Comments on: Undisciplinary Design / People-Practice

By: John the Statistician

John the Statistician — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:40:16 +0000

Yeah, I can see that: just as a spime is a theory object, a wrangler is a theory role. As an actual person, to take on that name would kind of be contradictory: it would be kind of like someone saying that they are a user to define their profession, with the added confusion that the term user wouldn’t be in widespread use. The closest thing to a “professional” name that immediately comes to mind from this is something like “Wrangler Experience Engineer”. I don’t think you have too many options except for a completely nonstandard profession name, because you’re working in a completely nonstandard professional namespace.

By: Julian

Julian — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 00:31:58 +0000

It’s a bit of a conversation, I’d say, with things spoken, made and written participating. In a quite literal way, I learned of Bruce’s Spime thinking while he was here in Los Angeles at Art Center College of Design and I was asked to be the respondent to a small discussion group on his book “Shaping Things.” I was intrigued and wanted to create a more material response to his book and what it made me think about. So, I brought a bin of gear that I thought the near future would require for the “data wranglers” (extrapolating Gibson’s cowboy motif) in a Spime world — things like RF detectors and injectors, GPS devices, etc. Things that could detect the way digital bits leak out in to the world humans routinely occupy. And Bruce and I and many others go back and forth and around the “namespace”, re-imagining it and sharing ideas and so forth, often quite informally and indirectly. It’s not much of a canonically ordered namespace, more a shared cloud of thoughts and objects.

By: John the Statistician

John the Statistician — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 00:52:03 +0000

I suspect this comment was accidentally deleted before, which is a minor blessing, because it will let me reframe it in a more nuanced way. What do you think of the interaction between what you do and Bruce Sterling’s term for the participant in a spime technoculture, the wrangler? Is it comforting to kind of share a namespace for taking on this particular futures/design/technology activity of situating objects? Is it kind of an uncomfortable intrusion to have the name of another’s theory overlaid so directly on one’s own activity? Or perhaps it is misleading, and has connotations that hedge against certain aspects of your intended practices? Likely, I suspect it’s a bit of all three, and I’m curious if you could articulate your relationship to this term.