“Things that Beep: A Brief History of Product Sound Design,” Avant.org (August 2018).

“Things that Beep: A Brief History of Product Sound Design,” Avant.org (August 2018).
Integrative PhD Seminar, The New School, co-taught with Zed Adams
Interfaces are everywhere and nowhere. They pervade our lives, mediating our interactions with one another, technology, and the world. But their very pervasiveness also makes them invisible. In this seminar, we expose the hidden lives of interfaces, illuminating not just what they are and how they work, but also how they shape our lives, for better and worse. We also discuss a number of pressing social and political issues, such as why we are quick to adopt some interfaces (e.g., smartphones and social media platforms), but reluctant to embrace others (e.g., new voting machines and Google Glass).
Graduate ElectiveÂ
We live amidst real-time data flows, with sensors measuring everything from air quality to traffic, with our own cell phones yielding information about our whereabouts and activity levels, with buildings reporting on their own energy consumption and maintenance. This urban âintelligenceâ ostensibly allows for the optimization of our environments and our selves â for the production of âsmart citiesâ and smart citizens. In this hybrid studio weâll examine how the methods of data science shape our civic values and urban imaginaries, and condition the work of urban design and administration; and weâll assess the consequences â for the material environment, for urban citizenship, for quality of life, etc. â when data and efficiency drive design and development decisions. Taking nearby Hudson Yards as our case study, weâll explore not only how âsmartnessâ is operationalized in such new urban developments, but also what other kinds of intelligence have long been present in our cities. To evaluate Hudson Yardsâs smarts, weâll develop a collection of âurban intelligence test kitsâ â IQ tests, guidebooks, measurement instruments, field kits, etc. â to evaluate how human and machine logics, intelligences, and values are integrated and negotiated on this urban test-bed.
An interactive map of New Yorkâs historical media infrastructures â from newspaper publishing and delivery, telephone networks, radio antennae, and the electrical grids they depend on, to video arcades, carrier pidgeon cultures, and countercultural zine communities â in order to demonstrate how these material media landscapes have evolved over the course of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries; how contemporaneous networks overlap, complement, or compete with one another; and how older media may have laid a foundation for newer media networks. With Jessica Irish, Jane Pirone, Rory Solomon. As with most digital projects, this one proved very difficult to preserve. Sad.
I was invited to speak about âinformation spacesâ at the 2017 Association of College and Research Libraries conference in Baltimore on March 23, 2017. I tested my talk at Pratt, as part of their Pratt ALA speaker series on March 9, then reprised the talk at the Yale School of Architecture on March 31. Youâll find my slides and text here.
As part of the DESIS Studio Talks event on âDesigning Timeâ in February, 2017, I discussed Timeâs Interfaces. Here are my slides and text.
I had never before attended the annual Modern Language Association conference — but this year I was invited by the MLA Libraries and Research Forum to join a panel on digitized collections. Here’s the panel abstract:
Digitization processes enable access to library and archival collections â processes requiring decisions that effectively shape how scholars and students will ultimately use these materials online. This panel seeks to open the black box of digitization workflows by starting a discussion about pivotal moments in the processâspecifically how collections are selected for digitization; the process of creating OCR (Optical Character Recognition) transcripts, databases, and metadata for searchability; and the development of user interfaces and open access policies.
Each of us was assigned one of those “pivotal moments,” and I was invited to focus on the interface. The overall theme of the conference was “Boundary Conditions” — so I focused, in my seven short minutes, on how the interface itself is a “boundary condition,” and how it can be used to trace or bridge the boundaries between all those other stages in the digital workflow. In short, I wanted to function as a human interface between all the other presenters on the panel.
What follows are my slides and the text of my talk:
We might say that the interface is an exemplar of the âboundary condition.â [2] Theorists have variously described the interface as a deep surface, a zone of interaction, a gateway, a site of translation, a field of transition, a form of relation, a mediator of agency â a fertile nexus for all kinds of passages and permutations. [3] Itâs simultaneously a uniter and a divider, a âthickâ heterotopic space of interaction.
[4] For the longest time, the ideal interface was supposed to efface itself. The perfect portal was invisible, transparent, immersive, frictionless, seamless. Not any more. [5] In recent years, designers and theorists have embraced the idea of a productively âseamfulâ interface: one that doesnât mediate too effortlessly, that doesnât too thoroughly conceal all the complexity that lies beneath. Thereâs pedagogical value in friction, weâve come to learn. Those seams are the metaphorical water wings that prevent our submergence into that deep surface. [6] By resisting total immersion, we retain more of our agency, our critical faculties, our ability to see the interface for what it is â an embodiment of epistemology, ontology, and ideology. An interface is an intellectual and political infrastructure.
