This week’s reading, by popular demand from the DCG Reading Group, is Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin.  We will read  the ‘Introduction:  Touching the World ‘ and ‘Part 2′ that looks at all the many ways the human body receives information about its environment.  The book written in 1994 is a critique of priviledging vision as the dominant mode of operation in architecture as a discipline.  Published at the moment when the personal computer and digital visualization softwares made their presence felt in architectural practice, the book reminds architects of the principle task of architecture stated here by Pallasmaa:

“Architecture enables us to perceive and understand the dialectics of permanence and change, to settle ourselves in the world, and to place ourselves in the continuum of culture and time.”

Also attached are readings by J.J. Gibson from his book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. In connection with Pallasmaa’s reading, Gibson’s‘Introduction’ [pdf pg.6] and ‘The Haptic System and its Components’ [pdf pg.11] looks at the senses from a scientific point of view.  If you can only read one Gibson article read the Introduction. 

Lastly I propose two articles to return to Pallasmaa’s social and political agenda more closely.  From anthropology we look at Ashley Montagu‘s ‘Preface’ [pdf pg. 4] and if you have time Chapter 1 ‘The Mind of the Skin’ [pdf pg.6]  both from his book Touching:  The Human Significance of the Skin.  Kathleen Hayle’s How we became Posthuman:  Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Chp. 8.  ‘The Materiality of Informatics’ brings us back to the conversation we started on Tuesday about real and virtual but through Pallasmaa’s idea of embodiment.

Wolfgang Metzger (1899 – 1979) is considered one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology (Gestalt theory) in Germany*.

Written in 1936 and translated to English in 2006 Laws of Seeing remains aktuell as it covers subjects that are equally important (and mostly unresolved) today.

We will be reading the introduction section of the book entitled “Overview of the History of Visual Theory:” a history that is 77 years old now. This section corresponds to pages 8 to 13 in the PDF file (double pages). The rest is for your reference, however, I also encourage reading introduction to the English translation.

Wolfgang Metzger’s main argument, drawn from Gestalt theory, is that the objects we perceive in visual experience are not the objects themselves but perceptual effigies of those objects constructed by our brain according to natural rules. Gestalt concepts are currently being increasingly integrated into mainstream neuroscience by researchers proposing network processing beyond the classical receptive field. Metzger’s discussion of such topics as ambiguous figures, hidden forms, camouflage, shadows and depth, and three-dimensional representations in paintings will interest anyone working in the field of vision and perception, including psychologists, biologists, neurophysiologists, and researchers in computational vision–and artists, designers, and philosophers.

MIT’s own Pawan Sinha (Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) says “This is a classic work in Gestalt tradition of visual perception, and many of the issues Metzger touched upon continue to be major themes in current research…”

*Wikipedia

This week, the proposed reading is Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” (2001) which has been an influential text especially in material culture studies. Bringing back our attentions to things rather than ideas and subjects, it provokes us to consider, for a change, everything outside of the subject. In the field of design, we mostly focus on the process and the subject that perseveres through it, interpreting, creating objects. Baudrillard, as cited in the text, writes that “we have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object.” “It is the subject that makes history, it’s the subject that totalizes the world…” p.7 As makers, what do we make of what we encounter us? Are they our objects or, first and foremost, things? Brown considers things “as the amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject,” p.5 Just like looking through the dirt on the window glass,

[w]e look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. p.4

Perhaps starting a design is not different than creating a moment of malfunction. We can then start questioning. One more teaser from the text:

“When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object” (Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things [New York, 1972], p. 1).

I propose we read Edith Ackermann’s “Experiences of Artifacts” alongside Brown’s text to contextualize what the implications of “thing theory” might be for makers/designers. Two teasers:

To a constructivist, knowledge is not a mere commodity to be transmitted –emitted at one end, encoded, stored, and reapplied at the other– nor is it information, sitting ‘out there’ and waiting to be uncovered. Instead, knowledge is (derived from) experience, and actively constructed and re-constructed by subjects in interaction with their worlds. p.1

1. How can designers take responsibility for the qualities of their creations if they assume –I caricature the constructivist stance– that people will use them as Rorschach stains any way? 2. Beyond setting limits to our actions and/or clash with our expectations, what qualities does it take for an artifact be able to call up, in each of us, our own subjective representation? p.2

Athina and I have selected two papers for the next reading group. We believe they are both contrasting and complementing each other in various ways in context of space representation and perception. The first paper is titled  Language as a source of evidence for theories of spatial representation , by Ray Jackendoff. He is discussing the role of language in spatial understanding. The second one is Perception in Action by Giulio Giorello, and Corrado Sinigaglia. In this paper discussion focuses on the relation between object understanding and motor skills, from a neurophysiological point of view.

The next readings for the DCG  follow up on the conversation from last week, ‘What is computation?’ The first article discusses the modeling of cognition, computationally and by other methods as a comparison.  We decided that this article could be optional, but we will start with it because it is interesting to consider the arguments from this article in light of Von Neumann’s mathematical modelings last week.

The article is titled ’What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation?’  by Timothy van Gelder 1995.  This article develops an idea of representation and other potentials for modeling a system or behavior.   The primary article we will discuss is ‘Haptic Perception:  A Historical Approach’ by Robert Jutte. This article provides an outline of historical thought on haptics.  I found it a great reading to start to think about framing problems of touch, how other cultures thought about touch and what this might mean for computational design. 

