Matter and Knowledge Among Digital Communities [Presentation Transcript. Date of Presentation 16.7.2013] Maroula BACHARIDOUa and Georgios ADAMOPOULOS b a NTUA School of Architecture, Athens b NTUA School of Architecture, Athens Abstract. At the threshold between the industrial and the digital crafting era, this paper discusses the notions that both today’s designers and users are grappling with. Learning from pre-industrial design and crafting environments, considered as ‘intelligent’ due to their responsive results, mostly achieved using empirically-oriented methods, we envision the creation of a new environment, this time in the age of scientific, technological and computational applications. Based on interdisciplinary collaboration and global data collection and analysis regarding crafting materials and methods, this environment acts both as a design tool and a knowledge-propagation model among digital communities: simulating the complex behaviors and properties of matter through a user-friendly, real-time computer interface, this environment educates and assists users in the creation and manipulation of their personal -optimized to local conditions and needs- artifacts. Keywords. crafting, tacit knowledge, computational thinking, interdisciplinary design, coding, participatory design, digital commons
Introduction: Material Knowledge Among Communities With the development of Web 2.0, the World Wide Web evolved from a one-way medium of global information storage and display, into a medium that enables an increasingly high degree of bi-directional human interaction with the digital world. During this transformation, various digital infrastructures of mass communication were developed, which enable autonomous content production and are often considered particularly efficient, regarding the propagation of information. Taking advantage of the tools offered by Information Technology, communities have invented communicational methods and structures, in order to effectively record, archive, exchange and disseminate knowledge all over the world. Despite the undeniably high degree of infiltration of the digital world into our every-day lives, these, seem impossible to become devoid of their physical nature, of their materiality. This observation, associatively ignites questions about the position of matter within digital communities. If access of the global community to digital knowledge reserves, is more unobstructed and massive than ever, does the same freedom persist to exist, regarding our Knowledge about Matter? Which matter? Whose Knowledge? It's a fact, that we experience Matter, almost in the entirety of its forms, as a product with an exchange value, as a commodity. In almost every contact with matter, from the way we obtain our food and clothing to our living places, the model is more or less the same: Matter comes to us as a consumer product produced by someone else, with us being almost completely excluded from and indifferent for its production process. We are consumers of matter and not
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administrators of matter. In the contemporary production and economy model, administrators of Matter, namely industries and companies, are also the primary administrators of the Knowledge of it. In recent years, rapid developments in the fields of mass customization and digital design are being realized through: • The emergence of user-friendly product customization platforms and the increasing accessibility in terms of price, simplicity and hardware requirements, of 3-Dimensional design software; • The equally increasing accessibility of digital manufacturing machines in terms of price, size and user-friendliness , as well as the emergence of online Design to Manufacturing platforms. These developments in general, and particularly 3D printing, managing for the first time in industrial history to bring the production machine and the material resources to the hands of the consumer, have formulated a digital fantasy, a promise or vision: The average user/consumer will soon be a designer/producer of his own goods. If consumers become the new administrators of Matter, what happens to the administrators of the Knowledge of Matter? Isn't it obvious that the new administrator of Matter, will automatically control the knowledge of it? Considering the past material culture of the 20th century, reaching up to our present, we believe that such a hypothesis is not that clear or certain. Thus, while facing this upcoming production shift from the industrial to the digital era, fantasizing about where we are heading to, we find it necessary to examine where we are coming from, posing two questions: • Which are the problems of our material culture? and • Can we find other material cultures that propose alternative ways? Our material culture Since the most common way of coming in contact with matter is through consumer products, we will initially focus on them, and specifically on the notion of the "Good Product".What is a good product? The answer is not the same for a consumer and a producer. Consumers want products to be beneficial to them, while producers want products to be profitable. Consumer's benefit doesn't necessarily lead to producer's profit, while producer's profit doesn't necessarily lead to consumer's benefit. We believe that the problem of this model, lies on the possession of material knowledge and expertise, the so-called “know-how”. Producers possess the knowledge of their products and of how to produce profit. What do consumers really know about their products, regarding their benefit? Do we, as simple consumers, possess the knowledge, the ability to judge the quality of our products? Can we really justify the price of our products? Do we feel the need, to understand design decisions? Technological and material knowledge is indeed encyclopedically recorded and easily accessible in public online databases. However, this knowledge, is not organized and embedded within an evaluation system of the actual products used in our daily lives. Due to the relative lack of easy and reliable alternative ways, this cognitive void of the consumers, is thus filled by the main administrators of material knowledge, Producers. Through Marketing, producers legitimately inform us, among other things, about: •
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Which products are useful to us.
