Too H±man by Mariane Ghrayche

xxx xxx xxx Name, Surename TitelofyourMasterThesis Subtitel Department Architecture,ofFacility Management and toMasterGeoinformationThesisobtaintheacademic degree Master of Science (M. Sc.) Too H±man The image of the human body in DesignAuthorMarianeElGhraycheFirstExaminerMA.FriederikeSchäferSecondExaminerProf.Dr.JoachimKrausseClosingDate21.08.2019

3 To the stones that I stumbled upon and those who have helped me carry them ... Come see what I have built

Self’ movement as a case study, we will explore its obstacles and chances in enabling a fair understanding of the bodily experiences and paving the way for new perception(s) of the body.

The argument reconceptualises the area where design, quantification and technology inform each other to better situate the body in the built environment. Due to the limited timeframe the research implications are not yet explored: the argument attempts to lay the groundwork for later practical implementation.

PurposeABSTRACT5

This research is a thorough investigation into the image of the human body in design, it probes into the paradigms of viewing the body, in order to trace the image’s headway and challenge the conventional ‘Universal Body’ mindset.

Takingqualified.the‘Quantified

Design/methodology/approach

Findings

In view of a body suspended within an open system of natural, artificial and technological entanglements, this study posits the role of quantification and measurement in building the body image and fostering the human’s aspiration to know, control and alter themselves through numbers. On the basis thereof, the thesis proposes ‘self-tracking’ as an empowering design methodology through which quantified bodies can be

Originality/value

The argument is made through an overview on the historical and contemporary paradigms of viewing the body in relation to design and through critical, design analysis and argument, with close examination of a case study.

The argument establishes a design discourse where the agency is granted back to the human, enabling his agonistic activity within a democratic process.

Keywords

Human body, Image, Normalization, Self, Body Entanglements, Self knowledge, Self-tracking, Quantification, Qualification.

ChapterIntroductionCONTENTS701THE CONSTRUCTS OF THE BODY IMAGE 1.1 The quantified perception of the world 1.2 The representations of the human body 1.3 From Quantification to Normalization Chapter 02 THE BODY AS AN INTERFACE 2.1 The impact of the body image on Design 2.2 Designing for the body / Designing the body 2.3 Changing the world / Changing ourselves Chapter 03 THE BODY AND THE SELF 3.1 The notion of the ‘Self’ 3.2 The end of the body as we know it 3.3 Self Knowledge through numbers Chapter 04 THE QUANTIFIED SELF MOVEMENT- CASE STUDY 4.1 QS Background and Objectives 4.2 Challenges and Opportunities of QS 4.3 Situating numbers, From ‘Quantification’ to ‘Qualification’ 4.3 Seld-tracking in Design: Lessons to Learn/ Mistakes to Avoid Conclusion Interconnected future Bibliography

This research examines the ‘image’ of the human body that has shaped the practice and theory of design since the earliest representations of Man. The image of the body is the picture that we identify ourselves with.

The body is the instrument through which we explore the world, it stands at the threshold between us and that world. However, it is never a rigid barrier or a fixed boundary, but a porous and malleable system, constantly being reshaped and reformed. This has rendered ‘self-design’ an obligation that leaves us wondering, where does our ‘us’ end and where does ‘the outer World’ begin? The disparateness of body and self is reflected in the structure of this study. While the first chapter ventures into the physical representations of the body and the ideals behind them, the third chapter introduces the notion of ‘Self’ and presents the less tangible, mental and psychological representations of the body. The second chapter, however, acts as an entr’acte between the two, examining the impact of the body-image on the design process and successively, the impact of design on the body. ‘Shall we change the world or change ourselves?’ is the main question tackled in those three Chapters.

The body topic is the investment of all fields and the image of the body is the product of many interwoven layers and paradigms. This research attempts to leap into the myriad ways in which the body is perceived, especially in the world of design1, in order to study the possibility of a fair representation of human beings away from the ‘Man: the universal standard’ sign in which they are conventionally framed.

The1 use of term design throughout this thesis designates the design process in general, which also situation.aspectsandtheequipmentdone,itthesciencenaturalergos,comesThe3workingandsize,measurementsparticularlybodysciencesbranchAnthropometry2architecture.includesistheofthehumanthatdealswithmeasurements:withofbodyshape,strengthcapacity.word‘ergonomics’fromtheGreek:work;nomos,law.Itistheofwork:ofpeoplewhodoandthewaysitisthetoolsandtheyuse,placestheyworkin,thepsychosocialoftheworking

The thesis approach is not directed toward a Plato-Aristotelian, body/soul kind of relationship between the human and the world, nor is it an attempt

It comprises the physical and mental interpretations of the body preceding and influencing the production and reception of everything around us. Some images are imposed, others are formed, and others are transformed.

We will probe with an overview of the historical and contemporary paradigms of viewing the body into the design field that has adopted an anthropometric2 form of thought, where the body was transformed into ones and zeroes. Be it for the sake of representation, comparison, betterment, ergonomics3, standardization, or the sake of transformation, the attempts to cater the body have placed it in polemical images, which will be thoroughly studied through critical design analysis, and close examination of a case study.

Introduction8

This study owes large debts to many well-established ideas and researches in the fields of biology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and anthropology, which will be rigorously explored in what follows. The main contribution, however, was putting them all together in direct contact with the design discourse and with the long-lasting question of ‘who we are and what do we want to become?’

Too H±man: The Image of The Human Body in Design Introduction

9 to outline a Frankensteinian non-anthropocentric design approach that goes beyond the human. In view of a body suspended within an open system of natural, artificial and technological entanglements, we rather turn to its connectivity, sensitivity, and processability within the built environment. Based on this approach, the research aims to instigate the docile bodies of today to rebel against the pre-defined and dull image that designers have placed on them. The target is bringing back the agency to the so-called ‘users,’ and allocating them to become ‘producers’ of their own choices. For that to happen, the bodily interactions need to be understood, observed and tracked, which leads us to venture into the world of Self-trackingself-tracking.ispresented in this thesis as a practice of empowerment that opens a dialogue between the human being and their environment. It is argued that the role of design is allowing for this dialogue of feedback to happen, between the designer, the agent, and the product/space.

Systems regulating the design of buildings transformed the building itself and systems normalizing humans’ measurements transformed the humans themselves. Quantification paved the way to standardization and normalization throughout the history of design, nevertheless, there’s a fair chance today using the same weapon of ones and zeros to challenge this authoritative structure, not by defying it, but by allowing an agnostic activity within its grids. Self-tracking enables this soft-resistance, or ‘sousveillance’ to happen and opens a dialogue between ‘quantification’ and ‘qualification.’

Attempting to demonstrate that self-tracking is not as suspicious as it is portrayed in the media and academic literature, and away from the terror of Big Data, the study introduces in chapter four, a polemical case study, which is the ‘Quantified-Self’ movement a community of people tracking, quantifying and analyzing different aspects of their lives, using different methods and tools, to learn new things about themselves. The QS example is unfolded, illustrating the challenges and opportunities of self-tracking, as well as the pitfalls to avoid in order to extract positive lessons that can be implemented in the design discourse.

Leonardo da Vinci, On the Treatise of Vitruvius, Bk.iii. Ch.i

Chapter 01

One might think of quantification as the act of attributing a numerical value to the measurement of something, that is, to count the quanta of whatever one is measuring. Nevertheless, it is necessary to note that quantification also produces a platform that allows mathematical calculations and statistical procedures to happen. While the merits of quantification are recognized in natural sciences and economy for their assistance in achieving objectivity, it is strongly criticized when applied to social entities, which are often subject to change. for example the quantification of categories such as ethnicity and gender, or in the case of this study: ‘Human Bodies.’

This chapter presents an overview of the historical paradigms of shaping the body image in the design field the guiding ethos, aims and aspirations from the 50th century Human representations to the 20thcentury industrialization of the body, throughout the history of quantification and measurement.

The Constructs Of The BodyImage

The greatest agenda of humanity is presupposing a sense of proximity and togetherness with the universe and leaving no room for theories perpetuating a Cartesian division between the Man and the Microcosm; in other words, humanity regards the world from its vantage point which is most of the time in the center (Figure 1.1) This relation coincides with the phenomenological understanding of corporeality that is believed to be manifested in the human body. Hence, in order to understand themselves and/in the world, homo-sapiens evolved a quantitative way of perceiving time, space and the material environment including the human edifice.“Four digits make one palm; Four palms, one foot; Six palms, one cubit; Four cubits, the entire height, and also one pace. These divisions constitute the human edifice.”

1.1. THE QUANTIFIED PERCEPTION OF THE WORLD

Now Whether the chief mathematician is ‘God’ or ‘nature’ is not something that will be tackled here, however, the raison d’être of this thesis is to examine the quantification perspective in relation to the body archetype and its significant role in fostering the humans’ aspiration to hack themselves −body and mind (an idea that will be elaborated throughout the study).

The German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler (1599), determined to explain how physical causes are given numerical and geometric expressions and how quantities are the archetypes of the world, he said: “What else can the human mind hold besides numbers and magnitudes? These alone we apprehend correctly, and if piety permits to say so, our comprehension is, in this case, the same kind as God’s, at least insofar as we are able to understand it in this mortal life.”

Chapter 01 Arthur4 Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (Har mondswoth; Pemguin Books, 535,611.1964), Anthropomorphism5 is the attribution of hu man traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human ánthropos6entities. is Greek for humans. It is part of an expression that is translated as Son of man in the New Testament.

The Constructs of the Body-image

Albert7 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. 1991),VintageO’BrienJustin(NewYork:Books,170. Figure Macrocosmos.1.1 From the Cosmographia of Peter Apian, 1584.

From this perspective, if humans are at the center or if ‘All thought is anthropomorphic,’5 then ‘God’, or ‘Nature’, must have an inordinate fondness for ‘ánthropos.’6 The French Philosopher Albert Camus (1942), explained the consequence deducted from this truism saying: “The mind’s deepest despair, even in the most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reading it to the human, stamping it with his seal.”

The shift toward quantitative measurement wasn’t as smooth as we, who regard today after ages of quantification, may think This shift couldn’t be possible without visualization. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1954), described the role of visualization in feeding the mind: “One of the fundamental traits of the mind of the declining Middle ages is the predominance of the sense of sight, a predominance which is closely connected with the atrophy of thought Thought takes the form of visual images. Really to impress the mind a concept has first to take visible shape.”8 For that reason, quantification and measurements weren’t the delights of only mathematicians and astronomers, but they have also been a prerequisite for architects, sculptors, and painters who played a major role in illustrating corporeality down the ages

The Vitruvian Man

The principle of Vitruvius had become famous as a result of its pictorial representation by Leonardo Da Vinci (Figure 1.2), which embodied the Renaissance ideal of ‘L’Uomo Universale’ (the Universal Man), whose explanatory comments reads: “If you set your legs so far apart as to take a fourteenth part from your height, and you open and raise your arms until you touch the line of the crown of the head with your middle finger, you must know that the center of the circle formed by the extremities of

1.2. THE REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMAN BODY

The locus classicus of humans stamping the world with their seal is architecture, and despite the fact that anthropomorphism was and still is a notion associated with many contradictions, it has been strongly adopted in architecture as both a form of thought and argumentative support. The human body was frequently used as a model and copy of architecture and its parts in the theoretical reflections on buildings. Consequently, both the body and the building were defined and metaphorically transcribed through proportions, measurements, and abstracted geometric representations.

In the fifteenth century, the discovery of the ten volumes of Marcus Vitruvius, “De Architectura,”9 marked an upheaval point in the history of architecture; they have been regarded as the first books on architectural theory as well as the base for the representation of human proportion in architectural design, and perhaps the earliest mathematical statement of logocentrism in architectural theory In the treatise, Vitruvius discussed proper symmetry and measurements related to the building of temples, he believed that the divinely created human being has the perfect proportions, therefore, a properly constructed temple should reflect this perfectionism and relate to the parts of the body He noted that a well proportioned man is the one having the distance between the fingertips of his outstretched arms corresponding to his height from head to toe.10

Johan8 Huizinga, The Waning of the Mid dle Ages (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 284. Marcus9 Vitruvius Pollio was the first Roman ar chitect to leave surviving written records of his studies. The architectur al drawings contained in his Ten Books on Archi tecture, De Architectura describe essential principles of architecture, town planning, construction and design.

1.2 The Vitruvian Man, draw ing made by the Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, ca. 1490.

.”11 Chapter 01

Although he was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci and Marcus Vitruvius’ circumscription of the human body, Dürer displayed women and men of different proportions in order to show their unique beauty of form (Figure 1.3), unlike the ‘Vitruvian Man’ that was immersed in the geometric order of circle and square and illustrating one absolute form based on ideal proportions determined by Vitruvius. The Constructs of the Body-image Vitruvius, De Archi tectura, II. pref. Leonardo11 Da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da 214.[1517]Konecky(Connecticut,USA:Vinci&Konecky,2003),213-

Figure12

13 the out-stretched limbs will be the naval, and the space between the legs will form an equilateral triangle The span of a man’s outstretched arms is equal to his height

By the same token, the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer fashioned a number of approaches to the study of the human body, he portrayed humans of all different shapes and sizes aiming to innovate the science of human proportion. In his book “Della simmetria dei corpi humani,” (1594), Dürer presented an advanced analysis and instructions of how the human body was to be represented correctly within works of art

On the Symmetry of human bodies -Albrecht Dürer

Furthermore, the ancient Indian theory of architecture is based on a model of the universe known as ‘Vastu Purusha Mandala,’ it is a metaphysical square plan that represents the course of the heavenly bodies and supernatural forces (Figure 1.5). The diagram is considered the diagrammatic and mathematical basis for generating design; it is divided into 9x9= 81 parts that determine ultimate dimensions, function, and even sequence of construction for every element of a temple or a family house

Until the early 20thcentury, the image of the human body inculcated in art academies was the one based on canonical proportional charts Students were taught to measure and memorize the most famous sculptures of antiquity and then transfer their metrological knowledge to their own works. Yet, it is important to notice that the use of an ‘ideal model’ to generate a proportional system is not only a Western concept Ancient Egyptian art, for example, used a canon of proportions to generate perfect bodies; it consists of a grid that measured 18 units to the hairline, or 19 units to the top of the head (Figure 1.4). This conventional system was used up until the end of the New Kingdom’s 26 Dynasty and was found to be aesthetically pleasing while representing the subject in idealized forms that were not necessarily faithful to the actual people in question

There are countless examples across diverse cultures and times that portray a human figure linking health, religion, cosmology, and design, however, the focus of this study is mostly on the widespread Figure(s) that have crossed the seas and globally influenced the perception of what the body is and what it looks like.

Figure Illustration1.3 of a baby from Albrecht Durer.

Other canons of proportions

15 Chapter 01The Constructs of the Body-image Figure 1.4 The development of the Egyptian Grid Sytem. Figure 1.5 The Vastu Purusha figure. via wikimedia

At this point, a line could be drawn from the ‘Bertillonage’ system to the facial recognition algorithms of today: The algorithms work by statistically comparing distances between key points of the face to a database of images, provided by dense CCTV, policy cams and iniquitous Smartphone cameras. Many would assume that algorithms are taught to be objective but the reality is that algorithms rely on simplified metrics, similar to those in the systems of Bertillon and Lombroso. Only now, because of their vast complexity, no one can query an algorithm as they could an eyewitness.

