[Xmca-l] Re: Reflective Discourse on XMCA

[mike cole]

Life is intervening between me and an answer to your first message and
those that have followed, Henry. With luck I will get time to read back
through the threads and the original article in order not to avoid comments
that "replicate" as you put it above.

In your initial note you pointed to the phenomenon of disPLACEment that
Alfredo picked up on. My mind went immediately the relation between
displacement and imagination (you have our "minding the gap" paper on
imagination?). I see the same set of issues in your comment in this note
that:

And does this have anything to do with Huw’s conjecture about a continuum
of kinds of projects, at one end those that replicate (with minimal
creativity) and, at the other,  those that “get outside the box”?

No displacement, no gap. No gap, nothing new, rather, we are at the
"replication" end of Huw's continuum, as you refer to it.

Back when I get my homework done.


mike

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 4:38 PM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Do I recall (and understand) correctly Alfredo’s and Rod’s article (on
> boundary objects and building museum spaces) that gesture preceded naming?
> I mean that the boundary object started as collaborative/coordinated
> movement. It was a perfomance before it was a thing that could be named. A
> verb before it was a noun. And does this have anything to do with Huw’s
> conjecture about a continuum of kinds of projects, at one end those that
> replicate (with minimal creativity) and, at the other,  those that “get
> outside the box”? Academic discourse tends to be very nouny, Latinate,
> loaded with bound morphemes. Such discourse serves important purposes when
> operating on the generalization and abstraction side of things, amongst the
> experts. But boundary objects (as observed by Alfredo and Rod) assume the
> project members are strangers to one another’s way of generalizing and
> abstracting. Could gesture then be “rising to the concrete” in discourse
> generally? That would provide nice praxis.
>
> Respectfully,
> Henry
>
> > On Oct 13, 2015, at 4:45 PM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Alfredo,
> >
> > I suspect the quality of the unknown thing here would need qualification.
> > Experienced practitioners in software are often dealing with
> to-be-designed
> > artefacts, although these mostly fall into a more minor category of
> things
> > conforming to well-known conceptions or abstractions, hence they are
> > usually only unknown in a rather contained sense (a bit like roughly
> > knowing what kind of model you need to build out of lego).
> >
> > Contrary to this, computing problems entailing a new computational
> paradigm
> > would certainly throw such programmers into a genuine unknown (the
> dawning
> > realisation that one is working with a different kind of kit).  Also,
> with
> > respect to requirements, the real unknowns are usually the soft
> > requirements on agreeing what the problem is in the first place, which
> will
> > be largely governed by the social situation of said programmers, i.e.
> being
> > paid to get something built.
> >
> > Naming is very important in software in order to try to communicate
> > functional intent, hence practitioners would no doubt be comfortable
> > establishing agreement about naming before moving on.  Nonetheless you
> may
> > well be identifying some form of design mediation at play too.
> >
> > Best,
> > Huw
> >
> > On 13 October 2015 at 23:08, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Henry, all,
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I am at this moment going through a video database on design work in a
> >> software development company, and, observing a discussion between two
> >> developers who talk about features of the software that are not yet
> >> developed, but which could be, ??the insight came upon me that, to
> possibly
> >> create anything together (and there is no other way to do it since one
> >> alone has not the tools/competence to do it), they had to name it. So,
> the
> >> developers were talking about something that does not yet exist but
> which
> >> nonetheless needs to be referred to in order for them to even begin
> working
> >> on it. And naming something that does not yet exits does not happen
> >> immediately, because they do not have a name for it. Naming it takes
> time
> >> and space, that is, work. So, I think the notion of "displacement" that
> you
> >> mention, if it captures this work that talking does to the imagining,
> very
> >> relevant to what I am witnessing in my data. And, given the salience of
> >> "place making" in the thread, the term "disPLACEment" may be timely
> here.
> >>
> >>
> >> Alfredo
> >>
> >> ________________________________
> >> From: HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com>
> >> Sent: 13 October 2015 23:34
> >> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> >> Cc: Alfredo Jornet Gil; Rolf Steier; Geoffrey C. Bowker
> >> Subject: Re: [Xmca-l] Re: Reflective Discourse on XMCA
> >>
> >> Mike,
> >> In your original post on Oct 10, you  suggested that we might "...come
> up
> >> with a deeper understanding of the interlocking issues involved". As you
> >> say, each chatter will have their own response to that. Mine is that I
> can
> >> relate the three issues to displacement, which is arguably the most
> >> important property of language as a semiotic system. It is the ability
> of
> >> with language to refer to and construe aspects of the world removed in
> time
> >> and place (from the here and now) and to the "make believe"
> ("irrealis").
> >> I was reminded of this on re-reading an article by Bruno Latour on
> >> Interobjectivity that Greg Thompson posted back on Aug 18. Most people,
> if
> >> asked, think of language primarily as something for communication.
> Animals
> >> communicate, but, as far as we know, do not displace. (Though It might
> be
> >> argued that animals do a better job of communicating than people.!) I
> would
> >> like to emphasize the importance of the temporal domain, as well as the
> >> spatial, with displacement.
> >>
> >> Henry
> >>
> >>
>
>
>


-- 

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch