Jonathan Bean

Taste Regimes and Market-Mediated Practice

Taste has been conceptualized as a boundary-making mechanism, yet there is limited theory on how it enters into daily practice. In this article, the authors develop a practice-based framework of taste through qualitative and quantitative analysis of a popular home design blog, interviews with blog participants, and participant observation. First, a taste regime is defined as a discursively constructed normative system that orchestrates practice in an aesthetically oriented culture of consumption. Taste regimes are perpetuated by marketplace institutions such as magazines, websites, and transmedia brands. Second, the authors show how a taste regime regulates practice through continuous engagement. By integrating three dispersed practices--problematization, ritualization, and instrumentalization--a taste regime shapes preferences for objects, the doings performed with objects, and what meanings are associated with objects. This study demonstrates how aesthetics is linked to practical knowledge and becomes materialized through everyday consumption.

Learning from IKEA hacking: i'm not one to decoupage a tabletop and call it a day.

We present a qualitative study based on interviews with nine IKEA Hackers - people who go online to share the process of repurposing IKEA products to create personalized objects. Whether they were making a self-conscious artistic statement or simply modifying a towel rack to fit in a small bathroom, IKEA hackers illuminate an emergent practice that provides insights into contemporary changes in creativity. We discuss the motivations for IKEA hacking and explore the impact of information technology on do-it-yourself culture, design, and HCI.

Old hat: craft versus design?

Craft is enjoying a renaissance. Visit a hip neighborhood in Portland, Brooklyn, or San Francisco, and the signs are everywhere—most likely, painstakingly hand-lettered on a chalkboard. Take a walk down a street in these cities and you‘ll likely find the opportunity to learn to make pickles and enjoy some craft beer and artisan cheese, all before recrafting your body through yoga. From our vantage point in design schools on both U.S. coasts, we see a parallel in academia to the comeback of craft in popular culture. The prefix “DIY” has been applied to fields such as urbanism and biology. Craft is aligned with a new interest in making and doing, encouraging an appreciation for experimental and small-scale interventions, such as World Park(ing) Day, where the everyday urban space of a parking spot is repurposed into temporary park space. These examples reflect a renewed understanding of craft as promoting human-scale activities and sensitivities. As authors and researchers, we’ve been more than complicit in this shift, orienting our research and teaching toward questions of materiality and longevity, and instantiating these concerns in projects involving knitting, IKEA hacking, homemaking, and bookbinding. This turn back to craft—and the response to it—both in popular culture and in academia, seems to represent a critical choice facing design education: whether to include the mastery of a craft in the execution of design.

The medium is the fake news

reported on Cameron Harris, who fabricated, apparently without the help of Russian masterminds, an entirely false story about the discovery of pre-marked ballots sitting in an Ohio warehouse. His motivation? Money for student loans, car payments, and rent. And with his fake-news websites pulling in a reported