Though Lombroso’s misapplication of criminal profiling perpetuated social racism, the real abuse of anthropometric research happened around World War II Anthropometric studies performed by German Nazis were used in the categorization of Aryans/ non-Aryans and lead to the decimation of countless individuals who did not fit into established categories (Figure 1.9).

The anthropometric12 efforts originated in the ancient civilizations and developed in the 19th century, never ceased to transform the human body into numbers, be it for the sake of comparison, efficiency or even policing

Anthropometry is the branch of the human sciences that deals with body legalisticinbroughtnowwhoseanCesare13workingshape,surementsparticularlymeasurements:withmea-ofbodysize,strengthandcapacity.LombrosowasItaliancriminologistviews,thoughlargelydiscredited,aboutashiftcriminologyfromapreoccupation with crime to a scientific study of criminals (Ency clopedia Britannica).

In the quantitative approach, subjects are often reduced to the minimum required by their definition to be visualized on paper and divided into equal quanta, be it Mercator ’s projection, the course of mars through the heavens, the fluctuation of wool prices or the representation of human anatomy This way subjects, despite the errors and omissions, can be measured, compared, analyzed and even manipulated Consequently, anthropometry has forged a history of abuse and discrimination despite its valuable contributions in the development of clinical research, forensic identifications, and modern design

Alphonse Bertillon, the French police officer and biometrics researcher, is credited as the father of anthropometrics based on his classification system known as ‘Bertillonage’ that was spread in the late 1800s- early 1900s as a method for the identification of criminals. Bertillon collected different bodily measurements such as height, length and width of the head, foot size, the length of the left forearm, and length of the middle finger, as well as other morphological and distinguished characteristics of criminal custody (Figure 1.6). He classified each individual as a small, medium, or large, and added frontal profile photography to each file, what is known today as the ‘mug shot’ (Figure 1.7-8).

Bertillonage

The American writer, Ida Tarbell interviewed Bertillon in 1894 and asked him whether his measuring system proved or disproved the theories of the criminologist Cesar Lombroso13 and many other criminologists, who believed that certain physical characteristics were signs of criminality, Bertillon dismissed these theories. (check Interview)i

Thus algorithmic biases can easily be overlooked. However, due to flaws in design and biases in the data used to create them, algorithms can be inherently racist, as is being demonstrated in many strands of recent research. These biases are not easily overcome. In conclusion, it has been noticed that visualization and quantification, together they snapped the pad-lock throughout history and offered humans, who are longing to understand themselves in the world, a new way of examining reality and a structure around which to organize perceptions of that reality. It introduced the notion of a ‘right perspective’ and ‘correct way’ of seeing things, which will be further developed in this chapter.

Figure Frontispiece1.6 from Bertillon’s Identification anthropométrique (1893), demonstrating the measurements needed for his anthropometric identification system. Wikipedia.

17 Chapter 01

The Constructs of the Body-image

19 The Constructs of the Body-image Chapter 01 Figure Photographs1.7-8 from Alphonse Bertillon’s “Album of Paris Crime Scenes,” Eugenics.TheFigureof(Metropolitan1901–1908.MuseumArt).1.9“science”ofNazi

The great social changes that occurred by the end of the First World War in Central Europe, required new measures to inform the public of social and economic affairs, which became a great concern in the newly created democracies. The use of visual means to communicate quick information was widely spread in newspapers, on posters, and in the statistical abstracts that carried pages of illustrations, what brought graphic designers into play.

20 1.3. FROM QUANTIFICATION TO NORMALIZATION

Neurath’s dictum that words separate but images connect have found supporters everywhere. People are guided and seduced, up until today, by the modern pictorial language which has become widespread in technology, however, one must note that the value of a pictorial sign can fade and become unclear in a relatively short time. For example, the sickle that is an unmistakable symbol for agriculture will no longer be familiar at the end of the century. Hence, to communicate by the means of ‘the images’ is a double-edged sword that might connect people of the same epoch or continent, but also create a gap of misinterpretations of those images.

ISOTYPE14 The acronym Isotype stands for International System of Typographic Picture Education. The method describedwas as a cul ture-free, systematic approach in which typographic pictures are used to teach relevant statistical facts about social, economic, and political topics. The term Isotype is derived from the Greek words iso and typos and hints at one of ownitsmain character istics, i.e. the consis tent use of the same symbol to display the same element.

Isotype -Otto Neurath Otto Neurath, the Vienna Circle social scientist and philosopher, designed pictograms to educate the public about the statistical basis of modern life and its underpinnings. The graphic language symbolized key Data from politics, economy, and demographics. It was displayed in the Museum of Society and Economy (Gesellschafts-undWirtschaftsmuseum) established in 1925 by Neurath, and it was known as the ‘Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics’, what was later called ‘Isotype’14 (Figure 1.10).

The Isotype was a teamwork of economists historians and statisticians who were responsible for collecting the data, and of ‘transformers’ who were responsible for creating meaningful visual configurations from numerical data into sketches of pictorial statisticsii. Moreover, the very important contributions to the Isotype creation was the work of the graphics artist, Gerd Amtz who developed the abstracted symbols used in Isotype, he tried to make them as simple as possible to be understood by everyone, even by a Martian Neurath (1932) asked how we could explain to a Martian what an earthy economic crisis is: “At first, he would not understand us if we tried to tell him what unprecedented confusion results when, in a space packed with shouting human beings and called the ‘stock exchange’, certain numerals on a board dwindle day by day… But a man from Mars would be quick to grasp the significance of shelter, food, clothing, books, sports and the like.”

(Marie Neurath, 621.tation,ofGraphic:the“WorldOtto15127).ence,Instructional“ISOTYPE,”Scino.3(1974):Neurath,PlanningandUSA,”inSurveyMagazinesocialinterpreMarch1932, Figure 1.10 Otto Neurath, Modern Man in the Making.

21 Chapter 01The Constructs of the Body-image

The dimensions of the figure, first set in 1936, were derived from both a proportional canon and a statistical average of body measurements. Average dimensions produced minimum standards that were derived from, and conflated with, ideal views of existence. Hence, the ‘normal’ as average was also conceived as ‘normal’ as ideal. The attitude of the time equated the geometrical and proportional ‘ideal’ with the dimensional ‘average’18. Later on, as a response to the metrological boom and the 1940s ‘Systemmaß’ (system measurement) of brick that was adopted as the industrial standard, Neufert modified his original figure into the modular system called Oktameter: “Man’s body height remained the same as that of the proportional figure of 1936 at 175 cm; however, the height of the shoulders increases from 143 to 150 cm. In this way, man as “the measure of all things” becomes more compatible with the module of the Oktameter of 12.5 or 125 cm.”

These variations in the details show that the apparent facts of the handbooks, relied upon by generations of architects, are far more anecdotal than factual. Neufert’s life was an ‘exceptional pursuit of the norm, as the Dutch

Ergonomics17 the word ‘ergonomics’ comes from the Greek: ergos, work; nomos, natural law. It is the science of work: of the people who do it and the ways it is done; the tools and equipment they use, the places they work in, and the psychosocial aspects of the working 18situation.

In early editions, the section ‘Der Mensch als Maß und Ziel’ was a key part of the introduction the direct translation is ‘Man as measure and goal’, whereas, in the English version, this section has been translated as ‘Man: the universal standard’. This already hints at the ambivalence about whether humans are the model for design or the target to be designed. Modern editions have shifted these remarks to the second chapter, which made them seem less fundamental.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the mathematical average was called ‘normal’ which also became a de sirable standard or goal. For example, the medi cal text Body Mechanics in Health and Disease with five editions from 1934 to 1952, whose authors worked with the Taylor Society identified three body types: Thin, Stocky, and the ideal between them, Normal, While both of the ex tremes were considered physically and psycho logically inferior (Kenny Cupers, Use matters: an alternative history of architecture [New York: Routledge, 2013], 45).

The 20th century tells the story of the uncanny power of handbooks and manuals, where the design, organization, and production of knowledge have been intimately interwoven. The need for standardization, order, and mass production opened the door for architects and industrial designers to guide the making process of the ‘New Man’ An ‘Esperanto Man’16 echoing Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ in the figures of diagrammatic silhouettes circumscribed in a geometry of ‘ergonomic calculations’17 mostly in the drawings by the architects Ernst Neufert, Le Corbusier, and the industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss.

Ernst Neufert’s echo of the ‘Vitruvian Man’ was the ‘Universal Man’ a diagram of a standing naked ‘male’ sweeping its arms to draw ideally proportioned geometry (Figure 1.11). Neufeurt’s ideas on the theory of proportion were stated in 1936, in his ‘Bauentwurfslehre’ (Architects’ Data) and have remained unchanged in all 42 editions that have been published and translated up to the present.

Esperanto16 Man is a term that is used in the context of this thesis, to express that the image created was intended to be universal and to cross all national, cultural and physical boundaries.

The Universal Man -Ernst Neufert

The emphasis on Neufert’s motives is important for it reflects the ‘Rapid Design’ mentalité of the modern era that, together with standardization, have regulated and routinized the design process, and ‘normalized’ 21 the production of knowledge to an unprecedented degree. The handbooks approach presumed that the standardization of building elements could be predicated upon the dimensional routinization of the human activities that they house (Figure1.10).

In20 his contribution to the book “Architecture and Authorship,” (Black Dog Publishing, 2007), the architectural historian Gernot Weckherlin noted that “a standard card-in dex box of “typical” de sign solutions.[Neufert’s] idea was to develop a standard library from experiences made by the active building atelier, from questions of the building owners and his students’ own expert skills in the design stu dio” (151).

Bauentwurfslehre,1936,ErnstFigure“disciplinaryofminimumsocialexertingthecount,term.understandingFoucault’softhatInFoucault’sac‘normalization’isensembleoftacticsthemaximumcontrolwiththeexpenditureforce,whathecallspower.”1.11Neufert, proportional figure.

Architectural theorist Reinier de Graaf puts it in his book “Four Walls and a Roof,” (2017). His collaboration with Albert Speer in 1938, who was Hitler’s general building inspector for the Reich’s capital city, allowed him to develop the standards that were duly incorporated into the building plans of that time. He was later in charge of planning the entire postwar reconstruction of Germany’s war-torn citiesiii. Nevertheless, his involvement in standardization began earlier in 1926, when he was teaching at the Staatliche Bauhochschule in Weimar. He conceived his own design module called ‘Schnellentwerfen’ (Rapid Design) that consisted of training new students in visualizing and solving architectural problems quickly and efficiently.20 (check course description)vi

‘Normalization’21 is used here in accordance with Michel

Wasmuth,gen,Jaspered.andture:BodyinModuleMeasurementNeufert,From“Anthropomorphism:Zöllner,VitruviustofromHumantotheofFascism,”ImagesoftheinArchitecAnthropologyBuiltSpace,KurtWagner,andCepl(TubinBerlin:Ernst2014),62.

In the 1930s and 1940s, many architectural books like the “Bauentwurfslehre” appeared. They didn’t contain text or buildings but a plethora of diagrams; for example, the “Architectural Graphic Standards” (AGS), “Time-Saver Standards” (TSS) and others in the United States and England (Figure1.11). The Constructs of the Body-image

23 Chapter 01

Frank19

Le Corbusier opportunistically responded to the government’s call for standardization and started developing his own system for dimensioning the whole design environment on the basis of an idealized ‘normal’ male body. Once again, an acquainted image of a standing ‘Man’ appears, defining a set of measures with a grid designed to fit the man placed within it, this time based on the golden section (Figure 1.12).

The Modulor -Le Corbusier

22 Le Corbusier’s humorous justification did not prevent the expansion of the Modulor, that is still taken until today entirely seriously as ‘innate’ and eternal, hence, the power of humorousness is not to be underestimated for it can be another form of normalization, and its impact might be even more powerful than disciplinary power.

The golden section and the Modulor inscribed in it, have linked both the anthropomorphic ideals inherited from Vitruvius and expressing the desire for a ‘Human’ architecture (or ‘Man’ architecture, deduced from most of the cases discussed so far) and the rationally well-calculated modern architecture. This is exactly what rendered Le Corbusier’s self-styling as a poet of architecture and what helped the Modulor propagate despite all the critiques on the irrationality of the golden section.

In 1910

With the Metre Convention of 1875, the human-based measurement system was replaced by a geomorphic system obtained from the earth’s circumference. However, this departure from anthropomorphism wasn’t totally accepted by architectural theory. A sense of reminiscence of anthropomorphic measurements can be felt in the work of the 20th century architects such as Le Corbusier and Ernst Neufert, especially with the latter’s statement in his Bauentwurfslehre: “Even today many people would have a better understanding of the size of an object if they were told that it was so many men high, so many paces long, so many feet wider or so many heads bigger. These are concepts we have from birth, the sizes of which can be said to be in our nature. However, the introduction of metric dimensions put an end to that way of depicting our world.”

Le22 Corbusier, Der Modulor: Darstellung eines in Architektur und Technik all gemein MasstabesharmonischenanwendbarenMasimmenschlichen(Stuttgart : Deutsche Verlagsan stalt, 1985), 56.

Le Corbusier introduced this image called the ‘Modulor’ in 1943 and he declared that it takes into account man’s average dimensions, while also being based on nature’s mathematical law of proportion. However, the seriousness of this declaration is questionable due to the fact that the figure’s height was initially determined at 175cm, but subsequently changed to 183cm based on two explanations provided by the artist himself: “firstly, wellbuilt policemen in English detective novels were six feet tall, which corresponds in the metric system to a height of 183 cm; secondly, this measurement would give rise to a larger number of correspondences between the metric system and the anthropomorphic measurements of Anglo-American culture.”

24 one wonders at this juncture, how many times has the designer failed since then, but for now, we go back to the constructs of the body images and the pioneer contributors to shaping those images, that can be mostly summed up as one.

The industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss also had his own version of the Leonardo drawing, he published his first anthropometric book “Designing for people” in 1955, where he introduced his two Heroes, Joe and Josephine: a fictional couple representing the common denominator for all dimensions, or in other words, the universal consumers on which Dreyfuss implemented what he called ‘human engineering’. In the book, he stated: “Our job is to make Joe and Josephine compatible with their environment.”23 It is surprising to read that it is his heroes that need to be compatible with their environment and not the other way around.

Moreover, Dreyfuss described design as removal of friction between human and objects: “When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the industrial designer has failed.”

Joe, Josephine and the abnormal -Henry Dreyfuss

Figure 1.12 Le Corbusier, Modulor

25 Chapter 01

159.Publishers,land:(Zürich,naed.ologynotesinsigningHenry241955),SimonpleDesigningDreyfuss,forPeo(NewYork:andSchuster,27.Dreyfuss,“DeforPeople”AreweHuman?onanarchaeofdesign,BeatrizColomiandMarkWigleySwitzerLarsMuller2016),

Henry23

The Constructs of the Body-image

In “Discipline and Punish,”(1975), Foucault theorized the docile body as a malleable object on which disciplinary forces are acted. He introduced the body as an object that can be read to determine how fields of power are organized during moments in history: its movements, its posture, its position reveal the discursive forces that have shaped it. “Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an Michel25 “DocileFoucault,Bodies,” in Discipline & Pun ish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, [1995] 1977), 135169. Figure Various1.13bodies taken from Henry Dreyfuss’s The Measure of Man and Woman, image compila tion by Diana Cristobal, Jessica Ngan, and BartJan Polman.