[7] Over the past five years or so Iâve written a series of articles about urban data science and citiesâ mediated infrastructures. A few of those pieces have focused on interfaces to the so-called âsmart cityâ â the portals or gateways where citizens can peek into, consume, or, if theyâre lucky, shape urban operations and civic services. Given the ubiquity of screens â apps, dashboards, public interactives, media facades, transit monitors, etc. â in these data-fied developments, Iâve argued, we need to pay particular attention to how their interfaces are engineering the values of our cities and structuring our subjectivities as urban citizens.
[8] Drawing inspiration from scholars like Johanna Drucker and designers like Mitchell Whitelaw, I offered a rubric for evaluating urban interfaces. Briefly, it advocated that we attend to the basic composition, materiality, scale, location, and orientation of our interfaces, as well as the modes of presentation and interaction (sight, sound, touch, smell) they make possible. I encouraged us to think about how interfaces impart a sense of orientation, how they help the âuserâ situate him or herself within the larger landscape; and how they âframe,â or conceptually partition, their content. I drew attention to the data models that undergird all these conceptual and technical architectures â and how those models embody an epistemology and methodology. I asked us to look for the hinges and portals between the technical systemsâ myriad layers. And I encouraged us to ask: to whom does the interface speak, who does it exclude â and why, and how?
[9] These questions could be applied to an urban kiosk â like the Link kiosks now lining New Yorkâs sidewalks â [10] or to an archival interface. And thatâs what Iâll be focusing on in the limited time that remains: [11] Iâve decided to quickly stitch a few seams between the different presenters on this panel and the stages of workflow that each represents. I want to show how interfaces to digital collections can productively expose the seams of archival process. [12] While helping people find the collection materials they want, they can also show â for those who want to know â how those collection materials got there, and how they came to show up in their search results.
[13] First, interfacing selection: Iâm sure many of you are familiar with Tim Sherrattâs work. His Invisible Australians project draws attention not only to what records are selected for digitization, but also to what people are recognized as citizens. Using facial detection software, a technology that readily lends itself to many nefarious applications, Sherratt and Kate Bagnall isolated portraits of non-white Australians in the National Archives of Australia. These were the âInvisible Australians,â those whose non-white faces, through their very existence, challenged the countryâs White Australia Policy of the early 20th century. He then reinserted those faces back into the Archivesâ website. This selection of thumbnails bestows subjectivity and permanent residence to a population selected for surveillance and exclusion.
[14] As Sherratt explained in his keynote presentation at the 2016 Migrant (Re)Collections conference, the original âprocess of identification,â which involved portraits and handprints, âhelped justify the racist underpinnings of the system.â Today, too, our own identities â and particularly black and brown identities â are selected for capture and digitization: âOur faces are increasingly not our own â they are public signifiers to be captured by systems of identity management and surveillance.â Yet by âexercis[ing] our power to aggregate, and to name,â Sherratt argues, we can âturn these systems on themselves.â Selection-for-surveillance becomes selection-as-subjectification.
[15] Second, interfacing OCR: Consider the late, great NYPL Labsâ âWhatâs on the Menu?â project, which highlighted the challenges of OCRâing typographically or graphically adventurous and handwritten menus. [16] Its Building Inspector does the same for maps, asking people to confirm the boundaries of individual properties. [17] Other researchers and developers have proposed, or are developing, annotation tools to supplement OCR. Iâd encourage us to think about using our interfaces to go beyond the optical, too â to highlight other modes of automating engagement with digital collections. [18] Consider Tanyaâs work with HiPSTAS, and how and interface can promote fruitful partnerships between automated listening and individual, critical listening.
[19] Third, interfacing the database:
[22] Fourth, interfacing metadata:
[24] Fifth, interfacing open access policies:
[26] Interfaces are not merely providing access to content; but also opening up the technical, social, and political systems within which that âstuffâ resides, and which gives it context. How can our interfaces provide this larger Latourian actor-network or Foucauldian apparatus surrounding the collection as an option, for patrons who want it? [27] In closing, I want us to think, too, about how to provide that entry through means other than screens and optics. Our digital collections represent multiple modalities, the analog objects that many of those digital records document come in myriad formats, patrons research and learn through their multisensory bodies and multiple intelligences; lets think about building that richness into our interfaces. [28]
I was invited to join Amy Earhart, Hannah Alpert Abrams, Amanda Licastro, Rachel Buurma, and Brian Rosenblum at the Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia on January 6, 2017, to discuss the labor behind the creation and maintenance of digital collections. You can find my talk and slides here.
âCloud and Field: On the Resurgence of âField Guidesâ in a Networked Age,â Places (August 2016).
âInstrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019,â Places (April 2016).