It's not that hard

1,000 an hour in revenue, it worked [2]. In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), it has long been a given that the interface transforms the user. We all become quite different humans, with different capabilities, different potentials, and different proclivities when information technology enters the scene. The fake-news phenomenon suggests we might pull back from this user perspective to consider the systemic effects of the supposedly self-regulating systems that we’ve built. The libertarian ethos baked into Facebook’s fake-news solution will require users to flag potentially incorrect content in order for it to be sent to a team of professional fact-finders. This fix is based on the assumption that in a free market, the best information will rise to the top. But the economic forces behind fake news—it’s especially profitable compared with traditional journalism, what with all that costly reporting and fact-checking—suggest that it is here to stay. Furthermore, the low participation rates on collectively edited sites such as Wikipedia indicate that far more people will be clicking “Share” than reporting fake news. The elision of fake news with propaganda reminded me of Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the From a compromised U.S. presidential election [1] to a gun-wielding “selfinvestigation” of a nonexistent child-trafficking ring, the impact of fake news is clear. Yet we have not paused to define exactly what fake news is, although attempts to control it have suddenly gained traction. Facebook, for example, has announced a number of measures aimed at fake news. These have been tested in the U.S. and will be rolled out in Germany, where strict laws against hate speech have put pressure on Facebook’s usual laissez-faire approach to content. Where and whether the policy will see wider adoption remains to be seen. It seems simple: Fake news is news that is not true, right? But this definition pushes aside the underlying question of what constitutes news. That category has already been stretched beyond limit by the proliferation of sites offering a mix of journalism, journalistic writing, and opinion. On an everyday basis, this is most apparent in the News app on my iPhone, where op-ed pieces from the Washington Post appear alongside straight reporting from Fox News. My feed is peppered with stories from other sources, such as Quartz, which informed me today that only 20 percent of millennials have ever tried a Big Mac. There is also a continual slew of click-baity articles from all types of sources starting with some variation on “Five things you need to know...” In a print newspaper, it’s easier to distinguish this sort of not-quite-news. Op-eds, in general, are not on the front page; they’re toward the back, while the front page is reserved for reporting conducted by the newspaper’s own staff. Wire stories are sandwiched in the middle. Advertising is corralled in boxes and designed to be clearly distinguishable from editorial content. But in the News app and elsewhere online, every story is equivalent. Opinion looks like reporting, which looks like public relations and advertising. For some, the latest speculation about the cause of exploding smartphone batteries is news, while others value reporting on which dusty shade of pink is now in vogue. Add politics to the mix— say, by referring to legislation as Obamacare instead of the Affordable Care Act—and further complications arise in distinguishing between fact, opinion, and advocacy. Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism that the medium is the message rings true. Not long before presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway referred to mistruths as “alternative facts,” many suggested reframing the issue altogether. For example, the Daily Kos published an article titled “Let’s Call ‘Fake News’ What It Really Is: Propaganda.” The problem with this shuff le is that while some fake news surely is propaganda, not all of it f its neatly into this category, which for me brings to mind a strange mix of an organized network of political operatives combined with the sound of Natasha’s cackle burned in from childhood binges of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. But some fake news is just opportunistic forgery. The Medium Is the Fake News

How green building is redesigning the user

insulation and passive house, the idea is quite simple: Use physics to make a building work like a really, really good Thermos. Provide lots and lots of insulation, so that heat and cold stay where they belong. Use good windows, and don’t put too many of them in places on a building where they will contribute to too much heat gain or too much heat loss. Build it to be airtight, with materials that are readily available on the market. Use a simple mechanical device to provide plentiful fresh air without losing a lot of energy. And use a computer program or spreadsheet to make some calculations and predict whether the building will perform as intended. Do it right and it’s easy to hit net-zero energy by putting just a few solar panels on top, while ensuring the building’s design allows it to coast through power outages without freezing or broiling the occupants. This is called passive survivability, and it’s a way the passive building concept differs from the net-zero energy buzzword. Well, it’s not that hard—until you fire up the computer program or open the spreadsheet. The two big players in the space are called the Passive House Planning Package, or PHPP, which is simply a heavily customized Excel spreadsheet, and WUFI Passive, which is a modification of a program developed by German building scientists to model moisture and thermal flows in buildings. While a SketchUp plugin for PHPP has reduced the amount of data entry required—previously a user would have to tally the surface area of every exterior wall, window, and even window frame—both approaches make the user do some deep digging for data that, as it turns out, doesn’t readily exist. Ever tried to find out exactly how efficient a heat pump is at the average temperature in the place where it will actually be T he myth of technological progress lies at the center of human-computer interaction. We are all invested in the idea that big problems can be solved with big solutions, big data, more algorithms, and Moore’s Law. For the past two years, I’ve been studying the green building industry in the U.S. And I’ve noticed that a similar myth of technological innovation is at play, with real consequences for our sense of what is possible today [1]. The myth of technological progress often revolves around a utopian vision of the future, where innovation has solved our most pressing and complicated problems, including poverty, hunger, and climate change. Upon reflection, these are simple problems made complex by us pesky humans. In the case of poverty and hunger, the problem is not that we do not have enough resources, but rather that they are so unequally distributed. In the case of climate change, the problem is that our activities are spewing out too much carbon dioxide. So, while redistributing resources is a complex sociopolitical process, it should not take a global accord or a major technological breakthrough to reduce the rate at which fossil fuels are turned into carbon dioxide. In the building industry, we already know how to do this, yet this sector is responsible for about 40 percent of carbon emissions. Economic growth in places such as Brazil and China, combined with the adoption of Western-style climate-controlled buildings, represents both a tremendous threat to the climate and an opportunity for transformation. Within the field of architecture, HCI’s focus has been on enabling architects to create ever more expressive and avant-garde designs. Architecture schools, in particular, are hotbeds of innovation in parametric design, which, when wedded with CNC fabrication, holds the promise of delivering Frank Gehry levels of complexity on constrained budgets. Some architects have connected parametric design tools with an ecological sensibility, designing elaborate sunshades, while others have put processors into building control systems. Back in the 1980s, the French architect Jean Nouvel designed an award-winning building clad with motor-controlled shutters that evoked Islamic art. Researchers in HCI have made a push into the relationship between energy use and building systems, first focusing on changing occupant behavior through energy dashboards. The consensus, however, seems to be that making people aware of their energy use effects only short-term reductions. More encouraging is the commercialization of this technology through products such as the Nest thermostat, which are setting the stage for large-scale demandreduction management. Yet the widespread assumption is the building industry is still waiting for technological progress to arrive—that we don’t have the building materials, the technology, or the design tools needed to effectively address climate change. A parallel assumption is that radical change will be needed in the building industry: Architects need to be computer programmers! Builders must be roboticists! Thankfully, it’s not that hard. The answer has been around, depending on who you ask, since about the 1970s, well before parametric design ruled the day, and well before personal computers could run spreadsheets. Known by several different names, including super