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How much we need to pay for a good product. Why we should prefer a certain product.
The fact that producers are both the administrators and the providers of this material knowledge, grants them control over how much of this knowledge will be released to the consumers and in what form this knowledge will be displayed. Consequently, things are developed for us, without us. Things follow a certain technological path, without us being able to know or demand alternatives.The less we know we know about the production of material goods, the more difficult it is to discern whether a material product is designed in favor of or against our ultimate personal or collective benefit. More and more things, regarding material goods affecting or defining our every-day lives, our professions and our relationships, from mobile phones and vehicles to household items and food products, seem to fall under the category of things, that our vast majority knows little or absolutely nothing about. The Craftsman Can we find other material cultures that propose alternative ways? Recognizing problems of our post-industrial material culture ,such as the fact that we know almost nothing, about the principles that make a production model , 'responsive' to the user's needs, we notice that elements of such a model existed during pre-industrial 'environments' . Interplay with matter : Matter + Knowledge Regarding matter, Manuel DeLanda's article 'Material Complexity' asserts that, since antiquity, the study of the complexity and variability of material behavior has traditionally been 'the concern of empirically oriented craftsmen or engineers, not of philosophers or scientists’. Craftsmen of pre-industrial workshops, through the empirical and technical investigation of physical laws that govern matter, seem to have achieved to implicitly comprehend them. Adaptive artifacts : Matter + Knowledge + Community Nicholas Negroponte in 'Soft architecture machines' in 1976, examining the 'indigenous' architecture of existing traditional local settlements as a model of responsiveness, notices that 'each of them had developed a system resulting of citizens building their own homes, creating relationships between them corresponding to the local needs and material facilities' . This kind of structural 'vernacular' corresponded to the needs of the user and, at the same time, the community he belonged, creating an artificial domestic ecosystem . Those environments, on the one hand optimized user 'inputs', while developing, on the other hand, a direct type of local design 'language'. Both references, describe the relation between humans and their artifacts, highlighting notions lacking from our contemporary material culture, such as: • the Direct contact with matter and the knowledge of its properties • the Propagation of material knowledge within a community • the users' desire to create something intended for themselves,something for their immediate benefit . Richard Sennett, analyzing specific craftsmen environments of the pre- industrial era, notices that these notions are inextricably connected. Taking example of the pre-industrial craftsmen, Sennett defines as craftsman, the person who does something well for its own sake. In 'The
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Craftsman', he explains that a decent craftsman's motivation was the achievement of balance between thriftiness, functionality and quality, whether he or his family were the direct users of his produced objects, or he felt obliged to protect his reputation and his credibility within the local community where he distributed his artifacts. The achievement of such a balance presupposed a deep knowledge of material behavior, which was usually obtained in a tacit way. As tacit, Sennett defines 'the kind of knowledge, that cannot be transmitted and codified in words; the knowledge of the thousand small movements whose aggregation drives to the development of a technique'. He notices that ' a proper workshop bases its activities within the interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness. This kind of communication between human, haptic action and material attributes was amended within the transition to the industrial age, where, according to Richard Sennett, 'the smart machine separated human mental understanding from repetitive, instructive, hands-on learning'. During the industrial era, knowledge, thanks to the development of science and technology was re-encoded from hands-on learning into explicit data, physical laws and manufacturing processes. These processes, in spite of having been proven unresponsive to local climatological, sociological and cultural conditions, were considered for almost the rest of 20th century ‘legitimate’ due to their generalized philosophy of construction. Smart Machine versus Smart User Today, in a post-industrial advanced technological reality, digital design and manufacturing is still dealing with the notions of responsiveness and adaptability, while promising to overcome the shortcomings of industrial production, bringing consumers before an unprecedented promise, as stated before. Considering Sennett’s craftsman, as someone who does something well for its own sake, and therefore develops ways of knowing how to reach this optimality, we discern strong correlations with the promised maker of the digital era; Trying to follow this hypothesis, this promise of a future society of makers producing for themselves, we stumble upon the problems of our material culture as described before. How can a society of consumption shift towards being a society of self-production? How can the future usermakers become true producers, if they do not really know or understand their products, cannot formulate judgement over their performance and their manufacturing process, over their properties and their suitability to their needs? If we keep picturing the current paradigm of a user who downloads free or paid digital objects and prints them on his 3d printer with minimum involvement in this production process, then essentially we cannot be talking about a producer, but rather about a mere consumer of digital products. Digital Objects as Information-Bearing entities. In order to depart from the state of the mere consumer and become an actual producer, the digital maker would face the need for the proper means in order to explicitly evaluate and validate his design choices. Regardless of their scale and importance to the human life, the notion of Material Performance is intrinsic to all objects. Under the scope of doing something well for its own sake, the demand to know how good the thing we are crafting is, can be found beneath the production of any object, from rings and toys to edifices and vehicles. A need arises for methods or processes, which, through experimentation with matter, would assist users in gradually understanding their objects , eventually leading them to the crafting of a good, beneficial product, as defined by their own criteria.
