John’s vision 7
EXTRACT: LITERACY
(…)
True, we have learned to filter out noise and distraction, but in so doing we have also lost the ability to reflect on and make sense of the bigger picture. Our perceptions of change through time and the behavior of processes are especially weak. Our way of life may well be threatened by changes to our natural and social support system taking place over years and decades—but we tend not to notice changes over a few years or decades. Cumulatively wasteful behaviors often seem trivial in themselves—leaving the light on, printing out an e-mail, eating a plate of Kenyan beans; but the accumulation of such tiny acts can weigh on the planet. In order to do things differently, to reassert some kind of control over the evolution of events, we therefore need to see things differently.
Tomorrow’s literacies therefore need to be process and systems literacies. In this text I explore what it might mean to design new perceptual aids to understanding the state of our natural, human, and industrial systems. I ask whether new kinds of sights, sounds, symbols, and experiences could tell us about how these systems work, what stimulates them, and how and why they change through time. And I conclude by asking which, if any, of these design actions would help us more than simply talking to one another.
We are not starting from scratch here. Many affective representations of complex phenomena have been developed in recent times. Physicists have illustrated quarks. Biologists have mapped the genome. Doctors have found ways to represent immune systems in the body. Network designers have mapped communication flows in buildings. Managers have charted the locations of expertise in their organizations. Our world is filled with representations of invisible or complex phenomena. But most of them have been made and used by specialists as objects of research. So the design challenge described in this chapter has a second aspect: how to deploy new representations in such a way that they influence wider groups of people.
What would it mean to monitor our planet’s signs in real time? Would it be feasible to design perceptual aids to help us to understand the invisible natural systems that surround us? In Germany, a design group called Art+Com has an interface ready and waiting. This interface, called T-Vision, generates the entire face of the Earth out of topographical data and satellite images. Using a level of detail to manage scenic complexity, the work presents a model of Earth as seen from a million kilometers above its surface or at the level of an office interior in Berlin. Other media artists have achieved just as stunning results at gound level. At a recent Venice Biennale of Architecture, multimedia artist David Rokeby presented a work entitled “Seen” that visualized the flows of people passing through and hanging out in Piazza San Marco. Rokeby used a video camera and applied special algorithms to each pixel to capture the trajectory of every pigeon and pedestrian in the piazza; each track left a fading trail that defined the direction and speed of movement. “We have a highly developed visual system that outperforms computers at many tasks involving large correlated fields of data,” says Rokeby; “the computer is capable of shifting invisible phenomena into the range of our perception, allowing us to use our own highly refined abilities.” This is especially true, Rokeby notes, of cross-temporal phenomena that constitute flow: movement patterns that happen too quickly or too slowly for us to properly register with our eyes. We might feed into a T-Vision interface data from sensors spread over the landscape. John Gage of Sun Microsystems talks about sprinkling “smart dust” over the world—millions of tiny sensors that would monitor the physical world remotely. Wireless sensors could be dispersed anywhere: Tiny thermometers, miniature microphones, electronic noses, location detectors, or motion sensors could provide information about the condition of the physical world and convert analog data about anything physical—pressure, light, gas, genes—into bits and bytes that they communicate wirelessly to a network.
A lot of research into remote sensing is funded by the military. True, many of the military’s applications of this technology involve sensing things in order to kill them, but it would not take much to repurpose these tools for civilian applications. The advertising for a once-classified product called GammaMaster proclaims, “Where Is Your Radiation Detector When You Really Need It?—On Your Wrist!” A precision timepiece with a built-in Geiger counter, the GammaMaster bills itself as “ideal for emergency personnel who may have to respond to accidents, incidents or terrorist attacks, which could involve radioactive material.” I’m also taken by the HazMat Smart Strip, a baseball-card-sized device that changes color when exposed to nerve agents, cyanide, chlorine, fluoride, arsenic—in liquid or aerosol form—and other substances that are toxic in small quantities. A change in color in any of eight categories alerts users to “get additional gear, decontaminate, or evacuate.” “It’s not cool to use your nose to detect chemical spills,” said Lieutenant Cris Aguirre, a hazardous materials technician and a Smart Strip user from the Miami-Dade Fire Department in South Florida. I can imagine repurposing the HazMat card so that it yells at me when I send too much money, too.