In the series of editions of his book “The Measure of Man, Human Factors in Design,” (1959), Dreyfuss introduced more users like wheelchair users, handicapped and elderly users, and more body types including aging, thinness, obesity and even race (figure 1.13). However thoughtful and progressive this might sound, it is still an attempt to discipline, normalize and categorize what is, by definition, not fitting within the ‘norm’. These illustrations revealed certain demographic segments of the population, as well as a restrictive conception of a preferred ‘model’ inhabitant of buildings. This kind of scientific ‘normalization,’ popularized by standard design methods, effectively established representational strategies for the differenceenabling taxonomy-of-otherness.

The army of silhouettes developed by Dreyfuss and Neufert were illustrated occupying every workplace, street, toilet, kitchen, stairs, vehicles, public and private space, equipment, furniture... with male bodies in factories and female bodies at home. Hence, not only spaces and objects were normalized, but also the activity around them.

Humans too, as it is noticed, did not escape normalization and the disciplinary power subjecting their bodies into, what Foucault calls, “Docile Bodies”25 Bodies that have entered machinery of power that explores them, breaks them and rearranges them.

“aptitude,” a “capacity,” which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection.”

At the beginning of the ‘eighties, Marey began to use photography for the representation of movement, he developed a procedure, called ‘time photography’ (chronophotography), to trace the movement in which the body was abstracted into a silhouette by a white suit, or into lines drawn on a black suit with a masked face (Figure 1.15).

27 Chapter 01

The Moving image

In the introduction of his book “La machine animale” (1873), Marey clearly stated that the animal organism was not fundamentally different than that of a machine: “Living beings have been frequently and in every age compared to machine, but it is only in the present day that the bearing and the justice of this comparison are fully comprehensible.”27 He also described the importance of his studies in optimizing and containing the speed, force, or labor which the living being can furnish.28

For the Lack of technical means, these early promises did not reach full maturity; the fulfillment had to from the industrial sphere. This occurred around 1912, in ‘scientific management’29 where the record of a given The Constructs of the Body-image

Etienne-Jules27 Marey, Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Ter restrial and Aeri al Locomotion (New York: D. Appleton and co, 1879), 1. Marey,28 Animal Mech anism, 1. 29 Scientific management is a theory of manage ment that analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is improving economic ef ficiency, especially labor productivity. It was one of the earliest attempts to apply science to the engineering of processes and to management. tific_managementdia.org/wiki/Scienhttps://en.wikipe

In the same context of ‘Docile bodies,’ more examples can be given on how the human body had been thoroughly industrialized and systematized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The guiding ethos of that time was one of efficiency, speed, and minimizing waste of energy, therefore, a new parameter was added to the famous abstract silhouette, which is ‘movement.’

The same system regulating the measurements of A4 papers in the 1920svi paved the way for standard table height, corridor width, and helmet sizes. Systems regulating the design of buildings transformed the ‘building’ itself and systems normalizing humans’ measurements transformed the humans themselves. In other words, standardization is a process that has transformed the subject and not only the object; it has shaped humans while shaping their things.

A line can be traced in that regard, from the French scientist, physiologist and ‘chronophotographer’ Étienne-Jules Marey, to the American couple, industrial engineers and ‘efficiency experts’ Frank & Lillian Gilbert. The three of them were involved in capturing the precise trajectories of human movement. Étienne-Jules Marey was committed to measuring movement in all its forms in the bloodstream, in the stimulated muscle, in the gait of the horse, in the flights of insects and birds and in humans movement (Figure 1.14).

Foucault,26 Discipline & Punish, 138.

Conclusion In conclusion of this chapter, it can be noted how at each phase of humans’ recorded history, their interest in measuring their own dimensions has reflected a large preoccupation with themselves and the world. This progress can be traced from the earliest beliefs in the magical attributes of numbers through the era of anthropomorphism; and so come more modern times where humans are seen concerned in the structure of society, normalization, the mathematics of populations, the laws of heredity, and the influence of environment upon their growth, nutrition, and health. This whole thesis can be rendered into an analysis of the constructs of the body image, however, it more relevant at this point to break the chronological inventory of the body image archives, and take into account the impact of that image on the design discourse. Yet, before moving on to the second chapter, It is held axiom to ask a series of questions in the light of what has been discussed so far:

The production engineers Frank and Lillian Gilberth made movement itself the protagonist with the method they built up where images of pure motion were obtained with entire precision, images giving a full account of the hand’s behavior. The human organism became even more ghostly and blurred since the white line representing the motion was the target (Figure 1.16). The scientific attempt to find the perfect shape of movement for each task had to be matched by new psychology of the human or ultimately that of the machine.

The preceding section refers back to the ‘docile bodies’ of Foucault, and his argument on how the ‘mechanics of power’ allow one to have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but so that they may operate as one wishes, with the techniques, speed, and efficiency that one determines.30 This pretty much sums up the ‘zeitgeist’ of the 20th century.

28 motion cycle was obtained in utmost detail in order to accurately observe the work process.

“Is Human at the Center of Design or is it rather him who is being designed from the very beginning? in case he is, what kind of human is at the center? hasn’t it been most of the time, a sex and race specific human? A white, well shaped, healthy male represented as a calculated silhouette, waiting for design while in fact it has been designed?” Foucault,30 Discipline & Punish, 138.

29 Chapter 01

Figure 1.14 Falling Cat - a short film by Etienne-Jules Marey, first showed how cats land on their feet. Figure Etienne-Jules1.15 Marey. Man in Black Suit with White Stripes Down Arms and Legs, Walking in Front of a Black Wall. c. 1884. Chronophoto Figuregraph. 1.16 Motion efficiency study, Frank ana Lillian Gil berth, ca. 1914.

The Constructs of the Body-image

The Body as an Interface

Chapter 02

This chapter is considered an entr’acte, where we assess how the ‘bodyimage’ produced in the past decades has impacted the production of the environments in which we live and interact. To do so, we do not need books and theories, we can simply look around us into the everyday objects and spaces, and wonder: ‘who were they designed for?’ For example, the uncomfortable chair we’re sitting on right now, the table we’re using, the jeans we’re fitting our bodies into, the earphones that keep on falling from our ears, the toothbrushes that are either too soft or too thick, the shoes that are always few millimeters bigger or smaller than our feet....

Bodies operate remotely as an interface with the outer world, they are made by what they eat, breathe, and synthesize. They function habitually and automatically until they malfunction, that is when awareness occurs.

Understanding how design affects the body can be mapped through the patterns of malfunctions caused by daily interactions with the built environment, that is not to claim that design’s impact is always negative, nevertheless, it is easier to track an apparent disease than a dormant virus. This chapter suggests that the emergence of the ‘user’ as defined in handbooks is the malady of the modern world. It examines the impact of the body-image on the design process and successively, the impact of design on the body.

To standardize in the early twentieth century was a positive value associated with being efficient, hygienic, and modern. Perhaps because of this positive valuation that the human body, its stature, and agency was conceived in a spirit of uniformity.

The most influential image of the body adopted in the design field was the one produced by the handbooks and manuals of that era such as Graphic Standards, Time-Saver Standards, and Bauentwurfslehre. The handbook’s approach presumed that the standardization of building elements and objects could be predicated upon the dimensional routinization of the

2.1 THE IMPACT OF THE BODY IMAGE ON DESIGN

The Body as an Interface Chapter 02 human activities that they accommodate. Handbooks were dedicated to objects and their measures, they favored the emergence of the ‘user’ that designates both the inhabitant who was turned into a consumer and the designer who utilizes the information provided by the manuals. This thinking subordinated design to the exigencies of the program and privileged ‘typical’ over ‘situated’ problem-solving, what standardized the design process itself.

Henri31 Lefebvre, The production of space, trans. Don ald

The French Philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre describes the ‘user’ in opposition to a producer, as the one who “passively experiences whatever is imposed upon them.”

31 The default user is a highly ideological fantasy figure presented as the norm around which all design will be centered. But what kind of human does this figure represent? Each theory that located the human at the center aimed to reinvent the human while constructing his image. In most instances the image represented a bored and disoriented human waiting for the designer/the architect or ‘the expert’, ‘the problem solver’, and ‘the choreographer’ to predetermine his use-value of the environment.

Press,bridge:ofOutlinePierre34146,Row,York:A.thought,Poetry,Martin33186.&(NewdwellingsaysEnvironment:PerceptionTim321991[1974]),Blackwell,(Oxford:Nicholson-Smith43-38.Ingold,TheoftheEsonlivelihood,andskillYork:TaylorFrancis,2002),Heidegger,language,trans.Hofstadter(NewHarperand1971),148,160,Bourdieu,ofaTheoryPractice(CamUniversity1977).

32 This idea is based on Heidegger (1951) who wrote: “we do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is because we are dwellers […] To build is in itself already to dwell […] Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build”33. Tim Ingold liberated architects from being ‘the experts’ and exclusively the ‘form generators,’ he instead considered the act of building as a continually ongoing process, for as long as people dwell in an environment. Unlike the user with the absence of character, a dweller builds an environment where his mental and physical life could contribute to enculturating a place; that is the active engagement of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus

In this context, we bring up ‘The building perspective’ in contrast with ‘The dwelling perspective,’ two notions discussed by the social anthropologist Tim Ingold in his record, “Building, dwelling, living” (2000). Ingold discarded the notion that because humans have the capability to imagine something before they put it into practice, that they somehow stand outside nature and thus are able to impose their imagination on nature, what he called ‘the building perspective.’ Instead, he put forward the so-called ‘the dwelling perspective,’ that he explained as follows: “the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings.”

The human body was never stable, it has always been defined by diversity and transformation. Yet this diversity is constantly challenged by ideals attempting to normalize the body into stable design codes, reinforced by self-fashioning protocols of diet, fashion, posture, looks and so on. The modern world is saturated by norms for repackaging and reshaping the body in the streets, in the bathroom, in workplaces, even on the digital platforms; the body has been radically reshaped in the name of design and under the guise of protection and reinforcement. The body is an artifact, the product of protocols and technologies and the image of a singular stable human served by design is an ideology, an effect of design rather than its starting point; the body itself is designed and reshaped daily starting with its very silhouette.

Summarizing, the Image of the Body is constructed through Design, while the same image reconstructs the Body, also through Design. In this circularity, the body and its image can be understood.

Our Bodies lurk within presumably ‘normal’ equipment, clothing and even spaces. We suffer from chronic back pain and posture problems, we became rigid, almost two dimensional, in the image of the figure in the design manuals. We are endangered by the same design we have ourselves created. Perhaps that is the masochism of design (Figure 2.1) Analytical Diagram ex plaining the relationship between the body and the image representing it.

32 2.2 DESIGNING FOR THE BODY / DESIGNING THE BODY

Between designing for the body and designing the body, lies a history of ever‐changing self-perception. The ‘image(s)’ through which humans perceive themselves are constantly projected and reflected by ideals and mind maps, making them wonder everyday what are they becoming.

33 The constructs of the body image Chapter 01 Figure 2.1 How To Kill People George Nelson Design And Violence, Vitra Mu seum

PublicFiguredisabilities.2.2-3Toilets In the United States In China

signs 1.

Let’s take the toilet seat, for instance, although what happens in the bathroom usually stays in the bathroom, the entire history of modern design could be written from the point of view of that artifact. Why the emphasis on the toilet seat and not on another advanced technological device or piece of furniture? the answer is simply because it is a design paradigm exemplifying a close relationship between body, building, and use; with all the cultural and psychological attitudes surrounding it.

Some35 people regard squat toilets as more hygienic compared to sitting toilets for they might be easier to clean and there is no skin contact with the surface of the toilet seat. Other people regard sitting toilets as ‘more mod ern’ with lower risk of soiling clothing or shoes while urinating. Further more, sitting toilets are more convenient for the elderly and people with

Seated toilets were first invented in the late 16th century by Sir John Harington. But it was only during the 19th century that they became available for mass use. Most of the Western world sits to defecate while squatting is favored in the developing world that is directly related to the perception of the body and its natural needs in the modern civilization, as well as the religious and cultural influences on the everyday practices. These controversial attitudes towards squatting and sitting35 are spotted in public spaces, with instructions on how to use the toilet seat in the western countries (Please do not squat) and instructions on how to use the squat seat mostly in eastern countries (Please do not sit) (Figures 2.2-3).

34 Example:

Toilet Seat

The constructs of the body image Chapter 01

Alexander Kira, a professor of architecture at Cornell University produced a meticulously technical study of the bathroom called, appropriately, “The Bathroom.” His ambition was to establish a fresh set of design criteria for bathroom facilities which were damned “ARCHAIC, INADEQUATE, UNHEALTHY, AND UNSAFE!”

37 Kira examined all activities performed in the bathroom from body care to defecation. Based on the medical point of view that the squat is the optimal way to defecate, he proposed a semi-squat redesigned toilet seat that would support the ischial tuberosities and would bring the knees above the seat level (Figure 2.4). Kira was aware of the feeling of disgust and guilt that this topic provokes therefore, he devoted many passages to identifying and dissecting taboos surrounding bathroom activities. However, despite his efforts, “The Bathroom” did not seem to inspire the widespread consumer revolution Kira sought.

F.A36 “TheHornibrook,Cultureof the Abdomen”(1933), in Alexander Kira, The Bathroom, revised edition (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 116. Alexander37 Kira, The Bathroom (New York: Bantam Books, 1967 [1966]), Front matter (publicity), n.p. Capitals in Henry38original.Dreyfuss, De signing for People (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955),59“The3961. Bathroom Re visited,”The Ar chitects’ Journal (December 1, 1976): 1021; Conway, “In dustrial Design USA,” 12.

Dreyfuss associated the readiness of people to accept a new design with the notion of “survival form” a familiar element incorporated into an updated product to make the unusual acceptable to many people who would otherwise reject it.38 That is a major problem when a drastic change is needed and perhaps that is why Kira’s bathroom reform was not implemented. Kira reflected that the best hope lay in education: “improving the general public’s level of awareness and understanding of design issues.”39 However, this is not merely a design issue, when the general public is ready to disregard scientific facts and safety bars for some kind of fantasies they associate with spaces and objects, then the behavioral issues must be underlined, something that could quickly surpass the capacity of design to reconcile.

Away from the cultural attributes, squatting used to be the natural way for defecation and the ideal posture which provides the stomach muscles with the proper support during the expulsion process, in contrast with the classy ‘sitting-on-a-chair’ posture so often assumed on a standard water closet. This is why, when facing difficulty in emptying the bowels, people unconsciously fold their arms across their stomach, and draw their feet back to assume an approximation of the squat posture. In this respect, the design of a toilet ‘throne’ is invidious in terms of its suggestion about sitting posture which is the major cause of constipation, described by the physiotherapist F.A. Hornibrook as “the greatest physical vice of the white race.”

