Review of Doors of Perception 6 conference ‘Lightness’, 2001
By Nico Macdonald (@Nico_Macdonald)
Review of the Doors of Perception 6 conference ‘Lightness’ conference, sixth in the design conference series, which took place in April 2000 in Amsterdam. First published in LOOP: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education, April 2001, Number 2. [US style spelling and punctuation]
Reflections 15 years on
I re-published the piece after hearing Sugata Mitra, who was a highlight of the event, on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week discussing Technology in Education. I haven’t come across a riposte to my critique of Mitra’s ‘bottom-up’ view of learning, though the debate about established learning and examination models has come to the fore.
In the piece I noted that ‘many of the arguments presented at Lightness relied on shocking the audience with big numbers, while others elevated the nebulous concept of “the environment” above clear human needs, but neither approach enlightens us about the dimensions and scale of the issues’. However, the narratives around sustainability and resource use seem to have abated, perhaps because the nightmare scenarios painted didn’t come to pass, and the empiricism of sustainability was never grounded in theory.
On the other hand, the level of theorising about the nature of the Internet and the Web has also declined, and it’s refreshing to be reminded of some of the pioneering thinking in this area. The event also previewed modern discussions of the Internet of Things, with a talk by BodyMedia on its wearable body monitors.
For the piece I drafted a pre-amble reflecting on the value of conferences, and how they might be improved. The editors at Loop didn’t publish this, but did publish an Editors’ Note. With the proliferation of events, and our greater ability to share information about their content, this discussion is more important than ever.
Preamble
Conferences are strange affairs. They have proliferated, and not just in designland, over the last ten years. People often travel thousands of miles, while their employers spend half a month’s salary on this, accommodation and conference fees, and lose their employees services for up to a week as they go virtually incommunicado. What is gained for the individual and their employer in this scenario? And more generally how is knowledge in the profession incremented by each of these events?
Lightness was the most thoroughly documented, non-academic conference I have attended, with a live Webcast, full transcripts online and a forthcoming CD-ROM, produced with Ijsfontein, that should now be available. Reading the transcripts conveyed more of the presenters’ ideas than I had gleaned from attending the talks and begged the question ‘Why have an event at all?’ Yet only one attendee out of more than thirty I spoke to explicitly indicated that they were unlikely to attend again.
Clearly the networking aspect of Doors is key, and attending forces the audience to take time out to focus on the presentations and discuss the ideas behind them. Disappointingly this discussion was only extended between the audience and the platform for the last 20 minutes of the three-day event, preventing any public development of, or challenge, to the ideas presented. The closest we got was the panels which, with the exception of Jan Abram’s ‘Panel on Applications of Lightness,’ didn’t develop the themes cogently.
How many attendees actually write the requisite reports on the events they attend, and how does their experience enhance their organisation’s knowledge more generally? And how do the ideas presented, or generated more informally in panel discussions and audience debate, work their way into the fabric of professional knowledge? Conference reviews are thin on the ground, not least because some publications feel that it is inappropriate to review something that their readers cannot then experience, unlike a book or an exhibition, and talks are rarely referenced in writing or in other talks. Meanwhile most conference documentation is in the form of published papers, which are hardly the most accessible form of knowledge.
For the fifth Doors of Perception conference Janet Abrams, then working with the Netherlands Design Institute, was commissioned to create a new journal, If/Then, described as a ‘yearbook of the near future.’ If/Then sought to document the ideas around the event (with articles by speakers based on, but not transcripts of, their talks), also recording the Institute’s ‘Getting On!’ talk series, documenting the EU’s i3 program, and reporting on recent Dutch design and new media initiatives. If/Then has had an enviable longevity.
To be more useful to the reader conference reviews themselves could be better contextualised, allowing the reader to find out more about presenter and the event organisers, referencing presenters’ writing and past and future talks, recording their ideas in a more granular way, pointing to online transcripts and the event programme, citing the presenters’ references, and layering the writer’s insights with commentary from attendees.
This might also tie into events that begin online with thoughtful reading lists and introduction to the speakers’ thinking, and wind down in the same medium with discussion of the themes, insights and references gleaned from the event.
Editors’ note: Nico Macdonald points out that traditional, journalistic reporting of conferences flattens the understanding for the reader, offering little to communicate the depth of experience of being an attendee. This is especially true for Lightness as the format of running text disables relevant connections within content that makes assessment of a conference so valuable.