Some environmental activists are already using environmental sensors as an extension of human senses in an environmental context. The Digital Library for Earth Systems Education (DLESE) involves teachers, students, and scientists in a project to create a library of maps, images, data sets, visualizations, assessment activities, and online courses. In New York State’s Black Rock Forest, a consortium of schools, colleges, and research institutions, participants in DLESE, study topics ranging from tree rings to glacial geology, in situ. The forest has been “instrumented” (their word) with environmental sensors that continuously measure and record properties of the air, soil, and water. The sensors sense the same phenomena as human senses, but do so 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Interpretation of data is as important in the project as collecting it. “Probably the most important insight you can convey from the real time data is that environmental factors vary across both time and space,” says Kim Kastens at the forest’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a partner in the educational effort. “Thinking about causes leads to questions like: why is it that air temperature goes up and down on a 24 hour cycle? why is it that one site consistently has lower relative humidity than the other?” Another educational tool used in the Black Rock Forest work, Data Harvester, enables students to perceive the ways that environmental data vary through time (by generating time series graphs) and through space (by plotting the data on maps).
For the Australian engineer and artist Natalie Jeremijenko, our places are complex, and robust understanding of them develops from approaching phenomena from many different angles, disciplines, and points of view and trying to make sense of conflicting evidence. In her project OneTree, Jeremijenko uses trees as a kind of electronic and biological instrument, or “blogservatory.” Cloned trees that have been raised in identical environmental conditions are planted in pairs throughout parks and other public sites around the San Francisco Bay Area. “In the next 50–100 years,” according to Jeremijenko, “they will continue to render the environmental and social differences to which they are exposed. This is the basis for a distributed data collection project that … provides a different context for public discourse of global climate change than one that is based on passive consumption of authoritative data.” The goal of this project is a collective one: to enable ongoing monitoring and intelligent interpretation of data thereby gathered by many interested persons, lay and expert alike. For instance, a local perfume developer, Yosh Han, anticipates that leaves from the different sites of these genetically identical trees will have different smells; researchers interested in asthma rates in varying neighborhoods can monitor the absorption of particulate matter, or grime (which clogs the stomata in leaves and irritates the alveoli in our lungs), on the leaves of the genetically identical trees. In another project, the Map for Bikes and Birds, Jeremijenko and colleagues will facilitate the collective observation and volunteer monitoring of many other environmental interactions that create the dynamic spectacle of the San Francisco Bay Area. Anyone can upload his or her observations, speculations, and ideas onto each site’s blogservatory.
Environmental sensing—by humans, by remote sensors, or by trees—raises tricky issues of calibration. Who determines where the red line starts that indicates when the measurements of a variable have reached a level that shows it is harmful? People and cultures evaluate data in different ways. An Eskimo might judge a room to be too hot that a child from New York would find just right. Comparable differences of interpretation occur on a planetary scale. Violent arguments greeted publication of the Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist in 2001 because Lomborg questioned the way ecological data had been interpreted. For me, the Lomborg debate missed the point. Without defending sloppy scientific reporting, I question whether it is necessary for ecological doomsday scenarios to be true for them to be important. Uncertainty is the inevitable feature of a complex world, and scenarios help us deal with that uncertainty. Harvesting accurate data is one thing; deciding what the data mean, and what to do about them, is another.
Systems literacy is not just about measurement. The learning journey up the ladder of complexity—from quarks, to atoms, to molecules, to organisms, to ecosystems—will be made using judgment as much as instruments. Simulations about key scientific ideas and visualizations of complex knowledge can attract attention—but the best learning takes place when groups of people interact physically and perceptually with scientific knowledge, and with each other, in a critical spirit. The point of systems literacy is to enable collaborative action, to develop a shared vision of where we want to be.
Comprar Plano B na Livraria Cultura