Making: movement or brand?

Solar Decathlon competition, held this summer in Versailles, France, exhibited a number of recognizable design strategies: adding to the top of existing structures; assembling modular, prefab elements combining kitchens, bathrooms, and heating and cooling systems; wrapping existing buildings with a new, efficient layer. Only a few entries elaborated on the longstanding but ecologically problematic theme of the freestanding house in the unspoiled countryside. Perhaps because of a heightened awareness of climate change, several of the entrants couched their contributions in terms of disaster relief. But also on display, if harder to see, were embedded technologies intended to reduce residents’ carbon emissions. Largely, these technologies were intended not to shift energy-wasting occupant behavior, but rather to circumscribe the possibility of waste. Solar Decathlon houses, built by university teams backed by corporate sponsors, are judged on several criteria, each with topic-specific juries. A panel of architects presides over the design award, so it is not surprising that the shapes of the houses—which might seem innovative to the casual observer—reference established examples of “good” modernist design, all hard angles and cantilevers and open plans and sheer planes of glass. One house had no interior walls other than those enclosing the bathroom, with a loft bed perched seven feet in the air. (I imagined tiptoeing around a sleeping baby when the tour guide explained the design team envisioned the wide-open house as suitable for a family of four.) Homes, even those not built for solar energy competitions, are getting more efficient, but indirect carbon emissions attributed to the residential sector continue to climb. This is in part because we are using more consumer electronics. I wondered if the Solar Decathlon houses would be bristling with LCD screens trying to get their imagined occupants to change their behavior. The Japanese team did have a tablet linked to a computer that performed facial and emotion recognition (it identified me correctly as a happy 30to 39-year-old male). But mainly the technology in these houses takes the form of innovative building materials. There were photovoltaic systems, along with tight-sealing windows and new insulation materials, such as aerogel, that lend a slim door the insulation value of a thick wall. Many teams used superefficient minisplit heating and cooling systems made by Japanese manufacturers that, together with electricity-generating solar panels, allow super-insulated homes to be net producers of energy. Broadly speaking, the design strategies that produced these homes also can be considered technologies. For example, several of the houses used the Passivhaus standard, which necessitates the use of a computer energy model during the design phase. Technology is embedded in the homes’ design and in the materials, but the goal for most of the teams seems to be to make technology invisible in the final product, so the houses feel as normal as possible. I was struck by the split between two trajectories: one where we are using technology such as the FitBit and Lumo posture sensor to monitor everyday activity and to make decisions based on that data, and another where the expectation is to delegate human decisions to the technical realm. In the case of the Solar Decathlon, technology is used to configure the material environment so that we unruly humans can make only choices that are less harmful. Framed like this, technology is not so much the coach that keeps us in line, but rather the invisible hand behind a Truman Show existence, where our choices are delimited and determined in advance. Of course, the real state of affairs is somewhere between these two extremes. There is a long history of demonstration homes in the traditions of both architecture and computing. What makes the Solar Decathlon houses interesting is that they follow the tradition of architectural competitions, where a chief concern is the poetic expression of future aesthetic possibilities. So they share the sense of playful experimentation that has long informed HCI, but with a very different set of assumptions about human agency. Eli Blevis has called for tackling environmental sustainability as part of “motivating the will for sustainable behaviors as part of an economically viable future, rather than by expecting such effects to be solely the dominion of legislation and public policy,” for example, by creating modular products that are easier to maintain or designing products for heirloom status that may be less likely to be thrown away [1]. How Green Building Is Redesigning the User