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Proposal We propose a way of thinking about digital design environments, towards incorporating creative learning within the process of digital object manipulation. We envision a generation of intelligent environments, that empower users by providing them unrestricted knowledge of the object to be made. If consumers of the 21st century eventually become the administrators of their material goods, then the Knowledge of Matter, being a global cultural achievement, faces a unique potential: The chance to come down to the end users of matter, effectively rendering them administrators of both Matter and the Knowledge of Matter. We propose a shift of orientation of digital design platforms, a shift towards: Treating users of digital design and manufacturing platforms as Producers and notas Consumers, towards the Infusion of the concept of Matter deep inside the design process, by providing users with digital simulation and experimentation tools which would enable and stimulate them to thoroughly test the material and structural properties of their digital objects, towards unmediated exchange of material knowledge and equal, non-hierarchical collaboration between scientific communities and user-maker communities, and finally towards Open ended, never finalized systems: New methods could be added, old ones could be improved or rejected, new materials and fabrication methods could be introduced and tested by the community. All of the scientific data about Matter should be open to all, subject to experimentation, evaluation and questioning. These kinds of environments , would provide the framework for the compilation of material and structural genotypes into an accessible database, which in turn, through interaction with users’ input would produce adaptive phenotypes. The development of such a digital material database, would require at a first stage, the systematic recording and collection of dispersed or hard to reach interdisciplinary data regarding material properties and behaviors, capacities and particularities. At a second stage, these collective data should be systematized and reassembled into an open,digitally mediated dictionary. Finally, through visually rich design interfaces, this organized material knowledge would reach the end-users, the future makers. Real-time, interactive Digital Experiments, would be the connection link between the scientific material knowledge and the user intentions and requirements, enabling them to reach as close as possible to the knowledge of their designed object, before manufacturing it. The proposed Creative Learning Environments would essentially be constituted of a back and a front-end: Back end-Contributors and Databases The Back-End of those Environments would be realized through the collective and distributed efforts of interdisciplinary Contributor Communities, organized along the lines of the P2P ideology.These interdisciplinary communities would be responsible for the systematic recording and collection of global data, focused in aspects such as material behavior and endurance under diverse conditions and climates, material scarcity and resource depletion, traditional and contemporary fabrication methods, as well as ergonomics, human safety and sustainability.
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The results of this ongoing collaboration should be analyzed and cross-referenced between the various disciplines, in order to be reassembled into common scientific grounds. A high degree of systematization and generalization of these heterogenous data sets would be required, in order for these material libraries to be flexible enough, to seamlessly embed new materials or fabrication methods uploaded by the Contributor Communities. The decisions and system design choices of the contributor communities, as well as the entire data sets of their collective efforts, would be completely open to the public. Transparency of aims and results, of efforts and processes, would accelerate the evolution and maturation of these digital environments. Every machine needs calibration and every program needs debugging. Accordingly, physical real world testing of manufactured objects could dynamically inform and improve the database, either through every-day domestic use and user reporting or in controlled lab conditions. The proposed design environments, are conceived as living entities capable of perpetual evolution, systems that get better and smarter the more they are used. Physical testing would act complementary to the digital testing: Real-world-use results, would be compared and correlated with the simulated results, thus capturing the inevitable flaws of the system and assisting in its calibration and debugging process. End-users of such design platforms, while being producers of their material goods, would, at the same time, be active testers of the platforms themselves, reporting their experiences and detecting inaccuracies in the digital simulations. Being engaged in a bidirectional relationship with the scientific contributors, they would be able to discuss, judge or question the contributor decisions, providing valuable feedback through their personal experience. By the term users, the individual home producer is not strictly implied. Educational institutions could get deeply involved in the evolution of the platform whether by massive testing or by directly contributing to the knowledge pool. Local communities or grassroots movements could also prove invaluable contributors through their collective testing efforts. Such a proposal, of a universal, unconditional access to scientific material knowledge, does not imply the obsolescence of the need of scientists, engineers, or designers. We rather propose the redistribution of this knowledge, the rethinking and restructuring of the ways this knowledge is channeled to end-users, the ways it is propagated and obtained. Front end - Makers and interfaces By “Front-End”, a user-friendly computer interface is envisioned, a translation of the complex scientific data into a language meaningful to- and comprehensible by- the users. Explicit scientific data would be tacitly embedded, infused into the users’ digital models. Such models, Initially devoid of material and manufacturing information, would acquire accurate material properties, display simulated behaviors and dynamically and realistically respond to users’ manipulative actions. These information-bearing digital entities would enable users to come indirectly but tangibly in contact with the scientific data, through creative interplay and experimentation and more importantly, through the immediate visual, numerical or lexical outcome of their actions and design decisions. Such repetitive digital trial & error processes, would not only lead users towards an explicitly
