[Xmca-l] Re: The Emergence of Boundary Objects

[Lubomir Savov Popov]

Dear Rolf and Alfredo,

What is your definition for place? How is place different from space? I ask because people use the words place and peacemaking in dozens of different ways; it is just mindboggling.

Thanks,

Lubomir

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces+lspopov=bgsu.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces+lspopov=bgsu.edu@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Rolf Steier
Sent: Tuesday, July 14, 2015 2:44 PM
To: Alfredo Jornet Gil
Cc: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity; mike cole; lchc-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The Emergence of Boundary Objects

Hello All,

I also want to thank everyone for participating in this discussion, and I'm looking forward to developing some of the ideas from our text. I think that Alfredo did a nice job of introducing the context of our study, so I don't have much to add. The two aspects that Mike brings up are also very much of interest to me, and I think quite closely related. I think we treat 'distributed imagination' in this instance as a form of place-making for a space that doesn't exist yet (the museum exhibition). At the same time, the place where this design work is occurring is also undergoing a transformation from space to place as the participants construct representations and begin to collaborate. Alfredo and I were playing with an illustration of these trajectories as merging, though we weren't able to bring it together - so maybe this discussion can allow us to flesh out these thoughts.

I'm looking forward to the discussion!
Rolf

On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 7:38 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

>  Hi Mike and all,
>
>
>  thanks for recommending our article for discussion, and thanks to 
> anyone who wishes to participate. We really appreciate it! I can try 
> to say a bit about the article.
>
> Rolf and I did our PhD as part of two different projects that had a 
> science museum and an art museum as settings for the design of 
> technology-enhanced learning environments. Early on in the PhD, we 
> begun talking about notions of space as central in our respective 
> projects. During the last year, we shared office and had much more 
> time to discuss. We had always wanted to write something together and 
> the MCA special issue on Leigh Star seemed the perfect occasion.
>
> The design meetings involved many participants from different 
> backgrounds, from education to architecture and software engineering, 
> and sometimes it was difficult for the teams to advance towards 
> definite solutions. I remember watching the videos from the first 
> months of design work, hoping to find something for writing a first 
> paper. I found different interesting issues to pursue, but one episode 
> clearly stood out from the rest. It was a design meeting, after many 
> meetings with lots of disagreements and dead ends, in which a 
> discussion that concerned a wall in the museum space unexpectedly 
> appeared to trigger lots of good ideas in the design team. It stroke 
> me that something as banal and simple as a wall had been important in 
> making it possible for the participants to achieve shared perspectives 
> on the task and go on. I remembered then to have read something about 
> boundary objects, and it was then that the figure of Leigh Star begun to be relevant.
>
> In this paper, the aim was to consider boundary "objects"  from the 
> perspective of the participants' "bodies," which stood out in our 
> analyses as particularly relevant for the achievement of co-operation 
> despite lack of substantive agreement. Rather than shared substantive 
> understandings, what seemed to allow the participants to proceed was 
> being able to orient towards and perform specific situations that were 
> lived-in (experienced, gone through). We recur to the notions of 
> place-making and place-imagining to emphasize this per-formative 
> aspect that has to do with inhabiting a place and finding one's ways around it.
>
> We wrote the paper as we were finishing our respective 
> theses/defenses, and we wanted to do something that should feel fun 
> and free. We felt that Star's work was broad and were encouraged to 
> connect different ideas from different scholars. The schedule was 
> tight, and, although I think we managed to put together some ideas, we 
> may have taken many risks in bridging across the different frameworks. 
> I hope that those risks taken may now open space for 
> questions/comments to emerge in the discussion, and I look forward to learn a lot from them.
>
> Thanks,
> Alfredo
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* lchcmike@gmail.com <lchcmike@gmail.com> on behalf of mike cole 
> < mcole@ucsd.edu>
> *Sent:* 14 July 2015 19:17
> *To:* eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> *Cc:* Rolf Steier; Alfredo Jornet Gil; lchc-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> *Subject:* The Emergence of Boundary Objects
>
>   If my information is correct, both Alfredo and Rolf have some time 
> in the upcoming period to discuss their article on the emergence of 
> boundary objects.
>
>  So, to start the discussion.
>
>  I am finding this article enormously generative of ways to think 
> about some perennial issues that have recently been on my mind. The 
> entire discussion leading up to the formulation of transforming spaces 
> into places (and recreating spaces in the process) locks in directly 
> with our current work on the 5th Dimension, which i have been writing 
> about for some time as a tertiary artifact and an idioculture, but 
> which most certainly fits the concept of a boundary object.
>
>  Secondly, I have become really interested in "practices of imagination"
> and that is just how Alfredo and Rolf characterize their two 
> installations and the professional teams that cooperate to create them.
> And they make a new linkage by referring to distributed imagination, 
> which is most certainly going to require imagination to fill in the 
> ineluctable gaps, and provide us with some insight insight into the processes involved.
>
>  Those are my issues for starters. What strikes others?
>
>  mike
>
>  PS--
> For those of you who missed this topic, the article is attached.
>
>
>
>  --
>
> Both environment and species change in the course of time, and thus 
> ecological niches are not stable and given forever (Polotova & Storch, 
> Ecological Niche, 2008)
>
>
>