We couldn’t agree more with Macdonald’s original vision for this review: allowing the reader to find out more about presenter and the event organizers; referencing presenters’ writing and past and future talks; recording their ideas in a more granular way; pointing to online transcripts and the event program; and layering the writer’s insights with commentary from attendees. The qualities of interactive media would seem to advance to this sort of solution. Regretably, we could not accommodate this due to time and resource constraints for the current issue.
Given advanced planning and time, and contributors’ similar vision for the presentation of their work, it is our hope that future reviews can achieve this level of experience.
Review
“Lightness.” Great title for a conference, covers a multitude of virtues. Efficient use of materials. Sustainability. Freedom. Inspired thinking. Nimbleness. A feeling of power. Flow. It fits well into previous event themes in the Doors of Perception series — Play held in 1998, Home, Info-Eco and Speed — that have allowed Doors’ co-director john thackara to look around Europe and beyond to find the people he thinks will be the most stimulating participants. This is a pleasant change from many events, particularly in the US, where the usual suspects “do their thing” or promote their organizations. Sometimes one has the feeling of being on the outside of a salon with Thackara as the host. However, the eccentric orbits from which the presenters arrive belies any possibility of clubiness.
Doors of Perception, which has moved from being an event to an institution, hosts what is now the largest, and certainly the most eclectic, design conference in Europe — and pulls it off in style. Although Doors is no longer a well-kept secret it still has a counter-cultural feeling that guarantees mainstream attention and attracts some of the best and the brightest people from within and around the design world. As ever, this was a great opportunity for catching up, networking, debating and kicking ideas around. This aspect of the event was consciously promoted at Lightness, with the program punctuated by long breaks in a vast clubroom sub-divided into more intimate spaces using translucent drapes.
It is harder to see how the event — even more loosely themed than its predecessor, Play — could deliver on its promise of driving new agendas and developing new tools in design. Aware of this, Thackara commented that he saw Doors as a “rock in a pond,” on the edge of an industry dominated by events such as Comdex but influencing them as its ripples spread out. In his opening remarks, Thackara noted that “in order to do things differently, we need to see things differently.” “Lightness” had been chosen as the topic for a conference about design and the Internet in the belief that, far from creating a weightless economy, humanity was creating wasteful flows of matter and energy. “Only 6% of material in advanced economies ends up in products,” he told the audience, “yet we continue oblivious.” To make the point he held up an Apple PowerBook, belonging to one of the presenters, claiming that the waste generated to make it was close to 4,000 times its weight. Even more dramatically he claimed that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, to meet his daily needs is roughly one million pounds per year. His response was to “close the loop” and improve energy and material performance by a factor of up to twenty times. “Put this way: lightness is really a great business opportunity.”
While great for drama, this view of the human condition is rather ill-founded. It assumes that the goal of society should be the efficient use of materials and energy rather than higher aspirations such as economic progress, happiness, quality of life or human liberty, from which efficiencies inevitably flow. Big numbers tied to apocalyptic themes tend to grab attention, but out of context they are meaningless. How much matter and energy is available to “waste” in the first place? Is the 21st century more or less wasteful than the 19th? Is the developed world more or less efficient than the developing? While human progress (which has taken place in spite of nature) has increased the efficiency of our use of matter and energy, to make this an explicit goal leads to stasis. Green thinking, like that of the English Reverend and proto-Green Thomas Malthus two hundred years ago, doesn’t have the capacity to develop practical alternatives. It can only sit on the sidelines, chiding the rest of us, befuddled as we solve the problems, almost unconsciously, which the Greens considered intractable.
“It’s a tattoo for tourists. You get a map of the subway on your hand. You use it for several days, and by the time it has worn off you already know the subway.” — Barcelona-based product designer Marti Guixe
Even if we accept Thackara’s approach, how do we identify lightness? As New York-based architect Elizabeth Diller noted in her talk about the media pavilion building her firm designed for the Swiss Expo 2002: “it takes a lot of stuff to make nothing.” In one of his presentations that threaded through the event Stewart Butterfield, director of Vancouver-based Sylloge, considered the efficiency of a ceramic mug compared to a paper or Styrofoam cup. Analyzed in terms of energy and material inputs, and considering the lifetime of each product, one reaches an unexpected conclusion. While appearing to be heaviest, the mug turns out to be the lightest. On the other hand, while the Internet is championed for its promise of a lighter future “hundreds of billions of miles of wire are rarely considered,” Butterfield observed.
