Brenda Laurel’s explorations of her career path, value choices, and “culture work” reached out to me in an uncomfortably pervasive way. Never have I read a book that seemed so personal, yet so professional. In fact, I have never thought about professionalism in such a personal way.

The reason why this book touched me so profoundly (and I am still wrapping my head around this) is due in major part to Laurel’s readiness to assume the social responsibility of her profession (something I think the field of design could benefit more from), and her stark defense of her values as they were incorporated in her work.

While embracing failure on a professional level, Laurel never concedes victory on a social level. Her experiences with Purple Moon show that, while failing her specific business context, positive social values are not necessarily a counterweight to capitalist endeavors.

A passage on page ten struck me as particularly jarring. Laurel struggles to end her identity as an artist and political activist. I certainly understand the transition for the purposes of soothing weary investors. However, I think that in the end, Laurel did little to shed the identity. She may have called it another thing, but to find another path around what is already considered safe in order to meet similar ends (in this case, profit) is at the heart of political activism, and art as well. Artists struggle to find new means of expressing a new nuance of a familiar emotion. Activists struggle to find a new means of conducting society to attain the familiar goal of successful and effective government.

Perhaps I am just too starry-eyed and immature to give up that aspect of my identity. Or perhaps people like Laurel have laid the framework so that individuals like myself may not have to surrender it at all.

It was difficult, nay, impossible for me to conjure up a research question and then read about research methods without considering the possibilities that apply to my question.

So naturally, while reading about Stacey Purpura’s thoughts on product testing, I had to apply particular effort in staying focused lest my brain wonder about the product possibilities of my research results. The deeper I read, the more difficult it became. Eventually, I gave up. So my response to the reading basically reflects how I might implement my hypothesis if given funding to do so.

My main interest focused on the concept phase of the reading, mostly because I am in the concept phase of what might become a product.

My research revolves around how Los Angeles fans interact with a local band’s Myspace page. I want to see if all of the metrics that Myspace makes public about a band are taken into consideration. The reason behind this is that if certain metrics are valuable to the process a fan uses to evaluate their interest in a band, than the band can emphasize those metrics. And if a fan sees a certain metric as negative than the band can de-emphasize that metric on the page, or erase it altogether.

So how would this transcribe into a product? This information would certainly be of interest to bands. Perhaps they would pay for it. Perhaps a service that would offer page optimization to bands based on their current metrics would be valuable. At any rate it will be difficult to tell without any concrete data before me.

I try to think, what would be valuable to my band? But at the same time, that may require more research. Would bands pay for such research? What could such an optimization process promise to band’s potential success?

Perhaps that’s a research question on it’s own…

In section two of Brenda Laurel’s Design Research, I had trouble understanding exactly the point of what was going on. The concept of design as research doesn’t necessarily elude me, but I feel like most of the passages focused on something resembling a guess and check method. Part of me for some reason wanted to fight this possibility. It just seemed too simple to spend so much time on. It wasn’t for some time after reading the selection that I began to assemble the concepts in my mind in some enriching way.

Lisa Grocott talks about Studio Anybody as a venture that put client projects on hold in lieu of building a library of new methods by process of speculation and discovery. Then towards the end of the reading, the essays “Sanjuro: The Ronin leaves town” and “Shoot your own Dog” resonated the same principles.

It seems that as of the assembling of this book, designers as a group of professionals have fallen into some sort of prison due to corporate constraints. These passages seem to emphasize the creative individual over the quick buck. The over-arching argument is that creativity unleashed is essential to build up a mental bank that, in turn, will help produce more effective, efficient, and overall more stunning designs.

While reading this I thought of my last job (which was working for an online magazine). I felt a beat of sympathy for the designers there. As far as I knew, they never had the chance to really experiment, to research, and to come to new conclusions. They were simply consumed in day-to-day tasks.

Then, I realized, is the perfect time to implement such design tactics. As designers sink deeper into the day-to-day, it seems that the list of design problems only gets longer and longer. That’s the point to stop and take some time to revise the whole process.

That way a given “grand strategy,” as said by Rob Tow, is seen again with a new light and new excitement. Then the “strategies” can be reorganized, and perhaps the “tactics” can be made more efficient.

First some questions:

Question #1) How have you personally experienced the concept of “remix,” and was it important to the way you interpret media? Did it occur in a free cultural economy or not? Do you believe that DRM could kill the “remix”?

Question #2) The problem of fitting games into a classroom is an example of design tackling prejudice. What kinds of prejudices do you see shaping our current media ecosystem? Can you think of any assumptions that hold back the progression of media or that stop people from engaging media in a deep and relevant way? What design questions and research methods could engage these assumptions?

*****

Of course there is no way for me to elaborate on the title in any deserving way. But, I want to posit the claim based on some reading I just completed in Brenda Laurel’s Design Research book, and Laurence Lessig’s “The People Own Ideas!” combined with my own experience.

What’s the first thing you think of when thinking of the word “skater”?

Is it punk rock?

Is it Avril Lavigne’s hit “Sk8r Boi”?

Is it something else?

Your answer to this question is likely a result of your own cultural ecology. If you grew up in the suburbs, you might be wondering, “what else is there?”

If you grew up in the “ghetto” of Los Angeles, you might have already assumed that either you are not the intended audience of the questions, or that this writer is completely biased, naïve, or possibly even racist.

Skateboarding started with kids who liked to surf but who were impatient with the fickle beaches, and eventually, as the past time became more marginalized by society, it fell more specifically in the punk niche. Then it expanded rapidly. Now skateboarding is not the pastime of punk rockers so much as it is merely the past time of the stylish youth. And that certainly includes hip-hop culture.