The sitting-toilet example highlights two major concerns, the first is related to the act of defecating and the second is related to the design of the object itself. Why, to this day, is it still hard to change the conventional toilet seat? Is it because the bodybuilding is no longer capable of handling the squat position? Is it a matter of anatomy, ideology, ergonomics vs. aesthetics, luxury, design, or a combination of them all? (Figure 2.5)

36 Figure Variations2.4 in support and weight distribution by posture assumed. From Alexander Kira, The Bath room (revised edition, 1976), 121.

37 Figure 2.5 Who’s Serving Whom? A randomly taken photo that never imagined would end up here. DESIGNING FOR THE HUMAN

The interface(if it exists) between the human and the world is the ultimate preoccupation of Homo Sapiens, as previously discussed in Chapter 1. It’s a forever unsatisfying attempt to fashion a self-image and to come to terms with what is seen in this continually reconstructed mirror. The modern era required individuals to imagine themselves differently different body in different occasions, a better body in a new world and gave them the tools to do so, that it has become easier for them to change themselves than to change the models. Humans are today suspended in a complex and continuous exchange between themselves and artifacts, a relationship that dissolves the distinction between them.

Many scientists and philosophers like Andy Clark argue that humans have always been to a greater or lesser degree Cyborgs, not in a futuristic nightmarish ‘post-human’ scenario combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being human-technology symbionts, able to enter into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids. “This ability, however, does not depend on physical wire-andimplant merges, so much as on our openness to information-processing merges. Such merges may be consummated without the intrusion of silicon and wire into flesh and blood, as anyone who has felt himself thinking via the act of writing already knows.”40 This perception of the cyborg is related to ‘man the toolmaker’ notion, in the sense that the human mind is naturally disposed to develop tools that are not just external aids, but part of the daily functioning. “The human doesn’t simply invent tools, tools invent the human.”41

There is never a clear line between the inside and the outside of the porous system called the ‘body’ as it is routinely changing. Body parts are replaced on the inside, like transplanting a cornea, and supplementary attachment on the outside, like glasses. These are not even considered as changes but as adjustments of the natural body. Medical procedures are today normalized and the body is treated like an interchangeable system than can be reengineered, a construction site in which every element and process can be adjusted, magnified, suppressed, or replaced with different technologies (Figure 2.6). The interior is filled with mechanical parts such as screws, nails, stents, braces and different kind of bones support... even body parts themselves can be replaced such as bones, valves, veins and different tissues and organs that can be taken from another human, from an animal, synthetic, 3D printed, or even grown (Figure 2.7). We can zoom out to external prosthetics, bionics, and plastic surgeries and zoom in to drugs, chemicals, and gene pools. All these modifications are introduced to the body in order that it can become itself again, or that it can remain being itself, or that is can become something else. This triggers the question: ‘What do we want to become?’

38 2.3 CHANGING THE WORLD / CHANGING OURSELVES (Figure 2.5)

Andy40 Clark, Natu ral Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human

2016),MullerSwitzerland:ofonAreandBeatriz41Press,(Oxford:IntelligenceUniversity2003),5.ColominaMarkWigley,weHuman?notesanarchaeologydesign(Zürich,LarsPublishers,51.

39 The constructs of the body image Chapter 01

Figure Human2.6Body is like a factory, Chinese public health poster, ca. 1933.

Figure 2.7 3D printed prosthetic nose.

Frankenstein42 is a novel that tells the story of a young scientist who, obsessed with discover ing the cause of gener ation and life, created a human being from stolen body parts but, upon bringing it to life he recoils in horror at the creature’s hideousness.

It has been said that in order to change the world, humans should first change themselves, while in an overly designed world, equally redesigning the humans, the challenge is for them now to identify themselves. The notion of Cyborg, prefigured 200 years ago in the literary works of Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein,”42 has caused a deep sense of unease that people have about their personal identity; how could some non‐organic matter to which they have so little conscious access count as a bona fide part of them? This myth appears to warn people that if they try to play God they will be punished severely and this is somehow comforting because it implies that sapiens are the best of all beings and any attempt to change them will fail. It also means that even if their bodies might be altered, you cannot touch their ‘Selves.’

The Body and the Self

Although the self is invisible and can be equated with the soul, there’s no attempt to tackle the body-soul dualism in this research. After all, one might say, a center of gravity is just as invisible, and just as real. In order to situate the self, two major elements should be taken into account. First, the sense of ‘being’, which means having a point of view on the world and having a sense of limits and placement of one’s own body in space. And second, the complex ‘narrative self,’ that is the story we tell others, and ourselves, about who we are. Both elements are affected by the external recruitment of props and aids. Fitted with the tools around them, human beings’ sense of selves of what they can do and they cannot do alters and adapts. Fitted with glasses that correct their eyesight and allow me to see clearly, their core sense of their own visual potential changes. Accustomed to the use of the internet that allows them to access Google anytime, it seems less and less clear where what ‘they’ know stops and where what ‘it’ makes available starts.

Hypothetically, if the Self is the boundary between ‘me’ and ‘the world,’ and if the body is the interface between ‘me’ and the ‘world,’ can it be that my ‘self’ is my ‘body’?

The scientists working in this field strongly stress on the nonexistence of the self as a kernel, rather than an emergent system. Andy Clark used the

Chapter 03

3.1 THE NOTION OF SELF

With this Chapter, we move to the ‘beyond the body’ part of this thesis, where the notion of self is being introduced, by tracing various strands of the modern identity to understand how the picture of selfhood evolved and what is it to be a human agent or a self in the dense technological matrix where the human is located today. Having discussed earlier the instability and malleability of our bodies, makes us wonder where do we begin and where do we end? when are our bodies stretched and when are they transgressed? and most importantly what is this ‘I,’ or ‘self’ that separates us from the world.

The principle of distinguishing self from the world, inside from outside, is not only a biological matter but it produces some remarkable echoes in the highest vaults of our psychology. Consider this experiment by the American Psychologist Gordon Allport, where he examines how, once across a boundary, the bodily fluid becomes alien and foreign to us: “Think first of swallowing the saliva in your mouth or do so. Then imagine expectorating it into a tumbler and drinking it! What seemed natural and ‘mine’ suddenly becomes disgusting and alien. Or picture yourself sucking blood from a prick in your finger; then imagine sucking blood from a bandage around your finger! What I perceive as separate from my body becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, cold and foreign.”45 Even the disgust border can extend beyond the bodily self and become pleasant when, for example, associated with admired or beloved persons. For instance, some parents do not find their young children’s body products disgusting. That

Neil44 Harbisson, is best known for having an antenna implanted in his skull. He was col or-blinded and always wanted to feel colors, so he developed a antenna-like device that translates light frequen cies into sound vibra tions, allowing him to hear colors. The antenna was transplanted in his skull and it’s totally fixed as part of his body. With time he started differen tiating between different sound frequencies and associating colors to what he hears. Harbis son is officially recog nized as a cyborg by the British government (Figure 3.1).

43 Biologically speaking, the body is a porous system and its boundaries are indefinite not only because of the modifications we’re able to perform on it like replacing a heart, or like implanting an antenna to receive colors and sound waves44 but also because of the interlopers ranging from bacteria through microscopic mites that live on humans’ skin, that are selves in their own rights. On those grounds, with such an open system, why it is that the discussion about an interior and an exterior, a boundary and an interface, is still up?

Gordon45 Allport, Be coming: Basic Con siderations for a Psychology of Per sonality (London: Yale Press,University1955),43. Figure Sonochromatic3.1 Head and Seismic Arm, 2015 Cyborg Arts, Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas.

The Body and the Self Chapter 03 term ‘soft-selves’ in his book “Natural Born Cyborgs,” and determined that “There is no self, if by self we mean some central cognitive essence that makes me who and what I am. In its place there is just the “soft self”: a rough‐and‐tumble, control‐sharing coalition of processes— some neural, some bodily, some technological— and an ongoing drive to tell a story, to paint a picture in which “I” am the central player.”

Andy43 Clark, Natu ral Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Press,(Oxford:IntelligenceUniversity2003),138.

Example: Cell Phone

42 can be considered as a social extension of the biological/psychological self. Border crossings are thus either moments of anxiety, or something especially enjoyed.

The most evident example is the cell phone which is only the visible tip of the biggest human artifact, the global-communication system that covers the planet. Mobile phones have become an integral part of the body and brain. A research organization based in the United Kingdom called YouGov, coined the term ‘nomophobia’48 (no-mobile-phone phobia), which is the fear of being without phones. The mobile phone has become part of the self, it accompanies people throughout the day and also during the night within their arm’s reach. Most of the people feel naked without it, their heads are angled down toward it in the streets, in moving trains, buses, and cars a recent article by the Washington Post has cited a study saying that people are growing horns from looking down at the phone49, not to Sandra46 and Matthew Blakeslee, THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN (New York: Ran dom House, 2007), 7. “Stand47 up and reach their arms, fingers extended, “wave them up, down, and sideways. Make great big circles form over your head down past your tights. Swing each leg out as far as you can, and with the tips of your toes trace arcs on the ground around you. Swivel and tilt your head as if you were craning out your neck to butt something with your forehead or touch it with your lips and tongue. This invis ible volume of aspace around your body out to arm’s length, what neuroscientists call perip ersonal space, is part of you.” Blakeslee, THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN, 3. Victoria48 Waldersee, “Could You Live without Your Smart phone?” accessedYouGov,August 8, out-your-smartphonecould-you-live-withports/2019/03/08/nology/articles-reco.uk/topics/techhttps://yougov.2019.

46 Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee, presented in their book “The mind had a Body of its Own,” an answer to the mystery of how mind and body intertwine to create the feeling of Self. They explained that the boundaries of the body, or what in neuroscience is called ‘peripersonal space,’47 expands and contracts, beyond flesh and bones, to suit the person’s interactions with the world. It morphs every time they move, sense, or act based on a network of flexible body maps distributed throughout the brain. This expandable field of self-awareness provided clues and answers to several questions, like why people instinctively duck their head when they enter a space with a low ceiling, or why they are able to experience the texture of food before eating it, by simply touching it with a knife and fork, or how does the body measure the steps they take before climbing a “Yourstaircase...etc.ownbody is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience.” V.S. Ramachandran and S. Blakeslee

The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran known for his experiments in behavioral neurology, argues that bodies are negotiable, in the sense that bodily limits are not stable. Instead, they are a construct influenced by tricks and technologies. (check out one of the experiments)vii Drawing on this, can objects be treated as free-floating parts of the body?

Now since the biological and psychological self boundaries are flexible and expandable, it’s a must to examine what neuroscientists have to say on this matter. “If you were asked, “Does your hand belong to you?” you would naturally say, “Of course.” But ask neuroscientists the same question and they will turn the question back on you: How do you know it’s your hand?... How do you know where your body begins and ends? How do you keep track of its position in space?”

Now if you need to contact prof. Krausse, you can try to reach him on his land phone or meet him in his favorite café in Berlin, every Saturday from 13:00 to 16:00. Perhaps we (Homo-Cellulars) are an upgraded version of Homo-Sapiens but that doesn’t necessarily mean a good thing. Moreover, it doesn’t make prof. Krausse less of a cyborg (with reference to how the notion of Cyborg was defined in Chapter 02).

The51 ‘Homo Cellular’ no tion was first introduced by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennale 2016, Are we human? The exhibit brought together statistics and data visualizations to illustrate how human is influenced and trans formed by the cellphone.

Denise49 Grady, “About the Idea That You’re Growing Horns From Looking Down at Your Phone…,” The New York Times, accessed August 8,

THE END OF THE BODY AS WE KNOW IT

3.2

A cell phone is no longer a secondary tool to human life but it has become a ‘basic’ of a new kind of life. It is only after an encounter with a ‘nonHomo-Cellular’51 that the dramatic transformation of the human by the cell phone can be understood while I store most of my information, notes, and memory on my phone and normally struggle to remember trivial things in my daily life, I observe the 76 years old professor, Joachim Krause, who never owned a cell phone, relying only on his memory palace and handwritten notes, to lead intricate discussions supported by a thorough theoretical background. That is to say, the brain no longer saves the kind of information that the phone is expected to store, especially with its ease of access providing a platform to offload mental capacity.

The Body and the Self Chapter 03 mention the tech-neck aches resulting from spending too much time with necks craned forward. People are attached to this device because it has provided a sense of protection and connection, from and with the world. Mobile phones are considered one of the most valuable possessions a person can have. For instance, the refugees wrap it in plastic during their journey, it carries through archives of images, what was left from their homes and beloved ones. The scholars and theorists, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley argue that “The cell phone permanently attached to our body has taken over from architecture. Indeed, it has taken over much of what used to be defined as the responsibility of shelter in terms of a sense of security, space, orientation, and representation.”50

ers,2016),MullerSwitzerland:ofonAreandBeatriz50tion=2searchResultPosiphones-bones.html?health/horns-cellcom/2019/06/20/https://www.nytimes.2019,ColominaMarkWigley,wehuman?notesanarcheologydesign(Zurich,LarsPublish244.

Whether toward extinction or renewal, human beings are changing. They have become one with what they have created. They are their raw or augmented bodies, they are their transplanted or manufactured organs, they are their inherited or designed genes, they are their thoughts, their perceptions, they are their entanglements with each other and with networks and machines. The planet is clustered with both engineered organisms and evolved machines. The atmosphere is the emergent creation of farms and factories. Humans are empowered by tools and connected by networks of information and ideas. Unlike the age of Enlightenment, where progress came from dissecting things, progress today comes from putting things together. It is time for the Vitruvian Man to step down from his throne and permit the formation of new being(s) .

In summary, the (feminist) Posthuman removes the Man, or even the human from the center and encourages individuals to move beyond representational habits and to challenge anthropocentrism perhaps by beginning to consider non-human entities as the measure of all things

In her critical essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (1985) Donna Haraway presented her perception of Posthumanism by playfully exploiting the Cyborg myth for a better society, away from human domination. The Cyborgs for Haraway are free from the stereotypes and the insecurities of human beings. they are supposed to destroy the boundaries between humans, animals, and technologies. A cyborg woman, for example, can revolt and to re-invent her own roles away from the ideal matriarchal values imposed on her by society, she said: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess ”

On the same side, Rosie Braidotti explained in her lecture “POSTHUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN,” delivered at Yale University (2017), that it is at the moment of its dissolution that ‘Man’ becomes thinkable. She referred to Foucault’s example of the image of ‘Man’ drawn on the sand by the seashore, which is gradually erased by the waves of history.53

(Figure 3.2)

Donna52 Haraway, The Haraway Reader(New York: (NewtheanTheFoucault,532004),Routeledge,39.Michel,OrderofThings:ArchaeologyofHumanSciencesYork:Vintage Books, 1970), 387.

The question will be addressed in this section, from the Posthuman perspective, based on how feminists, such as Donna Haraway, Judith Bulter, and Rosi Braidotti regard it. Not in the futuristic sense of how technologies might modify humans to a point that the definition of ‘the human’ itself would be questioned. But as a critique of the unfulfilled promises of the enlightenment age that have produced a Humanist ideal of the ‘man of reason’ or the allegedly universal measure of all things, where social categories such as class, race, gender, and sexual orientations were the markers of ‘normality.’ The (feminist) Posthuman critique considers the vantage point of the subjugated by questioning the founding principles and achievements of the European humanism its role in the project of western modernity. It produces counter notions of humanity in contrast to the powers and privileges, values and norms, rights and visibility.

