER FIX SO THAT WE MIGHT ENACT REAL CHANGE IN OUR SOCIETY. “Design,” she advocates, “gives voice to values.…A design that has not engaged the designer’s values may speak, but with a hollow voice.”1 In 1996 Laurel cofounded the game development firm Purple Moon, whose aim was to produce media that recognized the needs and interests of young girls between eight and fourteen—a market largely ignored by the gaming industry at the time. Although acquired by Mattel in 1999 and shut down, the firm successfully staked out a path for cultivating girls’ interest in computation. The insightful research behind Purple Moon, particularly regarding girls’ preference for interactive experiences stemming from complex social interactions, fed a broader understanding of gender and gaming.2 Laurel’s current work continues to fuel humanist goals of love and respect through the development of technology informed by empirical research. Her interests now lie in utilizing distributed sensor networks and visualizations of biological data to help decision makers—as well as the rest of us—engage more deeply with the natural world.

DESIGNED ANIMISM

BRENDA LAUREL | 2009

My interest in the relationship between pervasive computing and animism has been brewing for some time—an anthropological bent and an engagement with poetics are old friends. I followed Mark Weiser’s work on ubiquitous computing at Xerox PARC and witnessed other early developments in the domain at Interval Research. During my time as chair of the graduate Media Design program at Art Center, I was drawn to thinking about ambient and pervasive computing from new perspectives within the world of art and design. When I also joined Sun Labs in 2005, I got to see the development of the Sunspots up close and personal. Of course, it didn’t hurt to be married to one of the principal researchers on the spots team, who continued his work with sensor networks at the NASA Ames Research Center. I’m now heading up a new transdisciplinary grad design program at California College of the Arts, where pervasive computing and sensor networks will play a significant role in many of our studios as well as in collaboration with other institutions. I see pervasive computing as an extremely important phase shift in our capabilities, opening up huge new vistas of possibility for design, discovery, experience, and human agency.

What does pervasive computing have to do with animism? Essentially, it can become a tool in manifesting what I call “designed animism.” The goal is fundamentally experiential, but the consequences are profound: designed animism forms the basis of a poetics for a new world.…

BRENDA LAUREL
“Tools for Knowing, Judging, and Taking Action in the Twenty-First Century” 2000

I won’t attempt to catalog all of the wonderful examples of emergence in natural, social, and computational systems. I want to simply call your attention to emergence as a design resource that can be tapped by networks of sensor-enabled devices working on local rules to create both beauty and knowledge.

So here’s a funny thing. In 2005, Sun Labs sponsored a transdisciplinary studio hosted by the Media Design program at Art Center. Bruce Sterling, who was in residence in our studio that year, co-taught the course, along with Nik Hafermaas and Phil van Allen. The idea was to lob a bunch of Sunspots—networked devices that are capable of producing emergent behavior—at a bunch of design students and let them have it. Jed Berk and Nikhil Mittner, both Media Design students, designed a flock of blimps that they called ALAVS—“autonomous lighter-than-air vehicles.” The blimps could be “fed” through an array of fiber-optic tubes. When they were “hungry,” they descended, and when they were nourished, they lifted off. When they were close to one another, they flocked and cooed. I have to say, it was totally trippy. When I last spoke with Jed, he was attaching video cameras to them and let them create a kind of ambient video blog. Cool.

Cool. So what?…As I said earlier, with animism I am not so concerned with the attribution of spiritual powers to beings and processes in the natural world as I am concerned with what those attributions induce in us. When we see the world as deeply alive and beautiful, how does it change us? How does it change what we decide and do in the world?

