Presentation @ <a href="http://www.mediacityproject.com/en_EN/events/conference-08/">Media City: Situations, Practices, Encounters</a>, January 17-18, 2008, a conference organized by the Bauhaus to investigate how the social settings and spaces of the city are created, experienced and practiced through the use and presence of new media.

1. situating design / designing situations
MediaCity Conference
January 18-19, 2008
Mark Shepard
Assistant Professor, Departments of Architecture and Media Study
Researcher, Situated Technologies Research Group
Co-director, Center for Virtual Architecture
University at Buffalo

2. architecture + situated technologies:
from tools to environments
Mark Shepard October 19-21, 2006 | The Urban Center + Eyebeam, NYC
Omar Khan A co-production of
Trebor Scholz The Center for Virtual Architecture
The Institute of Distributed Creativity
and The Architectural League of New York

3. situations are an anathema to design
• Traditional design practices involve developing discrete solutions to a given
problem.
• Assumptions are made about the extent and scope of the problem at hand, the
projected uses and activities that need to be accommodated, and the criteria
by which a design solution is to be evaluated.
• Clear definition of these initial conditions is essential to ensuring success of the
design process.

4. situations are an anathema to design
• By definition situations are circumstantial, the product of the forces at play at a
given moment in time.
• As such they are open to change and variation in ways that complicate
traditional design methodologies.
• Changing conditions of physical contexts (site, location) and social contexts
(interaction protocols, and activity) frustrate attempts at arriving at discrete
solutions to fixed problems.
• Designing for situations often entails evolving a field of ad-hoc solutions from a
discrete set of parameters. This solution set is by nature partial and open,
contingent on feedback from the environment within which its is situated.

5. FREEDOM <> CONTROL

6. Jean-Paul Sartre
• Two distinct and irreducible categories or kinds of
being: the in-itself (en-soi) and the for-itself (pour-
soi). Later adds a third, the for-others (pour-autrui).
• One is never free of one's quot;situation,quot; though one is
always free to deny (quot;negatequot;) that situation and try
to change it.
• We are always quot;morequot; than our situation and that
this is the ontological foundation of our freedom.
• We are quot;condemnedquot; to be free.
• Un théâtre de situations (1973)

7. Erving Goffman
• Behavior in Public Places (1963)
• A “dramaturgical” approach to human interaction.
• A situation is an environment of communication possibilities.
• quot;The individual is obliged to demonstrate involvement in a
situation through the modulation of his involvements within the
situation.quot;
• That which an individual owes is conveyed through appropriate
modulation of situated involvements - conveys respect for the
gathering.
• The social system found in the quot;little societyquot; involved in the
situation is made up from the conduct performed in
accordance with the norms of situational propriety
• What is owed the gathering is owed the social setting within
which it occurs, the joint social life sustained by the gathering
being an embodiment of the occasion itself

8. “Situationism” Psychogeography and the Dérive:
responses to 20th urban design and planning.

9. “Situationism” Psychogeography and the Dérive:
responses to 20th urban design and planning.

10. Chombart de Lauwe, “Paris et l'agglomération parisienne”, 1952.

11. “Situationism”
• A situation is not just ambience, but also an
integrated ensemble of behavior in time. It is
designed to be lived by its constructors.
• Preliminary problems in the construction of situations
(Situationist International #1, 1958)
• Situations require:
• a quot;temporaryquot; director (or organizing group)
responsible for coordinating the basic elements
necessary for the construction of the decor and
for working out certain interventions in the events
• the direct agents living the situation, who have
taken part in creating the collective project and
worked on the practical composition of the
ambiance
• a few passive spectators who have not
participated in the constructive work, who should
be forced into action.

12. Lucy Suchman
• Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (2007, 1987)
• Critique of AI research in the 1980s.
• AI research at that time was based on the idea that purposeful human activity proceeds
according to a preconceived plan which is perfunctorily executed, and able to be
reasoned about in objective terms.
• Suchman: Purposeful human activity proceeded not according to a preconceived plan,
but rather by ad-hoc, moment-to-moment interactions between people, and between
people and the environment within which those actions unfold.
• Plans become representations of situated actions, produced either before or after the
fact, to help us understand a course of action.

13. Lucy Suchman
• Thomas Gladwin, “Culture and logical process”, Explorations in Cultural Anthropology,
W. Goodenough, ed. (1964)

14. Lucy Suchman

15. Lucy Suchman

16. Gordon Pask
• Second order cybernetics - moving beyond the study of
control and communication in animals and machines to
systems that account for “observers” and “participants” in
these systems.
• Best known for his “Conversation Theory”, a theory of
interaction encompassing human-to-human, human-to-
computer, and computer-to-computer configurations in a
common framework.
Architecture of Conversations,
Gordon Pask

17. Gordon Pask
Colloquy of Mobiles Cybernetic Serendipity
ICA London, 1968

18. Colloquy of Mobiles, Gordon Pask, Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA London, 1968

19. Colloquy of Mobiles, Gordon Pask, Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA London, 1968

20. Colloquy of Mobiles, Gordon Pask, Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA London, 1968

21. Colloquy of Mobiles, Gordon Pask, Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA London, 1968

22. Colloquy of Mobiles, Gordon Pask, Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA London, 1968

23. To what extent might Pask’s concept of underspecification be helpful
in designing (for) situations? (Usman Haque)
• The reasoning behind Pask’s interest in underspecified goals is that if a designer
specifies all parts of a design and hence all behaviours that the constituent parts can
conceivably have at the beginning, then the eventual identity and functioning of that
design will be limited by what the designer can predict.
• It is therefore closed to novelty and can only respond to preconceptions that were
explicitly or implicitly built into it.
• If, on the other hand, a designed construct can choose what it senses, either by having
ill-defined sensors or by dynamically determining its own perceptual categories, then it
moves a step closer to true autonomy which would be required in an authentically
interactive system.
• In an environmental sense, the human component of interaction then becomes crucial
because a person involved in determining input/output criteria is productively engaging
in conversations with his or her environment.

24. Thank you...
Mark Shepard
Assistant Professor, Departments of Architecture and Media Study
Researcher, Situated Technologies Research Group
Co-director, Center for Virtual Architecture
University at Buffalo
shepard6@buffalo.edu
cva.ap.buffalo.edu
www.andinc.org