If Otto Neurath were to explain to a Martian what an earthy economic crisis is at present, we doubt that he would separate the symbol of humans from other artifacts, given the humans’ newfound knowledge of orchestrating chains of causes and effects in the political and economic systems, as well as in their own mechanisms. They understood the laws of nature and therefore, they were able to hack them to reshape the world in pursuit of something new whether it is immortality or extinction, that is not clear yet. Hence, should this change be feared or embraced? the answer is both. Why shall we embrace change?

45 The Body and the Self Chapter 03 Figure Leonardo3.2 Da Vinci’s Dog. via www.cartoon stock.com

On that account, the worry today is less about understanding the motor of the world, than about understanding the motor of our entanglements It is less about understanding the unpredictable forces of nature than about the unpredictable behaviors of our own constructions.

Example: AI

Embracing the age of entanglement doesn’t necessarily mean endorsing everything derived from it. Despite its promise of a more relevant selfimage beyond flesh and bones, promoted by the biotechnological matrix, we must really question whether we have a say in the construction of this new image or is it only a modern version of the same old model.

The highlight construction of the age is the artificial intelligence, the ultimate expression of logical control where the knowledge was extended beyond the capacity of humans’ minds. It allowed them to construct virtual realities and complex algorithms with emergent behaviors that can grow beyond their own understanding. Consequently, one wonders, what is the future of the body in a society inscribed by the regime of computation?

On 10 February 1996, ‘Deep Blue’, the chess-playing computer developed by IBM defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, which is no longer something impressive given that Deep Blue was programmed with all the detailed instructions regarding chess strategies (Figure 3.3). What is more impressive though, is ‘AlphaGo’, a computer program that taught itself how to play the ancient Chinese strategy board game called Go, which is more complex than chess. In March 2016 Alpha Go defeated Lee Sedol, the South Korean Go champion, by applying unpredictable strategies that stunned the experts. Artistic creations are also challenged by artificial Intelligence. David Cope, a musicology professor at the University of California, wrote computer programs that compose concertos and symphonies. Cope created EMI, experiments in Musical Intelligence, which specialized in imitating the style of great classical composers such as Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, Rachmaninov, and Stravinsky. He later released an album called,

46 Why should we fear change?

Our ability to expand, to globally communicate across vast distances, to capture what we see and hear, to invent new machines and create new plants, animals, and very soon humans, granted us god-like powers and the illusion of being in total control of our world while in fact, we are not. We have given our entanglements permission to act on our behalf in many areas of our lives, which affected our ability to be autonomously exercising control and choice. Acknowledging our malleability, and the fact that we are no longer the most influential players on the world stage does not mean adopting a chameleon image that stretches and merges with everything that it lays on. Losing the controlling position shouldn’t necessarily mean losing agency.

“Classical Music Composed by Computer,” which brought hatred from classical-music enthusiasts who argued the music is technically excellent but too accurate and it lacks some depth. Steve Larson, a professor at the University of Oregon challenged Cope to play in a showdown setting three pieces: one by Bach, one by EMI, and one by Larson himself, and based on that ask the audience to vote on who composed which piece. Cope accepted, he performed the three pieces and by the end of the performance, a vote was taken. The audience thought that Bach’s piece was Larson’s piece, that Emi’s piece was real Bach, and that Larson’s piece was composed by the computer. Following Emi’s success, Cope created more sophisticated programs, such as Annie. Whereas EMI composed music based on predetermined parameters, Annie is based on machine learning which means that its capable of developing unpredictable music in response to the new input from the outside world. This example challenges the human creativity that is considered to be exclusive to organic ‘algorithms’ (Figure 3.4).

47 The Body and the Self Chapter 03

Figure 3.3 The first defeat of, the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov by the computer called Deep Blue, New York, 1997.

Figure 3.4 David Cope in his ele ment.

Furthermore, the algorithms made it possible to generate the first image ever of a black hole, that was published on the 10th of May 2019. Katherine Bouman, an American computer scientist, led the development of the algorithm called CHIPR (Continuous High-resolution Image Reconstruction using Patch priors). It combined half a ton of hard drives worth data collected from eight radio telescopes around the world and turned it into a cohesive image something that would have been almost impossible for humans to do (Figure 3.5).

In conclusion, the technologies of the twenty-first century may strip humans their authority and empower non-human algorithms instead for that to happen, if it hadn’t happened already, there is no need of an external algorithm that knows humans perfectly; it is enough that the algorithm knows them better than they know themselves and make fewer mistakes than they do. It will then make sense to trust this algorithm with more of their life decisions. This defies the idea that the creator is better than the creations, and challenges the comfort resulting from considering “the Adam of your labor”55 a terrible monster, whereas it might be better than Dr. Frankenstein himself. While they think they have hacked the laws of nature, human beings allowed external algorithms to hack humanity and to know them better than we know ourselves.

Watson54 is an creation.rejectionDr.omissionbeennotations.ercreature”referredlabors”“theheno“Frankenstein”Shelley’sThe55computerIBM-Watson-superget.com/definition/terpriseai.techtarhttps://searchenWatson.founder,isTheanswering”manceforanalyticalandintelligencecombinessupercomputerIBMthatartificial(AI)sophisticatedsoftwareoptimalperforasa“questionmachine.supercomputernamedforIBM’sThomasJ.monsterinMarynovelhasname.InthebookcallshimselfAdamofyourandheistoas“theamongothabstractedconIthassaidthatthisreflectsFrankenstein’sofhis

Figure standingMargaret3.5Hamiltonnexttopile of codes she wrote, that took first humans to moon (1969). & Katie Bouman who developed algorithm for the 1st Black Hole Image with the stack of hard drives containing all the data (2019).

On top of that, artificial intelligence is now used in medicine to process masses of raw data to predict health outcomes. For example, the IBM Watson54, after synthesizing millions of up-to-date medical reports, patients records, clinical experiments, and medical journals, Watson supports cancer diagnosis and create management plans for oncology patients.

If58you were to design your future baby, you would probably care less about their looks, but you would definitely make sure they’re healthy, intel ligent and long-standing. When the movie “Gatta ca,” directed by Andrew Niccol was released in 1997, the chances that humanity will adopt a ge nome-driven future were still slim enough that one could watch the movie as a work of science fiction. But today, gene engineering tools and their implications have become reality. In the golden age of genome editing technology such as CRISPR-Cas9, ‘de signer babies’ are here. The real reason why we are terrified of genetic engineering, as Gattaca attests, has more to do with our shortcomings than with the pursuit of perfection.

Example: Wearable Technology In exchange for self-knowledge counseling, people are willing to trade their data and negotiate their privacy. A very controversial example of such an exchange is the rise of ‘Wearable Technology’ devices with sensors measuring people’s daily activities and habits. They function through storing and processing self-recorded data, enabling the person using them to learn more about health status, general habits, personality traits, moods, on so on. This example unfolds itself in three directions resuming the updated status of ‘self-quantification’, what was referred to earlier as ‘self-knowledge through numbers’ 1. First is the well-trodden direction of critique arguing that the commodification of big data gathered through wearable technologies gives way to new forms of commercial and governmental exploitation, as well as a new form of social pressure and discrimination against those who do not confine specific health and behavioral criteria (Morozov; Lanier, et al.)59

Commentary: In this area, the concept of privacy has shifted from ‘the right to be let alone’60 to the human right to “own’ one’s data. However, the dilemma of data sharing is the following: if shared, it is no longer under the person’s control, and if kept hidden, the person misses the opportunity to contribute and benefit from research studies and machine learning. The fact that trackers61 willingly buy and use wearables to monitor their daily activities does not mean they agree on their privacy loss, yet, they often engage in data sharing in exchange for a personalized assessment or treatment, or for crowdsourcing research purposes, for example, medicine solutions to common health issues. On aggregating platforms, statistical quantification can change its value and become a commodity; the main problem here is that the law itself is still not perceiving data as a valuable

49 The Body and the Self Chapter 03 3.3 SELF KNOWLEDGE THROUGH NUMBERS

As it is shown in the first two chapters, quantification paved the way to standardization and normalization, under the pretext of supplying the ultimate norms for humans’ to be well shielded. Along the same path, quantification serves as a backbone for algorithms to reach optimal output(s) through data processing. While the former laid the foundation of the bodyimage as we know it, the latter assists, in ‘knowing thyself.’56 Alleging that algorithms are able to know humans more than themselves, quantification posits that individuals can gain self-knowledge and self-awareness through numbers. An awareness of their bodies, their feelings, and their activities. The idealization of the body in terms of measurements sounds outdated in the twenty-first century not because the standardization lessons were well-learned; since the same old models are still the base of our built environments but because we are more concerned with being Smarter, Endurant57, and Performant.58 Performance is the new normal.

With56 reference to the Greek aphorism ‘gnothi seautón,’ know yourself.

Enduring57 is the capacity to endure, which is both to resist and to last over a period of time. I am using the adj. ‘endurant’ to mean both ‘resistant’ and ‘durable.’

50 expression of autonomy but regards it as a mere tradable commodity.

63 Foucault perceived the techniques of the self, inscribed in a history of how human beings cater and engineer themselves by exercising actions on the self, and by the self. That can be seen as an act of resistance that challenges the authoritative data structure, not necessarily by finding alternatives but by engaging with the same technologies in ways that are unpredictable by the policymakers; this strategy is called ‘soft resistance.’64

Commentary: This path regards self-tracking in general and wearable tech in this case as an act of introspection, with reference to Foucault’s techniques of understanding the self, “technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on.”

2. The second direction is the one framing wearable technologies and self-tracking as an act of awareness and a way to empower individuals in contrast to the top-down approach it creates a shift from a society of ‘Surveillance’ to a society of ‘Sousveillance’62 (Figure 3.6).

: To walk in this direction, is to consider trackers as blind, mindless dupes, rather than active participants in a dialogue between the data generated and what this data actually means. It has been discussed in the course of this thesis, how human beings are loci of multiple systems inscribed into an interconnected network. Self-tracking is fed from this network but it also feeds it back. i can observe, understand, and intervene in feedback65 loops once they understand their dynamics. Feedbacks can be either ‘reinforcing’ or ‘balancing.’ A reinforcing loop is not the most favorable scenario because it means that elements in a system reinforce more of the same, which leads to them taking over the system. However, a balancing feedback loop is where elements are balanced. Data generated by body interactions are not passive material for interpretation, they flow through the network, back to the main generator(the self), to be tested and probed. It’s a continuous process of negotiations where one side reinforces the other, that’s how the feedback is balanced and numbers and statistics become meaningful. For a self to be quantified, it should be first ‘qualified.’

Evgeny59 Morozov and Jaron Lanier, the first a Yahoo! fellow political scientist, the second a digeratus who popu larized the term virtual reality and co-founded VPL. Both adopted a critical path solutionism’.‘bid‘smart-technologies,’towardsdata,’and‘internet Samuel60 Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, “The right to pri vacy,” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (December, 1890): paragraph I. People61 engaged in Surveillance62self-tracking is a French word that means ‘watch ing from above’ (as police ‘watch over’ suspects). Its opposite, ‘Sousveil lance’ means watching from below (crowdsourced watching down at eye-level). The term was coined by the Cana dian researcher Steven Mann. Steven Mann, Jason Nolan, Barry Well man, tionsTavistockH.Gutman,H.Foucault,SeminargiesSelf,”“TechnologiesMichel63(2003):&ments,”veillanceCollectionDevicesWearableInventing“Sousveillance:andUsingComputingforDatainSurEnvironSurveillanceSociety1,no.3331-55.Foucault,oftheinTechnolooftheSelf:AwithMicheled.LutherMartinH,HuckandPatrickHutton(London:Publica1988),18.

3. In opposition comes the third direction, which is the threat previously discussed (in section 3.2- why should we fear change), that those kinds of technologies encourage people to outsource information about themselves without really wanting to reflect on them, which makes them less Commentaryautonomous.

The65 term feedback suggests a power relationship that circularity 66avoids.

Although self-tracking leading to self-knowledge was portrayed in this thesis as being related to artificial intelligence, that was only for the purpose of coping up with the contemporary discourse of humans’ development. However, the practice of self-tracking, or self-monitoring, is not contemporary at all and is not merely conditioned by wired technologies such as sensors, algorithms, and wearables. It has a rich pre-digital history related to self-representation and self-observation that hasn’t been rigorously studied, unlike the visual (portraits and images) and written (autobiographies, philosophy of the self) self-representations.

All three directions will be further elaborated in the following chapter, where the ‘Quantified Self’ movement will be introduced as a case study. However, before moving on, it is important to rationalize the interest in ‘Self-tracking’ as it lays the foundations of the design discourse that this thesis is trying to set.

Self-tracking

Benjamin Franklin, for example, was an early self-tracker (1791), he used a chart in which he noted his daily success in keeping the virtues that he had set for himself as a goal. In his autobiography, he wrote, “It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wished to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”

This64 term will be further developed in the Case Study (check page 58).

Benjamin67 Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 63. Figure 3.6 A drawing by Steven Mann’s sousveillancesurveillancedaughter,six-year-oldillustratingversus

Qualified here means having the knowledge, or ability that is necessary for doing or being something.

Buckminster Fuller was also an enthusiastic self-tracker, he kept a notebook diary about his day-to-day activities and ideas, he gave himself

51 The Body and the Self Chapter 03

Regardless of the tools, self-tracking is the prisoner scratching marks on the wall to keep time as a form of a diary, the mother noting down the time when she puts her baby to sleep and the time when the baby wakes up. Self-tracking is the body measurements on door frames, the traveling diaries, the checklists, and all sort of pen and paper kind of register to track habits, money, and so on. It is a connection between one’s activities/ behaviors and one’s self. Self-tracking is the kind of feedback received from the daily interactions whether done wirelessly or more traditionally it is exactly what humans need to shift from being numb users to being actors. Nevertheless, the advanced technological tools might as well be taken into consideration while tracking, as they enable the human to perceive what was previously unperceivable or unquantifiable.

52 the nickname ‘guinea pig b,’(1983).

To cut a long story short, self-trackers or members of the QS movement are typically portrayed as ‘data fetishists’ and reductionists, driven by the desire to control and optimize the complexity and uncertainty of life.

viii

The QuantifiedSelf Movement

Chapter 04

Self-tracking is proposed in this thesis as a practice of mindfulness and resistance, in opposition to the predefined image imposed on human beings, normalizing different areas of their lives and rendering them docile users. The case study presented is the ‘Quantified-Self’ movement, where people track and analyze aspects of their lives to understand and improve themselves.

The critical views about the politics of Big Data are simply reproduced at the level of the individual and of small ‘data’ (Harari; Morozov, et al.). They indicate that data sets are the creations of human design, hence are always implicated in power dynamics. In these critical analyses, the value of (big)data is framed in terms of political power (surveillance) and corporate profit. While these views tend to foreground the dark sides of the political economy of Big Data, little they have to say about the value of that data for self-trackers who consider themselves on the opposite side of Big Data.