My good friend Sean White has been working on a system called an Electronic Field Guide [EFG]. The vision for the project is to explore new forms of field guides that enhance cognition and memory. The project’s explicit purpose is to serve botanists and other scientists in identifying plants and observing or visualizing some of the relationships at work in their ecosystems. The project is a large-scale collaboration between Columbia, the Smithsonian, and the University of Maryland. A prototype system has been deployed on Plummers Island and will soon be mounted again at a science station on Barro Colorado Island in Panama. Sean says: “Biologists of all stripes go down there for research and most of them have their own specialty. We are exploring the possibility of providing the EFG to aid researchers in quick identification of flora relevant to their own ecosystem research. If a botanist is studying a caterpillar, they may not be able to identify the species of plants that it eats. The system will help them create an ecological web of relationships and perhaps even help build a semantic web in the field for further eco-informatic study.”

Sean has experimented with multiple cameras and sensors as inputs and with hardened tablets, augmented reality displays, and mobile phones as UI [user interface] devices. He believes that a distributed system without centralized control will eventually be an optimal form. He describes his goals this way: “We do this to support being in the world and part of the world.” He reports that when people experience these real-time streams of data in combination, a holistic sense of delight often emerges. In other words, emergence happens inside the person, and this is true even when one brain could not possibly sort the specific information content of each of the streams of information that are available to them. He’s had botanists tell him that they have felt the boundaries of their bodies dissolve. But, he cautions, this transcendental awareness is fragile and must be approached with a spirit of lightness.

As Sean’s system demonstrates, the process that I described in the context of prescientific representations in art and music has its inverse. In the first case, the creation of a representation that delights the artist reveals a deeper intuition of some of the unseen shapes of nature. In the inverse case, the fusion of inputs from distributed sensors delivered in delightful ways creates the same sort of joyous intuition.

When discussing this phenomenon at the 2006 Ubicomp conference, Bruce Sterling asserted in his usual acerbic way that “there is no magic.” Sean’s project combines sensor data with machine learning techniques to look at covariance in an n-dimensional space and find the eigenvectors or most meaningful axes in that space. Those reveal interesting patterns that a person can experience in sensory ways. They look at frequency patterns with Fourier transforms and the texture of irises with Gabor jets. With semantic zooming they are able to move in and out of the pattern space. Now that’s magic!

In my garden, there are fairies.

One of my fairies watches the lavender. This one has a history of the flowers and knowledge of how sun and shade move over the garden as the day passes. The lavender fairy brings the scent of warm flowers into my room just at the sunniest hour. It also whispers with the bee fairy, who knows that when the lavender is just so, the bees will come. The water fairies taste the soil around my plants and drip when they are too dry. The lizard fairies dance around the top of my desk when they see the lizards scurry from the Oregon grapes to the woodpile.

We see fairies, or make them up, but now we can also make them. We have, for the first time, the capacity to create entities that can sense and act autonomously, or with one another, or with living beings. They can learn and evolve. They can reveal new patterns, extend our senses, enhance our agency, and change our minds.

BRENDA LAUREL
“Reclaiming Media: Doing Culture Work in These Weird Times” 2002

My fairies watch the sun set with me. They dance the changes in light and temperature, in the closing of certain flowers, in the quieting of songbirds and the wakening of owls. And I have this perfectly joyful sense that my body is my home, my garden, my canyon, my trees. If I had more sensors, my body could be the earth. With matching effectors, I become a “Gaian Gardener,” responsible for and enacting the health of the living planet.

Scientists and artists know that patterns drawn from nature tickle our nervous systems at a deep, preconscious level. Designed animism is a healing system for our disconnect with our planet. But as our history so vividly shows, we are not likely to come to new awareness through fear, or even through information. We may, however, come to it through delight.

1 Brenda Laurel, “Reclaiming Media: Doing Culture Work in These Weird Times,” presentation, AIGA National Design Conference, Washington, DC, March 23, 2002), http://voiceconference.aiga.org/transcripts/index.html.

2 To hear more about Laurel’s experiences at Purple Moon, watch “Brenda Laurel: Games for Girls,” TED, February 1998, http://www.ted.com/talks/brenda_laurel_on_making_games_for_girls.