The three days of “Lightness” were organized around a progression of ideas: “Dimensions of Lightness,” “Perceptions of Lightness” and “Tools for Designing Lightness.” No presentation was more than 45 minutes, and most were well under a half-hour, which gave the event a light feeling, in the best sense.
“Geodesic domes make no provision for organic growth or human messiness. They have a perfect present and no future.” — Bruce Sterling, writer and leader of the Viridians
Kicking off the “Dimensions of Lightness” day, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling began his critique of lightness citing Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, noting that “geodesic domes cannot learn; they do so much with so little that there is nothing left to teach them,” leaving no provision for organic growth or human messiness. Counterposing nature to the discussion of lightness, Sterling observed — in his most evocative prose — that it “is entirely weighty and gross, and its primary means of communion are… physical phenomena like mud, infection and rot.”
The role of computers and the Internet in education was introduced by Sugata Mitra, Principal Scientist at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, in one of the most remarked upon presentations at “Lightness.” Mitra identified a number of his concerns about the application of current educational models in India. According to Mitra, accelerated learning spurred by the network will require children to create paradigms and solutions to strange new problems, and “imagination, creativity and lateral thinking will become the most important agents of change.” He is critical of the pervasive model of learning and pedagogy derived from the Greeks, arguing that learning to know and learning to do should not be considered as different activities. He reviewed a series of experiments he had conducted in rural India that involved setting up a kiosk with a dial-up Internet connection that children were observed using over a number of months. While his talk was very well considered, his conclusion that “making it happen” was the management paradigm of the age gone by and that “‘letting it happen’ will be the strategy for building the systems of the new age” belies an issue at the heart of education: that of pedagogy. Knowledge and wisdom can only be derived from experience when seen in the context of an intellectual model, and children on their own do not spontaneously re-invent these models, which would otherwise be passed down from teachers and parents.
The second day, “Perceptions of Lightness,” began with a magical presentation by Tjebbe van Tijen that involved long sequences of images scrolled, in a very un-digital way, across the huge projection screens. Van Tijen mused that “we have so much to see and read, that we need to make space for our own creativity.” On the topic of the modern museum, he was aggrieved that they cost more than the art inside them. “How can art live in buildings like these?” As appreciation of art has become central to self-identity for all social classes in Europe, one can see the logic (witness the Bilbao Guggenheim and Tate Modern); it isn’t about what is hanging on the walls.
Bridging the physical world and the network, Chris Pacione and Chris Kasabach of Pittsburgh-based BodyMedia presented the company’s service that uses wearable body monitors that wirelessly collect data about the wearer‘s food intake, rest, exercise and so on. This information is re-presented to the wearer, via a private website, so that they can make informed decisions about altering their lifestyle. Lightness of mass, pressure and restriction on movement were critical issues in designing the physical product. Information design and the visualization of complex — and personally critical — data are unique challenges. Many in the audience were clearly hostile to a perceived potential to exploit personal data for private gain, automatically assuming ill intentions and missing the potential for good in such remarkable tools.
“The phone screen may be Low Res, but the city is definitely a High Res immersive experience.” — Royal College of Art researcher Fiona Raby
Three presenters brought together complementary ideas about mapping the digital and the real world. Mapping the physical world to the network has been the theme of much of Fiona Raby’s research at the Royal College of Art in London. Considering the discussion of cellphone networks for her FLIRT project, she noted that “while the focus remains on the channel, how big it is and what we can push down it, the essential factor — its mobility — is lost.” The Lazy Crow, one of her concepts created with Ben Hooker, charmed the audience and reminded us that there may yet be hope for the post-WAP generation of cellphone-based services.
The work of design engineer and technoartist Natalie Jeremijenko, currently resident at the Media Research Lab/Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, has much in common with the poetic approach of Fiona Raby, although Jeremijenko, who is “known to work for the Bureau of Inverse Technology,” has a more explicitly political message. On the more poetic side she recounted a project undertaken while at Xerox PARC for color printer promotion at the Atlanta Olympics, which involved arranging parking cars in order of color by issuing locations based on the ticket machine’s scan. However the more political Stump project she described failed by substituting drama for insight into the nature of consumption.