At the beginning of this section, it must be stated that this treatise does not attempt to illustrate data as neutral and objective, however, it’s in its contention that in order to understand why people are willingly partaking in self-tracking and data sharing, and in order to really understand the culture of Big Data, there must be a fair assessment to the myriad ways that self-trackers consider while qualifying their data and deeming them valuable in the context of everyday life, beyond the data fetishism critique. This research takes into account anthropological studies (Bruno Latour), ethnographically informed studies of quantified self (Deborah Lupton, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus, Natasha Schüll, et al.)ix, and experiences, reflections, and insights from self-trackers, in order to move beyond the framework in which self-tracking is conventionally understood, and to better situate this group in the historical and present context of today’s global information society.

THE QUANTIFIED SELF MOVEMENT- CASE STUDY

53 The Quantified-Self Movement Chapter 04

The QS movement was founded in 2007, in San Francisco, by the two former “Wired magazine” editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly. It has grown to encompass a worldwide network of 45,000 members who use wearable devices, spreadsheets, notebooks, and other techniques of self-tracking to gather and analyze data for different reasons ”to answer a health question, achieve a goal, explore an idea, or simply because [they] are curious.”

QS practitioners explain their experiments what they did, how they did it, what did they learn from it in conferences, local meet-ups with ‘show and tell’ talks, or on the QS Forum. Leaders in the quantified self community work closely with public health experts, policymakers, and research scientists (and designers in the near future), to find answers to questions like, “How can we improve access to our own data? how can we share our data in a way that protects our privacy and individual agency? how can our self-tracking instrumentation, including wearables, analytics platforms, and data stores, be designed to better help us answer a broader range of questions about ourselves?”69 Self-tracking holds the promise of identifying patterns that are usually hidden or tacit, relying on the emotional detachment and arithmetic precision of numbers. This leads, as the movement’s self-proclaimed motto upholds, to ‘Self Knowledge Through Numbers.’

The QS movement is accused to be a form of ‘data fetishism,’ it is rigorously criticized by people in academic literature and the media, such as Luke Dormehl, Evgeny Morozov, Rachel Rettner, Yuval Noah Harari, Dominic Basulto, et. al.70 First among their objections is the claim that quantification is a reductionist act that ridicules actual problems. Dieting, for instance, is simplified with weight loss apps like ‘MyFitnessPal’ that measures calories, cholesterol, and fat intake, and disregards how each of those elements is related to the circuitous process of body weight. Since there is little agreement in the dieting community as to what exactly causes obesity, this defective way of thinking about nutrition might lead to dieting disorders. The relationship between body weight and the variables affecting it is not something that can be reduced to a simple algorithm. In this process, critics argue that an entire world of human, social, and environmental complexity may get lost. Furthermore, self-tracking is accused to increase people’s trust in numbers and decrease their trust in subjective, intuitive and tacit knowledge.

4.2 CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF THE QUANTIFIED SELF Challenges

“What68 Is Quanti fied Self?” Quanti fied Self, accessed August 15, Self?”“WhatQuantified69is-quantified-self/.self.com/about/what-https://quantified2019,Self,IsQuantified References70 in bibliography.

54 4.1 THE ‘QUANTIFIED SELF’ BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

72 Well, for the sake of this thesis, it is. 04 Evgeny71 Morozov, To Save

Chapter

rozov/.view-with-evgeny-motionism-an-internological-soluthe-folly-of-techlicbooks.org/https://www.pub2013,(blog),zov,”withism:nological“The72Lane,ExistProblemsandnology,ClickEverything,Here:TechSolutionismtheUrgetoFixThatDon’t(London:Allen2013),261.FollyofTechSolutionAnInterviewEvgenyMoroPublicBooksSeptember9,

In addition to the reductionist and imperialist critiques, self-trackers are accused to have blind faith in data that casts away the politics of measurements.

After thoroughly inspecting the critiques of ‘datafication’ and ‘solutionism,’ mainly in Evgeny Morozov’s book “TO SAVE EVERYTHING CLICK HERE.” an urge to develop a personal understanding of the QS movement aroused, especially after having the feeling that, in order to build his argument, Morozov have chosen extreme examples, mostly failures, that do not really constitute the entire culture of self-tracking (as discussed earlier, self-tracking is not a contemporary practice), or the whole thinking behind the QS movement. In an Interview with Evgeny Morozov, Natasha Schüll addressed the ‘Quantified Narratives’ topic and challenged his critique that “self-trackers gain too much respect for the numbers and forget that other ways of telling the story and generating action out of it are possible.”

71 She told him about the “Show and Tell” activity that QS movement is defined by, where self-trackers get on stage and tell a story about what they tracked, and what they learned from it, using numbers as just an element in the narrative process. She said, “I worry the QSers you quote mainly from media reports serve a bit too readily as a straw men for your argument. I mean it’s almost too easy to make fun of them as you do! I wonder what you might be missing by ignoring their actual practices.” To which Morozov responded, “There’s no way I’m going to go spend time with them I can’t stand them,” and later on he adds “I’m sure if I spend enough time with them I’d have a subtler account but the goal in the book was not to understand the QS movement.”

The Quantified-Self Movement

Technologies of measurement have a long history of being used for purposes of state control and discipline of population. Hence, one of the biggest concerns of the twenty-first-century is the history repeating itself via the digital constructions of ‘algorithmic identities’. This critique asserts, numbers are not neutral which means that the very phenomena being tracked are constructs of ideals and norms of what happier, fitter, healthier, faster... mean. The most updated discussion about the politics and social ramifications of the quantified-self concerns the attempt of some insurance companies to sell ‘interactive policies,’ which means the customers would submit their fitness data via the apps in exchange for discounts. This way, companies can check if their customers are committed to a healthy lifestyle according to their standards. The very self-knowledge aim of QS practitioners can thus have a counter effect if they are not aware of the normative implications of data-generating.

Whitney74 Erin Boesel, “Show & Tell Proj ects Archive,” Quan tified Self (blog), accessed August 16, imentation/cades-of-self-experers-many-deallen-neuringfiedself.com/blog/https://quanti2019,Selftation,”ofer’s“Allen75tell/.self.com/show-and-https://quantified2019,NeuringManyDecadesSelf-ExperimenQuantified(blog),May10,

The QSers, often speak about their experiments as a sort of negotiation with numbers, they do a crosscheck between their subjective knowledge and the objective aspect of their data in order to decide what to trust more. It’s a way to challenge the supposedly scientific, knowledge that people have about specific topics. One of the projects shared on the Show&Tell online page of the QS movement, is called, “My numbers Sucked But I Made This Baby Anyway,” in 2015 Whitney Boesel learned that it was ‘too late’ for her to have children due to her low Anti-Mullerian Hormone level, so she started tracking her AMH and other hormones and she discovered that is it possible to raise its level, unlike how it’s being promoted to young women as a predictor to future fertility. She finally managed to get pregnant but she said, “the real lesson I learned from confronting my low AMH and then tracking it, was that I still wanted a child. And I am ready to become a parent.”74 This connection to mindfulness is a recurrent theme throughout QS testimonials.

What was observed during the study on the QS movement is that, unlike the stereotypical image of someone obsessed with datafication, it is a network or a confessional community of people conducting selfexperiments with different techniques and objectives. It is a platform for all kind of self-trackers from random to purposeful trackers, from private to public trackers, whether tracking mood swings of medication effects, music or food, weather or mental state... some participants expanded tracking to many areas of their lives and others are focused only on a particular topic, some of them are rational geeks, some have dropped out, and went back in, some have always been trackers without even knowing. After checking the self-tracking and QS movement critiques, above and in chapter 03 (3.3), it is time to explore self-tracking as a practice of ‘mindfulness’73 and ‘soft-resistance.’

Opportunities

1. Mindfulness through self-tracking

At the opening of the QS2018 conference held in Portland, a very interesting testimony was given by Allen Neuringer, professor of psychology at Reed College, now professor emeritus. (strongly recommend to watch)75. Neuringer started doing self-experiments in the early 1970s, “many of which failed,” he said but failures in science are important. One of his failures was an experiment exploring the question: ‘How come we sleep on a flat surface?’ so he constructed a tilted bed and tried sleeping with his head on the high point but found himself sliding during the night, then he shifted the position with his head on the low point, but he woke up with a headache. Failures are really important for self-experiments in opposition to the critique that a person’s expectancies influence the final outcome of

The73 concept of mind fulness is dedicated to having an active, watchful mind.

57 the Neuringerexperiment.also gave examples of other successful stories, such as his aim to explore the influence of activity on his thoughts. Whenever a good idea came to his mind based on his evaluation of what a good idea is he used to stop and note it down, adding the condition he was in when this idea came, whether he was moving or he was in a more relaxed position. After many months he discovered that most of his good ideas came while he was exercising some kind of activity. However, this method didn’t work for him when he was trying to do mathematical calculations, he often found himself stopping to do the calculations, “this doesn’t work for everyone,” he said. One of the self-experimentation methods he mentioned is what he called the ‘mini If-Then contingency,’ which personally helped me commit to writing this thesis. It goes like this, whenever I am not able to write, I would say to themselves: so ‘if’ I sit down at the desk and spend at least 20 min working on my thesis ‘then’... The ‘then’ is always what at the moment is high probability if I let themselves go I might go to the bathroom, or go for a walk, or eat something sweet (what was often the high probability). Neuringer added a very important point saying, “I only use this method when I need to use it, I don’t impose those tools on my behavior when I’m able to work.”

76 So self-tracking’s aim is not always to make drastic changes, rather than tiny improvements that help people better contain Eventhemselves.though self-tracking is a personal practice related to the self, its results can be beneficial on a public level. It can be noticed, throughout the history of sciences, how self-experiments were the starting point of many discoveries. For example, the contribution of the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s, who was determined to prove, through experimentation, that memory, and mental process is something that can be studied, in opposition to the common belief of that time. He developed a system called “nonsense syllables,” that can be understood as a combination of constant-vowel-constant, such as DAX, ZUC, and BOK. Ebbinghaus would then write a number of syllables in a notebook and read them out loud with the same voice inflection in an attempt to recall them. He tested different lengths noting the speed of learning and forgetting. One of the things he found is that he could remember meaningful material, such as poems, ten times more easily than his syllabus. He also noticed what he called, ‘spacing effect’ that he was able to remember more information as memorized it a little bit at a time every day rather than when he memorized a big amount of information at once. He was the first person to introduce the ‘the learning curve’ in 1855, that explains how the increase in learning comes from greater experience.

The Quantified-Self Movement Chapter 04

In a nutshell, self-tracking is an attempt to achieve greater mindfulness of

Quantified76 Self (blog), perimentation.”DecadesNeuringer’s“AllenManyofSelf-Ex

The mobile health industry, for example, defines its algorithms based on its own understanding of ‘health,’ and is focused on how to cajole people into aiding to its standards. Such industry inspects the quantified self world in search of access to data that could indicate ‘health’ as indexed by measurements controlled by medical industry. But the QS practices do not cohere this way.

To explain how meanings can be ascribed to numbers, this chapter is leaning on the “Circulating Reference” notion coined by the French That77 is not to claim that all QSers are knights and all self-trackers are challenging ideologies, however, this is the aspect of QS that would be carried into the design discourse.

Whitney Boesel’s practice is completely different from Allen Neuringerl’s practice for example, not only in terms of what they believe but at a data level. Their differences cannot be thought of as a deviation from a norm, as they are diverging in a way that cannot be assembled meaningfully using the standard categories. Such data is not beneficial to the industry because QSers ideas about what constitutes an interesting measurement are totally wild; their motive to self-track in the first place is to discover something new beyond the conventional belief of what, for example, ‘health’ is.

4.3 SITUATING NUMBERS, FROM QUANTIFICATION TO QUALIFICATION

QSers use pre-sets as a starting point, but they unpredictably unfold and mutate their practices, thus, their output is never predefined, they allow their tracking to diverge in different directions, what frustrates the algorithms. This is exactly soft resistance to be able to playfully engage with technology in ways unexpected by the industry and policy makers. This means that even within an authoritative structure, an agnostic activity can emerge to challenge the basic building blocks of that structure; this dialogue is the asset of the QS movement in my opinion.

Mindfulness speaks out in opposition of a mainstream culture of ‘users’ discouraging people from finding their own answers. Mindful tracking practices pave the way for ‘soft resistance’ vis-à-vis large institutional and societal expectations of how one should be and what should they do. It is a way to challenge conventions and remake social norms.

58 something that human beings know little about, or think they know about.

2. ‘Soft resistance’ through self-tracking: The most important aspect of self-tracking is the idiosyncrasy of individual bodies and the in-situ experiments that self-trackers do which is on the opposite side form ‘analytics.’ In the world of Big Data, analytics is the mission that algorithms do. They basically inspect large database, identify patterns and draw outputs. The parameters taken into consideration by algorithms are pre-sets defined by the designers; they are arranged into categories, such as activity level, gender, and so on, used to classify people’s online behavior and deliver advertisement or content accordingly.

At the end of the study, the result was unlike the assumptions of the scientists that the forest was the one advancing on the savanna; sand

In search of the gap between the cognitive subject and the outside world, or rather to prove that there is no gap in the first place, Latour ventured with a group of botanists, biologists, and soil scientists into the rainforest Boa Vista (Brazil), to dissect how “the world is packed into words” and to know “how the science can be at the same time realist and constructivist, immediate and intermediary, reliable and fragile, near and far.”

Moreover, plants samples were taken from the forest to the botanical institute to be inspected. The decontextualization of the samples allowed for an entirely new approach to these entities; their dislocation from the context of the forest and position on the table of the lab, allowed scientists to freely shift the various plant samples in a combinatorial way, in order to discover new parameters that wouldn’t have been visible in the forest Allitself.the elements that were measured and depicted from the forest were transformed into charts, diagrams, and tables, that helped generate patterns, which were then transformed into a commentary report that accompanied the data in the published article.

59 sociologist and anthropologist, Bruno Latour in his book, “Pandora’s hope.”

The vexing question that the scientists were trying to settle concerned the dividing boundary between the forest and the savanna. To pursue their project’s goal, researchers had to produce a report detailing whether the savanna is encroaching upon the forest, or if it’s the other way around. The report had to solve, with evidence, the savanna-forest battle. The researchers work was done through, what Latour comes to call, a set of ‘circulating references.’

Latour himself can be considered a self-tracker even though he doesn’t associate himself with this term. His forest experiment, which will be explained in what follows, is worth being thoroughly examined as it resumes the way data and representations should be interpreted and why they are often misinterpreted.

Latour noted that the report they had to work on was not a mere mirroring of what was actually happening out there, rather than a series of translations across tiny gaps of material to the media. “In actual practice, however, one never travels directly from objects to words, from the referent to the sign, but always through a risky intermediary pathway.”79

Chapter 04The Quantified-Self Movement Bruno78 Latour, PAN DORA’S HOPE: ES SAYS ON THE REALITY OF SCIENCE HOPE,40.Latour,792000),30.University(Cambridge:STUDIESHarvardPress,PANDORA’S

In order to measure the movement of the forest and the savanna with respect to one another, they divided up the region with graphs and marked the trees with numbered metal tags. Soil samples were taken and compared against color cards that facilitated the depiction of their precise color, afterwards, color differences were assigned a numerical value that is revelatory of other properties contained in the soil.