So if you did grow up in central Los Angeles, you might associate skating with Lupe Fiasco and other non-suburban cultural icons. Indeed the music of popular skate videos might very well be an eclectic collection of skate-thrash, hair metal, indie rock, mainstream hip-hop, and underground hip-hop, and sometimes others. It’s really up to the skaters.

I bring this up because skateboarding is a perfect example of the cultural economy that Lessig talks about in his article. There is only one way to learn how to skate, and I will let you in on the secret: You watch people skate, and then try it yourself. In other words, you fall and then fall some more until you fall less. You pay with blood and with pain, but monetarily speaking, learning how to skate is free.

When skaters got involved with media, a new level of engagement was born into the sport. Skaters watched other people skate, learned how to do it, and then added their own twists. If someone ollied 10 stairs, somebody else would try to do it, and then add a kickflip, then somebody else would add a 360, then somebody else would do it all off the rail. In each scenario, the newest attempt was essentially a “remix” of the former.

When skaters started filming each other, a whole new league of skateboarding was born. People could watch and rewind, and they got better more quickly. Slow motion was added so that skaters could more closely examine the techniques. But a side effect of the slow-motion filming technique was that it looked really cool. And then style became part of the equation, and everything from a skater’s dress, to the soundtrack he picked for his part in the video reflected an entire sub-culture of skaters that would emulate their skate-hero.

Notice this entire culture was birthed from the phenomenon that Lessig talks about: a free cultural economy. It’s true that skaters pay for videos, but they also film them themselves and watch them online all for free. That doesn’t stop any of them from spending a good amount of their disposable income on the sport. They merely spent it in a different way. Instead of spending all of their money on the actual media, they spent more on the culture as a whole. Skaters became free to choose who they wanted to be in their niche. The niche did not decide, and the mass media certainly did not decide.

Media ecology from a research perspective

The biggest thing that struck me about the readings in Laurel’s book was the complication in breaking stereotypes (i.e. “Gaming is not for education” or rather, that edutainment makes for something resembling a “spinach sundae,” as the article by Henry Jenkins put it) in media application, and more so that prejudice was really a design problem.

I suppose it’s not uncommon to run into cultural barriers when carrying out design research, but it poses a particular problem in the realm of gaming, where the “intent” of a game is inherently assumed.

Compare gaming with video. One might watch a movie for inspiration, a documentary for instruction, or a short form YouTube clip for low-cult entertainment. What about games? People generally don’t hold the same open mind. Generally speaking, games are for fun and that’s it. We might think of something instructional, like virtual reality simulations for teaching soldiers how to shoot under pressure, as a separate entity from gaming. The actual barrier, historically speaking, would only be the cost of something like Duck Hunt verses the cost of an entire virtual reality machine. With advances in technology however, the ecology of media has changed. An interactive virtual reality medium is well within the reach of an average middle class American.

There’s an interesting way to think about this:

As a designer, eliminate the context in which you understand games right down to your design question. Thus, it is not “How can we get games into the classroom?” That will never happen. Class is not a place for playing games.

Rather think, “How would students benefit from an interactive experience?”

In this way I think the designer is side stepping a troubling and unproductive question. It is not the designer’s scope to tackle prejudice, but rather, to optimize on the media we have. And with technology advancing at the rate it is, and a generation of people growing up never knowing a world without it, the cultural requisites have been met already. The ecosystem exists. We only need to build.

I read Carolyn Ellis’ “Autoethnography…” essay over a week ago, and read Richard Shweder’s “The Surprise of Ethnography” a few days ago. I left both to simmer in my mind, and let my reaction to them come naturally.

On Thursday my band played a show in Santa Barbara, CA, about an hour and a half drive north of where I live. Earlier in the week I called an old friend of mine who lives there and invited him out to the show. His name is Joe.

I’ve known Joe since the first grade. We were best friends through all of grade school, got in a fight once in third grade, and never encountered any other problems in our friendship until high school. We were always very accommodating with one another, as we had to be given our very different backgrounds.

Then in high school he discovered that he had a deep affinity for smoking pot. I discovered that I did not. Eventually his circle of friends changed to reflect his new lifestyle, and mine did to suit my own. When college came, he went to UC Santa Barbara and I went to USC – two decisions that closely mirrored our desire to find a community that might support our lifestyles.

Through most of college I was always sad for him, wished he would find help, etc… Then at the show on Thursday, he showed up, after I hadn’t seen him for over a year, maybe two.

After the show he came up to me and told me he enjoyed it. Then asked me if I wanted to smoke. I declined. He insisted. I resisted. I told him I would buy him a drink and to meet me at the bar. He shyly agreed, with a slight look of irritation on his face.

I waited at the bar, and he never showed up. At that moment, I realized that I had actually offended him by not accepting his offer to smoke. Further, and I confirmed this with a phone call later, I further stepped on his attempts to be hospitable by offering my own hospitality, as if my wanting to get him a drink were sufficient means of greeting, and his offering a smoke, insufficient means.

That is when the full impact of the two essays sank into my brain. My presumptive universal was that, although only some people smoke pot, many more people would have a drink, and thus, having a drink is a better means of being hospitable. In addition, I experienced what I might call a momentary ethnographic experience just by comparing his desires with my own.

I realized that even in a more local context, the concept of presuming a universal is not only inconsiderate, it can lead to all sorts of judgments, such as I called my friend a “weirdo” after he left without saying good-bye.

Further my own experience of the situation, my own personal account gave me probably more insight into the situation than my observation of it. In that way, my autoethnographic account helped me better understand my relationship with a person than my ethnographic account could. Had I just observed the encounter I might come to the conclusion that Joe was being unreasonable. However, I really can’t say now. After all, I was in his town, and he was the one that made the effort to support my music. Perhaps there would have been another way to handle the situation with somewhat less awkward results.

Perhaps had I read the essays a little earlier…