Visualizing the abstract was the theme of architect-turned-media information designer Lisa Strausfeld’s lecture (delivered on the last day of the event, “Tools for Designing Lightness”). Strausfeld is working on a 164 x 33 foot (50 x 10m) digital “media wall” for the new Penn Station in New York, attempting to combine the visual and physical experience of the environment with a geographical view of the space. Alongside train information (where a timeline might slide gradually to the left), the wall will display data from Dow Jones, news and sports updates, and perhaps more ephemeral information about ticket sales to a particular destination.
Discussion moved back to the online world with talks by Webby Award creators Maya Draisin and Tiffany Shlain and Doors of Perception web editor Jane Szita. Delivering a very thoughtful presentation, and one that managed to wholly address the topic of the event, Draisin and Shlain commented that the Internet is about the redistribution of weight and lightness. Reviewing the trends in the development of the medium, they saw a movement from light (first generation websites) to heavy (with the concept of “stickiness”) back to light (with file sharing, community-generated content and user-maintained sites).
“It is important that we make cars not only lighter, but also smarter.” — Adriaan Beukers, aeronautical engineer, Delft University of Technology
Day three brought us to “Tools for Designing Lightness,” beginning with an inspiring talk by aeronautical engineer and academic Adriaan Beukers’ about the future of materials. The morning-after-the-night-before meant that many weary heads remained horizontally challenged.
Malcolm McCullough, the celebrated author of Abstracting Craft and until recently visiting professor in architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, delivered a very engaging presentation, but one that emphasized his learning over his ability (or desire) to argue a limited number of substantial points. His greatest insight was illustrated by the example of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, where “the illuminations were the centerpiece; electricity itself was a spectacle.” Noting that good architecture is designed to modulate light falling from above a façade, he pointed out that when a façade is illuminated from below the familiar turns strange. “Our job,” he concluded, “is to build the digital double to the physical world.”
“Lightness” wrapped up with a number of presentations that were more conceptual in their approach from representatives of the web agencies and integrators that, until recently, were darlings of the stock market. Rick Robinson, chief experience officer at Sapient, presented a number of theories. Asking himself why his experience of drop skiing — ostensibly a “heavy” activity involving weight and gravity — should make him feel light, he had been reminded of his teacher Mike Csikszentmihalyi’s research on the “Psychology of Optimal Experience.” Csikszentmihalyi’s interviews had revealed that “people would describe [such an] experience as one of release, as one of lightness, as one of forgetting the constraints of place and time and being in this experience that they came to call flow.” He moved on to quote Jacob Gutzel’s maxim that “a good theory gives you something to think about, but a great theory gives you something to think with,” citing Watson and Crick’s DNA models in evidence and asking where we might use models as a part of our everyday approach to work. On another tangent, he maintained that if the key to power is the control of the means of production, then “What a lot of us in this room are engaged in doing is returning control to the users.” “Given the premise that such systems extend the commonality of experience,” he continued, “the goal of the design of technology should be to provide access, trust and confidence in systems which are growing ever more difficult to know. And that is worth doing.”
Doors stands head and shoulders above most design events, combining eclectic presentations — a talk by Andre Oorebeek, the Concertgebouw’s chief piano tuner, and a performance of Soloduiveldans II by pianist Ivo Janssen — with solid theory and exemplary work. The “E-culture Fair” that ran in parallel to “Lightness” was a marvelous exposition of interaction design practice while the various related parties were appropriate extensions of the “Doors experience.”
Despite being hard to pin down (or perhaps because of this) the theme of lightness proved to be thought provoking, though a number of presenters didn’t feel an obligation to address it explicitly. Overall, a stronger programming and editorial role would have helped to pull the threads together. The discussion of lightness was often too abstracted from contemporary developments. For instance, the trend to heaviness in vehicle design may be a response to the modern concern for safety. The event would also have benefited from a more extensive discussion of its relationship to business — a theme Thackara touched upon in his opening remarks. Many of the arguments presented at “Lightness” relied on shocking the audience with big numbers, while others elevated the nebulous concept of “the environment” above clear human needs, but neither approach enlightens us about the dimensions and scale of the issues. In his introductory remarks, John Thackara cited Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in which Italo Calvino writes about “lightness of thought, not as in fun.” This is my favorite interpretation of lightness, and one I would have liked to see more in evidence in the discussion of the broader implications of the conference theme.
All images: Doors of Perception ©2000. Photographs by Wieger Fransen
Originally published at web.archive.org.