The series of translations and transformations between final results and initial proposition, upon which one could circulate back and forth, is what established the reference. Latour remarked that, “Knowledge, it seems, does not reside in the face-to-face confrontation of a mind with an object, On the contrary, […] at every stage we have recognized a common operator, which belongs to matter at one end, to form at the other, and which is separated from the stage that follows it by a gap that no resemblance could fill” he then highlighted an important property of this chain which is its reversibility, “The succession of stages must be traceable, allowing Figure Circulating4.1 referenes. Each step particularityreducesandampl fies universality (Bruno Latour, in PANDORA’S HOPE, 1999). Figure Circulating4.2 references. From matter to form (Bruno Latour, in PANDO RA’S HOPE, 1999).

60 was being transformed into clay. But based on the fact that we always move from clay to sand, not from sand to clay, how did that happen? The early findings suggested that biological factors in the form of worms and micro bacteria were changing the soil and creating clay, which facilitated the advance of the forest.

The Quantified-Self Movement Chapter 04 Latour,80 PANDORA’S HOPE, 69. Latour,81 PANDORA’S HOPE, 76.

Diagram 2 (Figure 4.2) This diagram illustrates the circulating reference principle mentioned above where, at each stage of transformation, there’s a negotiation between what is gained (amplification) and what is lost (reduction). As the diagram shows, successive stages lead to narrower locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity, but greater compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality, and vice versa.

4.3 SELF-TRACKING IN DESIGN: LESSONS TO LEARN/ MISTAKES TO AVOID

80 This concept was illustrated in the following diagrams:

Diagram 1 (Figure 4.1) Latour described this as a sort of interplay between ‘matter’ and ‘form’ as the upper part of the diagram shows. The ‘matter’ that is the forest in this example, it is translated into ‘form’ through tags on trees and soil samples and so on. Those samples now become new ‘matter,’ that is by itself translated into a new set of forms, such as categorization, gridding, plotting on the map, and so on. The interplay goes from matters to forms until the last form is attained which is the report. The circulating reference is the ability to move back and forth along this chain of transformations. In the lower portion of the diagram, there is an erasure of the intermediary steps, which creates a gap between the world and the words. It then represents an irresolvable question of how these words can ever refer to the world.

Consequently, Latour explained that what causes people to believe in the subject-object division is the erasure of the successive layers that renders a phenomenon real; he concluded that “Constructing a phenomenon in successive layers renders it more and more real within a network traced by the displacements (in both senses) of researchers, samples, graphics, specimens, maps, reports, and funding requests.”81 Same can be applied to quantification, which is the transformation from matter to numbers; it is by the successive layers of transformation that numbers are qualified.

In this thesis, design is regarded as a ‘system thinking’ an approach that grants complexity to the humans’ entanglements. It takes into account the relations, structures, and processes between different actors. Design should never consider people as ‘users’ rather than agents who can think deliberately and articulate their own needs and concerns.

61 for travel in both directions, [...] Truth-value circulates here like electricity through a wire, so long as this circuit is not interrupted.”

What makes design an ethical and aesthetic domain, is its ability to take into account different aspects of what something is and what it can

phpco.uk/naturalfuse.https://www.haque.AugustResearch,”“Haque:82Press,(Cambridge:versarialCarl812-10.3-6society,thealannualsentedSloterdijk),”Peter(preatthe2008internationconferenceofdesignhistoryFalmouth,September2009),DiSalvo,AdDesignTheMIT2012),5.Design+accessed18,2019,

Good design, as it has been discussed so far, is not the one taught in manuals, rather than something constructed vis-à-vis the dialogue between the designer and what’s being designed. This dialogue could be the feedback furnished by self-tracking as a way for people to understand their entanglements with the built environment. Design is the elbow room where this dialogue takes place, it grants free agents, as both manipulators and manipulated. Under the ‘system thinking,’ the goal of design is not to just build an artifact to fulfill a need but also to make people reflect on how that need emerged, how it has become a project worth pursuing, or not. Designers shouldn’t impose their answers on people, but they should make it easier for them to have feedback and ask questions, that may or may not lead to the same answers.

Tracking in Design Carl DiSalvo, a professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, examined in his book “Adversarial Design,” the possibilities of political design, a concept that is set in contrast to design for politics. He aimed to show how the experience of agonism might be articulated through the work of design, in a practice, which he termed ‘adversarial design’ DiSalvo considered that adversarial design paves the path for democracy “For democracy to flourish, spaces of confrontation must exist, and contestation must occur. Perhaps the most basic purpose of adversarial design is to make these spaces of confrontation and provide resources and opportunities for others to participate in contestation.”

62 become. Latour would agree to this saying that the concept of design today, “has been extended from the details of daily objects to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, and […] to nature itself,” he would add that “the decisive advantage of the concept of design is that it necessarily involves an ethical dimension which is tied into the obvious question of good versus bad design.”

In order to explain how design can facilitate agonistic experiences, DiSalvo presented the “Natural Fuse” project, designed by the LondonLatour,82 Bruno, “A cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of de sign (with special attention to

The Quantified-Self Movement Chapter 04 Anders83

63 based architect Usman Haque.82 It consists of a set of household plants hooked up to sensors, connected to a computer network, and plugged into a home electric outlet, thus functioning as a gateway to all electricity from that outlet. If someone wants to use a lamp for example, they plug it into the outlet connected to the plants. The plants function as a carbon sink; the lamp will function as long as the plants can absorb the carbon it emits. Similar plants are distributed to other people and they are all connected to the network. When the lamp goes off, the person faces three options: Off/ selfless/selfish. They can turn it on the ‘selfish’ mode and borrows energy from other plants (provided they are in selfless mode), however, this might risk killing the other plants if it draws too much power from them. Once the plant reaches its three virtual-deaths-limit, a jar on vinegar is automatically poured into its soil, and it then dies for real (Figure 4.3)

So what is the value of DiSalvo’s thesis? Instead of using design to provide solutions, design is used to problematize the situation. This example doesn’t aim to solve energy problems, but it reveals the material relations that define people’s consumption habits and highlights the ethical issues involved in it; it forces people to confront the problem rather than ignoring it. This awareness that design is able to bring is something that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Another project called “erratic appliances, pioneered by Swedish Designers from the Interactive Institute, aims to increase energy awareness through critical interaction design, beyond the conventional ways of saving energy. They built home appliances that behave strangely as energy consumption increases, focusing on the connection between energy use and possible changes in appliances behavior, for instance, they designed a radio set that tunes to a different frequency once the energy consumption in the household rises above a certain threshold. This was made by hacking an ordinary radio and installing a sensor that could measure the electrical fields around it. The shift away from ease use is intentional, the designers’ aim was to encourage what they call ‘user-unfriendliness’ and ‘parafunctionality,’ by increasing the poetic distance between people and their products.83 In a similar direction, an interesting project was developed by the designers Matthias Laschke and Marc Hassenzahl, called “Forget Me Not.” It’s a reading lamp with reflectors that open like flower petals when a person touches them, then close after a while, obscuring and dimming the light until the person touches them again. Thus, the person is in a constant dialogue with the lamp, to use energy appropriately.84 People in those examples are considered complex human beings who, by receiving feedback from their devices, will come to revise their values and understand the infrastructure of their entanglements. Isn’t that a sort Ernevi , Sam uel Palm , and Jo han Redström, “ Er ratic Appliances and Energy me-notmakers.com/forget-pleasurabletrouble2019,accessed“ForgetMatthias84(2017):gyKnowledge,Awareness,”Technolo&Policy20,no.171–78.Laschke,MeNot,”August17,http://www.

Ironically those examples are mentioned in Evgeny Morozov’s book, the same book where he criticizes QSers and self-trackers; at one point he

Tracking in Architecture

One of the workshops held this year in the context of Coop Design Research Master Program 2019 was called “Architecture of Knowledge,” conducted by Friedrich Schmidgall, and Christian Stein researchers at the Clusters of Excellence, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The aim of the workshop was asking how space can be described, how it can be experimented with and what questions can be asked about it. During the Evgeny85 Morozov, To Save Lane,ExistProblemsandnology,ClickEverything,Here:TechSolutionismtheUrgetoFixThatDon’t(London:Allen2013),326.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens distinguished in his book “The constitution of society,” between ‘practical’ and ‘discursive’ consciousness. The former is characterized by habitual interaction and the latter by reflexivity about actions. While practical consciousness helps a person locate the light switch to turn off the light when they leave a room, discursive consciousness explains why they turned off the light. Mindful sensing and tracking stimulates discursive consciousness, brings back the agency to the people, and allocates them to be designers by knowing what they really need and why they need it, by knowing what is really affecting them and how it is affecting them.

64 of tracking? and isn’t that what tracking is about?

Many studies have been done in this direction, mainly on workspaces, aiming to answer questions like, how does the physical workplace affect productivity? Where do serendipitous interactions happen in workspace? does mixing people in different subgroups help them communicate? What is the most favorable layout setting, how does virtual space affect physical space... etc.

As86 it was mentioned ear lier, Morozov tend to pick the examples that serve his argument and gener alize accordingly, without giving himself the chance to explore self-tracking beyond the frame he inscribed it in.

Juhani87 Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses”, in Architecture+ Ur banism, Questions of Perception (Special Issue, July 1994) The88 kinesthetic sense might also be added, coined by Anna Halprin, the breaker of rules of modern dance. The kinesthetic sense is related to the nervous system that holds the bodily parts together. Anna said, “I can conceivably imagine living without any one of the senses listed above, but can you imagine living without any awareness of your movement?” Anna Halprin, “A Natural Approach to Movement,” p.1. Museum of Perfor mance + Design. Col lections, SF, Anna Halprin Papers.

Furthermore, significant efforts have been put, in the field of architecture, into understanding how physical spaces and layouts affect the behavioral patterns of people. When the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa introduced two new senses to the body, it seemed like a strange thing to accept, however by adding the ‘movement’ and the ‘bodily awareness’ into play, Pallasmaa challenged the notion of architecture as static image, he instead encouraged people to explore spatial qualities through sensory experiences, he proposed a system of design thinking, that is empathetic to the experience of inhabitation, rather than a dictated mode of living that contradicts nuances of lived experience.87-88 This alone can be taken as the base for a series of experimentations especially with the technologies available today, allowing people to have way more than seven senses to generate feedback from bodily experiences in space.

comments, “not all sensors enslave us!”85 what leads to the previous commentary on Morozov’s critique.86

As the plurality of perspectives on space keeps growing, it is important to learn, as designers and architects, how to handle them and how to integrate them. Tracking, observing, and analyzing, help people expand their view from physical spaces to virtual, social, communicational, organizational and other spaces.

On a more personal scale, motion studies can be done, not by isolating the human being in a staged setting and trying to imitate their movement, but by tracking their bodily interactions in an actual day to day setting this can be done with the help of new sensor technologies. Tracking in this case allows humans to understand the, in situ, entanglements of their bodies; instead of systematizing and mechanizing the movement what Étienne-Jules Marey and Gilberth attempted to do the purpose will rather be changing the conventional norms and bringing back the long-lost connection between humans and their bodies.

turenexperimente/en/content/architekratory.hu-berlin.de/disciplinary-labohttps://www.inter2019,accessedFürHelmholtz-ZentrumtungKnowledgeperiments,”“ArchitecturesEx89ImageGestal|HermannvonKulturtechnik,August18,

Studying body motion can become a typical exercise conducted, on a one to one basis, between the architect and his clients.90 It doesn’t necessarily have to implement sensors, for example, clients can be asked to draw a simple map of their daily route, and observe how the built environment support or limit their daily activities, in order to come up together with a customized spatial setting that might or might not be typical. It’s a dialogue initiator and a way to reflect upon what ‘good design’ actually is.91

Finally, It’s time to see the Vitruvian man, Le Modulor, Joe, Josephin, and their friends dancing their way out of the box! Figure 4.4 The experimental zone model, perimenteArchitekturenEx , Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum Für Kulturtechnik.

The Quantified-Self Movement Chapter 04

The researchers track the participants’ activity, using various tools, and observe how the spatial configuration is affecting their productivity vis-àvis their work-style89 (Figure 4.4).

In91 order not to generalize, the work of many archi tects (designers) who conceive their spaces (products) based on a dialogue with their clients is highly acknowledged and appreciated, howev er this is considered as a kind of luxury. That’s not the ‘typical’ design method that is being taught in design and architecture schools, therefore, more efforts should be put to spread a ‘typical’ meth odology that has, generating non-typical outcomes, as a core value.

Future practical implementation

Clients90 in this case are al located to be designers.

65 workshop, Schmidgall and Stein presented their work on the so called “experimental zone,’ It’s a workspace shared by different researchers working on different topics. The layout of the space is changed on a monthly basis and various room configurations are set up, addressing every time a specific research question such as, “Themes of work - Styles of work.”

This thesis is about bringing the body out of the tomb or prison, in which it was placed by the images adopted in the design field. Throughout the analysis of those representations, we have touched the body’s fragility, porosity, malleability, and connectivity, vis-à-vis a thoroughly designed world what brought the question of self-identification and self-design into play. The body is embedded in relations of, and to itself via its entanglements in the world; it is written in acknowledgment of its past, present and future form.

The most important aspect of this relationship is that, while humans are informed from X through feedback, they have the ability not only to inform X back, but to effect an action on it. They equally have the possibility not to effect any action, for instance, they might never change the chair they’re sitting on, nevertheless, they will be aware of how much time they’ve been sitting on that chair, or what is it exactly what’s causing them back pain.

To understand those entanglements, we leaned on a history of quantification, not to come up with a new universal representation of a body, but a new universal mindset of non-representation, where each individual is responsible of what and how they want to be represented.

For that to happen, individuals need to know-themselves, and be able to decide for themselves, something that can be granted through selfobservation and analysis, hence, the self-tracking method is proposed as a tool for them to reach this mindfulness.

66 Conclusion

Being part of a complex network of actors, the body is connected with the world through flow-paths of loops, constantly informing each other. The following scheme resumes the main ideas discussed in this research in order to predict and visualize what the future body is about.

Conclusion Diagram Self-tracking grants individuals the possibility to receive feedback from their entanglements, namely ‘X’ X informing Humans this feedback takes the shape of numbers, charts, statistics, and even pain or other sensations...Now those materials are processed, analyzed, qualified and probed by the Humans, then fed back to X, in order to improve it, optimize it or alter it. The flow-paths connecting both parties keep informing each other until they reach an optimal synergy where the loop is balanced.

67 ConclusionToo H±man: The Image of The Human Body in Design

The purpose of this thesis would only be fulfilled when we go back, after a period of time, to find the following pages filled with self-experimentations, practiced and registered by whoever laid his hand on this study and was convinced that the self-tracking method is worth being implemented in the design discourse. Analytical Diagrams explaining the relationship between the body and its entanglements.

This concluding chapter is a first step toward an interconnected community of designers/self-trackers. it is an invitation to an open discussion aiming to turn off the autopilot mode adopted by humans, and to grant them back their agency through design. This will allow them to contain and personalize the built environment in which they live and interact.

