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How Do We Design Knowledge?

This lecture by Shannon Mattern (S.M.) was given at the University of Applied Sciences in Vorarlberg on February 1st, 2016. The text below is an abridged, edited version of the speaker's public discussion with Simon Ganahl (S.G.) following the presentation.

S.G. The Internet of Things how you've describe it in your talk seems to be driven by technological and commercial forces: engineers are fascinated by the advanced solutions they are able to create; managers need to launch new products in order to keep their companies going; snobs look forward to controlling their private castles from digital command centers. Is it time to stop selling an Internet of Things and start debating what Bruno Latour called a "parliament of things"?[1]

S.M. The metaphors we choose to describe our new technological and social forms impose upon them a particular ideology. They condition how we imagine politics being embodied in those forms, how we ascribe agency, and how we shape our discourse around those things. The appellation "Internet of Things" reifies the network itself; it all but removes human agents from the picture, and it obscures the world beyond those interlinked objects, which seem to exist for and by themselves. In reality, of course, the Internet of Things is shaped by and (ostensibly) for humans: by the programmers and engineers, developers and government officials who design the methods by which data are harvested, create the algorithms, decide where to embed the sensors and to what end they'll be applied, etc. And everyday people supposedly reap the rewards of this computational chatter: as the machines talk to one another, they're building us a more efficient world. Supposedly.

Substituting a term like the "parliament of things" reminds us that the Old French parlement, speaking, is at the center of such enterprises. It reminds us that the chatter amongst these objects has the potential, much as a legislative body does, to shape our political world, to define our repertoire of possible actions and shape our discourses. That parlement needs to happen not only amongst the networked things themselves, but also amongst those human agents who design, implement, and actively or passively use them. Rather than allowing the affordances and limitations of our things to dictate the shape and politics of the network that unites them; we have to start with – "parler over" – the type of political system we want, and build the world to serve it.[2]

S.G. Can you tell us a little bit more about the methodology of your inquiries into what you call "the deep time of urban mediation"?[3] Is this traditional historical scholarship or more a flâneur approach in the sense of Walter Benjamin?[4] You know that Benjamin's flâneur walks through a city street at snail's pace. While all the busy people are running from one appointment to another, s/he explores everything slowly and closely. S/he'll find a stack of time layers in every building, dating back several hundred years if s/he strolls through a major European city, for example. So, in short, is your urban media archaeology based on the study of printed sources, or do you contemplate, yes, even meditate upon material research objects?

S.M. My own approach employs a variety of methods – both those that are "rigorously" applied (i.e., in accordance with all the codes of practice laid out in the textbooks and grad-school methods courses) and those that are more casually executed. I think it's essential to leave room for casual, unsystematic, curiosity-driven investigation; if all of our inquiries are framed by "method," our models of the world tend to ignore the way "real people" encounter that world in quotidian contexts. Methodolatry tends to cultivate rigidity and blind us to the existence of joy and humor and absurdity and other inexplicable, "un-testable" phenomena in our sites and samples.[5]

My work of course involves library and archival research, but I also do interviews with scholars and government officials, designers and technicians (including especially people with seemingly un-sexy back-of-house or maintenance jobs), and I engage with the urban environment and built space with varying degrees of structure and intensity – from capricious flânerie to guided tours to fieldwork driven by very specific research questions. I also often simply sit somewhere, or sit with an artifact, and contemplate what I'm experiencing with all my senses: how the material smells, how the space resounds or compels my body to move.

And my archaeological interests in knowledge production leads me question the institutions, naturalized knowledge claims, professionalized practices, etc., embedded in every method I employ. When I do archival research, I'm both engaging with archival documents and wondering how they got there, who deemed them worthy of preservation, why they're organized as they are, etc. When I'm conducting interviews, I wonder about the historical epistemologies and labor practices that place my interviewees into the subject positions they occupy. When I'm doing a site visit, I wonder what existing "scaffoldings" or codified practices or historical forces might've molded the site into its current condition.

S.G. As this event is organized by a university department of media design, I'd like to talk a little bit about the design consequences of your research. You aim at exploring the values that are embodied in built objects such as desktops and reading rooms, but also in digital interfaces, right? Does that mean individual designers have an ethical responsibility? Or are these values embedded in what Michel Foucault would call historical forms of knowledge so that the agency of any designer is rather limited? Should politics, ethics, and history be part of a designer's education?

S.M. Yes, I think individual designers have an ethical responsibility to consider the values and forms of knowledge embodied in the things, spaces, and systems they create. Of course historical, systematic forces make it very difficult for the individual designer to rise up against The System. And yes, those people who are most deeply disenfranchised often don't even have the opportunity to contemplate the morality represented by each transaction, each gesture. Yet I believe that, whenever possible, we're obligated to take stock of our position within a system of values that define our professions and our larger society, and to evaluate where our own ethics lie in relation to these overarching priorities.

I'm also a strong believer in the power of small, humble, maybe even accidental acts of protest. Humor, parody, sarcasm: they all have the potential to rip us out of complacency and highlight how absurdly out-of-whack our priorities are. I also believe that individuals have the potential to embody an alternative set of ethics – to live as exceptions to the rule. Our industries and institutions and fields of practice might be plagued with corruption, but by practicing a contrary ethos – one of care and generosity and contemplative slowness – we can not only demonstrate that there are other ways of being in the world, but also turn social critique into an effortless, un-self-conscious performance.



[1] See Bruno Latour: Nous n'avons jamais été modernes. Essai d'anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte 1991.
[2] See Shannon Mattern: "Interfacing Urban Intelligence." In: Places (April 2014), URL: https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence.
[3] See Shannon Mattern: Deep Mapping the Media City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2015, pp. 1–8, URL: http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Mattern_DeepMapping.pdf.
[4] See Walter Benjamin: Das Passagen-Werk. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 1982 (= Gesammelte Schriften, V/1), pp. 524–569.
[5] See Shannon Mattern: "Methodolatry and the Art of Measure." In: Places (November 2013), URL: https://placesjournal.org/article/methodolatry-and-the-art-of-measure.

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