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good product but would also help them develop a tacit feel about matter and structure, making increasingly wiser choices the longer they experiment with their objects. This kind of digital hands-on learning of matter would be implemented through various sets of Digital Tests or Digital Experiments. Different Experiment Packages could exist for different categories of objects, through which users would thoroughly test and evaluate their objects’ critical properties according to their type of use, receiving real-time feedback. These results apart from giving users a clear and definite understanding of their objects, could be tested against a database of world quality standards, thus validating and certificating the suitability and safety of user-manufactured goods, an existing problem with current 3d-printed household items. We will now try to outline a possible mode of operation of these Digital Experiments.By inserting our information-bearing design entity, in the core of the classical Material Science Tetrahedron, we propose the decomposition of this entity into three basic integral components: •
Form or Structure, in the sense of the actual, designed 3-dimensional object to be tested and produced.
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Material, in the form of systemized packages of scientific data, ready to be infused to the designed model, in order to fuel the simulations.
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Fabrication Process, namely the machines, tools and processes required to shape matter into the desired form.
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Performance Properties, in the sense of the simulation outputs of the tested object, as a function of the scientific data model assigned to the 3d object and the user’s manipulative actions on that object.
One can easily imagine a typical relationship between these three components, with a user providing his design (thus having a fixed form/structure), sifting, at a second stage, through the material database, testing material variations of his design and after a series of experiments and simulations, ending up with a set of results regarding the performance and material behavior of the respective object. As far as material awareness of the user is concerned, this could indeed be a fruitful process. However, the relationship between those components, could be less linearly defined. Incorporating genetic algorithms and advanced computational techniques of structural form finding to the system, a user could begin from a fixed set of desired properties and experiment with different materials, leaving however the form and the structure unfixed, apart from some basic guidelines. The system would attempt to compute the optimal matter distribution that satisfies the initial user requirements, essentially inventing a structure optimized for the respective material, along the given guidelines. However, even if the form, structure and material of an object are defined and its resulting simulated properties are evaluated, actual properties of the same material, could greatly differ between different fabrication processes. The implementation of a database of fabrication
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machines alongside the material database, would add an extra dimension to the system, greatly enriching the simulations, by providing differentiations in objects' structural strength and behavior depending on their fabrication process. Additional properties such as cost of operation, power consumption and production waste would be introduced, along with restrictions and limitations regarding dimensions, form, structure and availability of materials. The dimension of manufacturing process, being itself part of the simulation and evaluation system, could stimulate experimentation on new fabrication techniques, ultimately providing an extensive, dynamic comparative library of available machines or methods. The means for the realization of this direct interaction could be both graphical user interface elements, such as parameter sliders or knobs, value fields, lists or cursor sensitive elements and more advanced and intuitive, virtual-reality or gesture-based methods of interaction. Various kinds of inexpensive open-hardware devices such as temperature or humidity sensors, could input real-world, real-time climatological data to the simulation model, enhancing the adaptation of the product to the local conditions, thus fusing the physical world with the virtual representation. Conclusion From the moment a tool has the ability to make its users understand whether their object is better or worse, it simultaneously constitutes a learning tool. Through the repetition of inexpensive and expeditious virtual experiments, users would learn to evaluate their own choices. They would gradually understand which kinds of choices lead to which kinds of results. With time, they would learn the limits of materials, the behaviors of structures, their material choices becoming more educated, bearing awareness of their consequences. Matters of static structure, stability, endurance in time, thriftiness, ecology, ergonomics and safety, namely matters which we massively ignore regarding our everyday items despite the effect they have on our lives, all these would become fields for experimentation and learning. The evolution of this system would lead to the development of a rich dynamic library of optimized digital entities such as materials, user-designed objects, building components, production methods or user-bullt machines.Ideally, this distributed design process, would result, through the facilitation of digital manufacturing methods, into a new generation of physical products, optimally adapted to each user and his immediate environment.
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