Feel free to share your experminets on: www.TooHuman.blogspot.com

SELF68 TRACKING EXPERIMENTS Share your experiments on www.TooHuman.blogspot.com and Let’s start a conversation!

69 Self-tracking ExperimentsToo H±man: The Image of The Human Body in Design What did you track? How did you do it? What did you learn? Share your experiments on www.TooHuman.blogspot.com and Let’s start a conversation!

SELF70 TRACKING EXPERIMENTS Share your experiments on www.TooHuman.blogspot.com and Let’s start a conversation!

71 Self-tracking ExperimentsToo H±man: The Image of The Human Body in Design What did you track? How did you do it? What did you learn? Share your experiments on www.TooHuman.blogspot.com and Let’s start a conversation!

SELF72 TRACKING EXPERIMENTS Share your experiments on www.TooHuman.blogspot.com and Let’s start a conversation!

73 Self-tracking ExperimentsToo H±man: The Image of The Human Body in Design What did you track? How did you do it? What did you learn? Share your experiments on www.TooHuman.blogspot.com and Let’s start a conversation!

IENDNOTES74

3 stunden zeit zuintensiver arbeit. dann werden die entwürfe eingesammelt. am nächsten morgen:der leiter führt die inzwischen durchgesehenen blätter nach einem gewissenzusammenhang am epidiaskop vor und jeder verfasser muß seinen entwurfin freier rede erläutern und verteidigen (denn eine scharfe kritik—erst dermitstudierenden, dann des leiters—setzt ein) wie ja auch später im beruf derarchitekt eine gedanken dem bauherrn gegenüber zu vertreten hat. der entwurf wird in den freien stunden der darauffolgenden woche durchgearbeitet.” wernergräff, ed., staatliche bauhochschule weimar (weimar: verlag staatlichebauhochschule, 1929), 8.

Translation: Monday 29, october 1928, 8:00am. The instructor of the course speaks about the class of buildings known as “schools” and develops a series of economic, organizational and spatial questions out of their pedagogical and human meaning that are based on examples of executed buildings from the period. Then the instructor selects a few narrowly focused tasks and develops the following program in collaboration with the audience:

II No rules of translation between the verbal and iconic were univocal. The relation between the quantitative, verbal, and the final visual representation was described as a transformation, and the expert in charge of carrying out this task was called a transformer (transformator), Marie Reidemeister, later Marie Neurath, trained in mathematics and art was a chief transformer.

III Albert Speer,“Vorwort,” in Neufert, Bauordnungslehre, 1943, p. 3: “der totale Krieg zwingt zur Konzentration aller Kräfte auch im Bauwesen. Weitgehende Vereinheitlichung zur Einsparung technischer Kräfte und zum Aufbau rationeller Serienfertigung ist die Voraussetzung zu einer Leistungssteigerung, die zur Bewältigung unserer grossen Bauaufgaben erforderlich ist […]“.

Bertillon was interviewed in 1894 by the American journalist Ida Tarbell, for McClure’s magazine. “But your archives, M. Bertillon?” I asked. “Are you not going to use your observations for scientific deductions, for anthropological conclusions, as, for instance, to establish a criminal type?” Undoubtedly,” he responded, “the statistics of the service will be used more and more for ethnographical and anthropological statistics. I have already done something with them. Here is a chart showing the color of the eyes in the different parts of France, from the maroon of the Spanish border to the blue of the Channel; and there is another, giving the relative length and breadth of the head. As for the criminal type, that is a delicate question.” Then you have never sought to confirm the doctrine of Lombroso’s school, that certain anatomical characteristics indicate the criminal?” No; I do not feel convinced that it is the lack of symmetry in the visage, or the size of the orbit, or the shape of the jaw, which make a man an evil-doer. A certain characteristic may incapacitate him for fulfilling his duties, thus thrusting him down in the struggle for life, and he becomes a criminal because he is down. Lombroso, for example, might say that, since there is a spot on the eye of the majority of criminals, therefore the spot on the eye indicates a tendency to crime; not at all. The spot is a sign of defective vision, and the man who does not see well is a poorer workman than he who has strong, keen eyesight. He falls behind in his trade, loses heart, takes to bad ways, and turns up in the criminal ranks. It was not the spot on his eye which made him a criminal; it only prevented his having an equal chance with his comrades. The same thing is true of other so-called criminal signs. One needs to exercise great discretion in making anthropological deductions. Nevertheless, there is no doubt but that our archives have much to tell on all questions of criminal anthropology.”

Ida Tarbell, Identification of Criminals: The Scientific Method in Use in France, McClure’s Magazine 2, no. 4 (March 1894): 165–66.

IV “montag, den 29. oktober 1928. früh 8 uhr. der leiter des kurses sprichtüber die gebäudegattung ‘schulen’ und entwickelt aus ihrem pädagogischen undmenschlichen sinn wirtschaftliche, organisatorische und räumliche fragen anhand von beispielen ausgeführter bauten der jüngsten epoche. dann wählt derleiter eine enger begrenzte aufgabe und entwickelt gemeinsam mit dem hörern das programm:[new paragraph] für ein vor kurzem besichtigtes baugelände ist der neubau der bauhochschule zu entwerfen. es sind lehrwerkstätten und wohnateliers anzuschliessen. der raumbedarf ist den studierenden bekannt.

-Neurath 1933/1973, 222.

Translation: “total war demands the concentration of all our forces, even in the building industry. Extensive standardization for the economization of technical resources and for the development of rational serial production is the precondition for an increase in output, which is necessary for the accomplishment of our great building tasks.”

75 A new building for the Bauhochschule is to be designed on a recently visited building site. Training workshops and residential studios are to be attached to it. The spatial requirements are known to the students. Three hours of intensive labor, then, the designs are collected. On the next morning, the instructor proceeds through the reviewed submissions on the epidiascope with specific issues in mind, and every designer must discuss and defend his or her proposal on an impromptu basis. This is followed by a sharp critique— first from one’s classmates, then from the instructor, just as one will later have to do when one becomes an architect and has to defend one’s ideas before an actual builder. The design is then reworked during one’s free time over the following three weeks.

Natasha Dow Schüll, “Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care,” BioSocieties 11, no.3 (September 2016): 317-333.

Nader Vossoughian, “Standardization Reconsidered: Normierung in and after Ernst Neufert’s Bauentwurfslehre,” Grey Room 54 (Winter 2014): 41.

Deborah Lupton, The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking (Cambridge: Polity, 2016).

V “Noch heute haben wir einen besseren Begriff von der Größe einer Sache, wenn wir erfahren : sie war soviel Mann hoch, soviel Ellen lang, um soviel Fuß breiter oder soviel Köpfe größer. Das sind Begriffe, die uns angeboren sind, deren Größe uns sozusagen im Blute liegt. Das Metermaß hat dem allen aber ein Ende gemacht.” Ernst Neufert, Bauentwurfslehre, 1992, p. 24.

Andy Clark, Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: University Press, 2003), 60.

*Gina Neff, media and communication scholar, and Dawn Nafus, senior research scientist, wrote the book “Self-Tracking’ (MIT Press), where they examined how people are engaged in self-tracking and how they make sense of the data generated. While presenting the challenges of using tracking technologies, they described how data can be a self-mirror and a way to connect and learn from others.

Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus, SELF-TRACKING,(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

VII Sitting at your desk, place your left hand underneath the desktop. Get a volunteer to tap the desktop with her right hand while using the left to (in synchrony) tap your hidden hand. Once again, many subjects will feel as if the “being tapped sensation” is located on the desk surface, as if the desk top were a real, sensitive part of their body. Now have the volunteer hot the desktop with hammer. Your galvanic skin response jumps as if your own hand had been threated!

VIII Bruno Latour is a French sociologist and anthropologist, now emeritus professor associated with the médialab and the program in political arts (SPEAP) of Sciences Po Paris. He is known for his innovative work in the study of science and technology. Latour is one of the developers of the “Actor Network Theo ry” that can be defined as a research method with a focus on the connections between both human and non-human entites. It considers everything in the social and natural worlds exist in constantly shifting networks and relashionships.

Bruno Latour, PANDORA’S HOPE: ESSAYS ON THE REALITY OF SCIENCE STUDIES (Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

IX Deborah Lupton is Centenary Research Professor in the News & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Design at the University of Canberra, Australia. In her book, “The Quantified Self,” she shed light on self-tracking by examining how this practice challenges conventional concepts of the body and the self, while studying its political side and how power plays out within the quantification of the self.

The DIN 476 standard, known as the A series of paper formats was released in 1922 and set out by German engineer Walter Porstmann. It is based on the metric system (an A0 sheet has a surface area of 1 square meter), with fixed proportions (1:√2). These standard paper sizes allowed for increased efficiency in publishing and were first championed by the German War Ministry during World War I.

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is concerned with the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender.

A.LiteratureBIBLIOGRAPHY76 Allport, Gordon. Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality. London: Yale University Press, 1955. B. Blakeslee, Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee. THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN. New York: Random House, 2007. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: University Press, 1977. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. C. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Clark Andy. Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Oxford: University Press, 2003. Colomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley. Are we Human? notes on an archaeology of design. Zürich. Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2016. Crosby, Alfred W. The Measure of Reality. Cambridge: University Press, 1997. Cupers, Kenny. Use matters: an alternative history of architecture. New York: Routledge, 2013. D. Damasio, Antonio. THE STRANGE ORDER of THINGS: Life, Feelinf, and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018. Da Vinci, Leonardo. The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Connecticut,USA: Konecky & Konecky, [1517] 2003. Dreyfuss, Henry. Designing for People. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955. De Graaf, Reinier. Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of Simple Profession. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Dodds, George and Robert Tavernor. Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005. Dormehl, Luke. The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All our Problems… and Create More. New York: Penguin, 2014. DiSalvo, Carl. Adversarial Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012. E. Ernevi, Anders , Samuel Palm , and Johan Redström, “ Erratic Appliances and Energy Awareness. “ Knowledge, Technology & Policy 20, no.1 (2017): 71–78. F. Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, [1995] 1977. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, Foucault,1970. Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin H, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton. London: Tavistock Publications 1988. G Giddens, Anthony. The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. Cambridge: Polity, 1984. H. Harari, Yuval Noah. Homo Deus: A brief History of Tomorrow. London: Vintage, 2017. Haraway, Donna, The Haraway Reader. New York: Routeledge, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, language, thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Henry Dreyfuss. “Designing for People.” In Are we Human? notes on an archaeology of design, edited by Beatriz Colomina, and Mark Wigley. Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2016 Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages. New York: Doubleday, 1954.

I.77 Ingold Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2002. K. Kira, Alexander. The Bathroom. New York: Bantam Books, 1967 [1966]. Koestler, Arthur. The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964. Kroker Arthur. BODY DRIFT: BUTLER HAYLES HARAWAY. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. L. Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Latour Bruno. PANDORA’S HOPE: ESSAYS ON THE REALITY OF SCIENCE STUDIES. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Le Corbusier. Der Modulor: Darstellung eines in Architektur und Technik allgemein anwendbaren harmonischen Mases im menschlichen Masstab. Stuttgart : Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1985. Lefebvre, Henri. The production of space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991[1974]. Lupton, Deborah. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity, 2016. M. Marey, Etienne-Jules. Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion. New York: D. Appleton and co, 1879. Mann Steven, Jason Nolan, Barry Wellman. “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance & Society 1, no.3 (2003): 331-55. Morozov. Evgeny. To Save Everything, Click Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Fix Problems That Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane, 2013. N. Neff, Gina, and Dawn Nafus. SELF-TRACKING. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Neufert, Ernst Bauentwurfslehre, or Architects’ Data, vall editions. Neurath, Marie. “ISOTYPE.” Instructional Science, no.3 (1974): 127. Neurath, Otto.”World Planning and the USA.” In Survey Graphic: Magazine of social interpretation. (March 1932): 621. P. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “An Architecture of the Seven Senses.” In Architecture+ Urbanism, Questions of Perception (Special Issue, July 1994). S. Schüll, Natasha Dow. “Data for life: Wearable technology and the design of self-care.” BioSocieties 11, no.3 (September 2016): 317-333. T. “The Bathroom Revisited.”The Architects’ Journal (December 1, 1976): 1021; Conway, “Industrial Design USA,” 12. V. Vitruvius. De Architectura, II. W. Warren, Samuel and Louis D. Brandeis,”The right to privacy.” Harvard Law Review 4, no. 5 (December1890): paragraph I. Weckherlin, Gernot. “ Ernst Neufert’s architect’s data: anxiety, creativity and authorial abdication.” In Architecture and Authorship, edited by Tim Anstey, Katia Grillner, Rolf Hughes. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007. Z. Zöllner, Frank. “Anthropomorphism: From Vitruvius to Neufert, from Human Measurement to the Module of Fascism.” In Images of the Body in Architecture: Anthropology and Built Space, edited by Kurt Wagner, and Jasper Cepl. Tubingen, Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 2014.

Websites78 Basulto, Dominic, “Meet the Urban Datasexual.” Big Think. Accessed August 19, 2019. Boesel,https://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/meet-the-urban-datasexualWhitneyErin.“Show&TellProjectsArchive,”QuantifiedSelf (blog). Accessed August 16, 2019. Grady,https://quantifiedself.com/show-and-tell/.Denise.“AbouttheIdeaThatYou’re Growing Horns From Looking Down at Your Phone…” The New York Times. Accessed August 8, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_managementWikipediahttps://yougov.co.uk/topics/technology/articles-reports/2019/03/08/could-you-live-without-your-smartphoneWaldersee,http://www.livescience.com/44618-quantified-self-culture.htmlLivescience.Com.Rettner,http://www.pleasurabletroublemakers.com/forget-me-notLaschke,https://quantifiedself.com/about/what-is-quantified-self/.Quantifiedhttps://quantifiedself.com/blog/allen-neuringers-many-decades-of-self-experimentation/Quantifiedhttps://www.interdisciplinary-laboratory.hu-berlin.de/en/content/architekturenexperimente/AccessedImagehttps://www.haque.co.uk/naturalfuse.php“Haque:https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/20/health/horns-cellphones-bones.html?searchResultPosition=22019.Design+Research.”AccessedAugust18,2019.KnowledgeGestaltung|HermannvonHelmholtz-ZentrumFürKulturtechnik.“ArchitecturesExperiments.”August18,2019.Self(bolg).“AllenNeuringer’sManyDecadesofSelf-Experimentation.”May10,2019.Self.“WhatIsQuantifiedSelf?”.AccessedAugust15,2019.Matthias.“ForgetMeNot.”AccessedAugust17,2019.Rachael.“Quantifiedselfmovement:howdata-obsessedself-trackerspushtowardhealthierlives”.AccessedAugust15,2019.Victoria.“CouldYouLivewithoutYourSmartphone?”YouGov.AccessedAugust8,2019..“ScientificManagement.”2019.

81 “Where you see ideal things, I see— human, alas! All too human things”! Friedrich Nietzsche

83DECLARATION

Herewith I declare that I have prepared this Master thesis independently, that it has not been submitted in the same or similar wording as an examination paper in another course of study, and that I have not used any other aids and sources than the ones indicated. I have marked any quotations given in the thesis in their original or similar wording as a quotation.

Place, Dessau-Roßlau,date 21.08.2019 Signature