Futures Past: Design and the Machine is a three-day conference on the institutional and intellectual history of research and visions for human-machine systems beginning in the second half of the 20th century, and its relationship to emerging roles of technology in design.

FUTURES PAST: Design and the Machine
MIT, November 21-23, 2013
Deadline: March 29, 2013

Call for papers
In 1960, the readers of the IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics encountered J.C.R. Licklider speculating on the future. “The hope,” he contended, “is that, in not too many years, human brains and computer machines would be coupled together very tightly and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought.” He called this new cooperative interaction between the human and the computer a “symbiosis.” At that moment, computers were conceptualized either as compliant instruments extending the capabilities of the human subject, or intelligent replacements, automating operations previously performed by the human mind and hand. Positioning himself between the distant prospect of artificial intelligence and the use of machines as mechanical extensions, Licklider declared “symbiosis” a productive way to engage with the changing technological environment.

This manifesto-like proposition coincided with the changing role of technology in design. Faced with the difference between the “symbionts” – the “man” and the “computer” – new research agendas raised questions of method, representation, interaction, and imagination. As computational media pervade design pedagogy and practice, the model of interaction between humans and computers in relation to the creative process persists as a research question, even though consistently obscured by the exigencies of practice. A new encounter with Licklider’s proposition fifty years later will help us rethink and contextualize the relationship between the human, the machine, and design.

This conference invites papers that inquire into the past that preceded, the present that coexisted with, and the future that followed Licklider’s proposition. We are interested in explorations of the assumptions and hypotheses that conditioned the coupling of humans with computational machines, and the debates around the roles of design and designer. Papers that investigate the institutional and intellectual history of human-machine systems and/or situate them within the social and economic context of the second half of the 20th century, are particularly welcome.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Research laboratories and design thinking
• Scientific methods in design and their critique
• Knowledge transfer and the military-industrial complex
• Interfaces, human-computer interaction and design
• Networks, infrastructure, environmental thinking, and computation
• Computer labs in architecture schools
• Computation in design (architecture) school curricula
• Participatory design tools and methods
• Computation before and after the computer
• Information and the architectural object
• Computational representations and their intellectual history
• Cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and models of the designer
• Experience and computation
• Mediation and media in human-machine systems
• Impact on contemporary pedagogy, research, and practice

In 1960s Licklider anticipated that the immediate future concerned with the agenda of “symbiosis,” would be “intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.” Is this future past?

Submission
Please submit your CV and an abstract of 500 words to futurespast@mit.edu by March 29, 2013. Accepted participants will be notified by April 26.

This Tuesday we will discuss short selections from John Von Neumann’s seminal 1954 book “The Computer and the Brain.”

As philosophers of mind Paul and Patricia Churchland describe in the Foreword:
What John von Neumann attempted to provide in his final lecture series here published as a single book-was a balanced assessment of the brain’s possible computational activities, seen through the lens of modern computational theory and in the light of computer technology and empirical neuroscience as they existed in that period.

We will be reading the following short selections:
- Foreword by Paul and Patricia Churchland.
- “Introduction” : pp. 1-2
- “Digital and Analog Parts in the Nervous System:” pp. 68-69
- “Codes and Their Role in the Control of the Functioning of a Machine:” pp. 70-72
- “The Language of the Brain Not the Language of Mathematics:” pp. 80-81
- Optional reading: Klara Von Neumann’s preface; to get the feel of people, times, and places.

Here are some excerpts (again from the Churchlands) to open your appetite:

A persistently recurring answer is that the biological brain has a physical organization and uses a computational strategy that is very different from the von Neumann architecture used in standard computing machines.This answer is still fiercely disputed, and it may, indeed, be mistaken. But it lies at the heart of current disoussions about how the biological brain actually performs its any cognitive miracles and how best to pursue the still vital enterprise of constructing various forms of artificial intelligence. Should we simply press past the obvious limitations of biological systems (limitations mostly of speed and reliability) and pursue the dazzling potential of electronic systems, systems that can, in principle and even with a von Neumann architecture, implement or simulate any possible computational activities? Or should we attempt instead, for whatever reasons, to mimic the computational organization displayed in the brains of insects, fishes, birds, and mammals? And what organization is that, anyway? Is it importantly or interestingly different from what goes on in our artificial machines?
[...]
At the end of broad discussions on the nature of intelligence, one often hears a commentator call out, in hope, for the arrival of someone to serve as “the Newton of the mind.” We wish to end on a different note. As the preceding commentary suggests, and as the following book illustrates, there is a strong case to be made that the hoped-for Newton has already come and, alas, already gone. His name is John von Neumann.

This publication aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion in the field of design and computation via encouraging inquiry, criticality, and knowledge. A precious group of contributors, renowned in their respective research and practice areas, develop the desired theoretical and critical spirit this publication aims to reflect. This publication is the product of its contributors’ invaluable and selfless efforts.

More information is available on the webpage:
http://computationaldesign.info

Full publication can be downloaded at:
http://www.mimarlarodasiankara.org/dosya/dosya29eng.pdf