Ghost Values: Infrastructures of Digital Design UCDARnet Conference Review by D. Fox Harrell Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego redfox@ucsd.edu Fox Harrell is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on developing new improvisational narrative forms. He earned an M.P.S. in Interactive Telecommunications at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, and both a B.F.A. in Art and a B.S. in Logic and Computation at Carnegie Mellon University. He has worked as a game designer and animation producer in New York City. He recently completed his first novel, "Milk Pudding Flavored with Rose Water, Blood Pudding Flavored by the Sea."

The bridge has its own desires. It hides an elitist urban planning agenda - it is designed so that public buses cannot cross, individuals without automobiles are excluded. A serial number on a microchip potentially opens the user's windows for outsiders to peep in. Daemons, slaves, and drivers work in unison to keep the system running. Objects have their own value systems. These play a role in determining the lives of humans. The protest voiced when considering infrastructures of digital design typically pits humans against their artifacts. It warns against ill-considered artifacts that threaten human society. The values of people are contrasted to the cold values of the machine.

This battle is an illusion. Infrastructures encode the values of the society. These societal values come into conflict with individual and local community needs and desires. Values that loft consumption and commerce up high reveal themselves. The bureaucracy that exalts dehumanizing technology is seen raw and naked. The "Infrastructures of Digital Design Symposium," was held between January 31 and February 2, 2003 at the University of California, San Diego. Its participants gathered to question the values of artifacts, to differentiate between visible and invisible infrastructures, and to argue for the importance of human narratives as a force to mitigate insensitive technologies. They gathered to poke fun at the bare bones revealed through slits in social robes. After all of the participants left the auditorium the spirit of unbridled consumption sighed in relief; human artifacts had been blamed and punished in his stead.

A triumph of the conference was repeated highlighting of the way that artificial environments force humans to adapt our behavior. In the panel on Health Information Systems Zena Sharman explained how a hospital required to increase security measures installed a Plexiglas barrier between patients and the hospital administration. It featured two holes at staggered heights for people to speak through and one slit at the bottom through which documents were passed-the form was so ill-designed, however, that all parties ended up craning down to speak through the document slit. Patrick Feng presented a theoretical account of these concerns highlighting that health care design often ignores the heterogeneity of users. In the domain of the arts Olga Kuchinskaya presented a poignant case study contrasting "The Art of the Poor," in this case the work of underresourced but technically innovative Russian animators, with a Hollywood computer animated film. Her argument was that the values of the "poor" media spurred artistic innovation. Presumably for rhetorical value she left the point unstated that the goals of the filmmakers were quite different, but this final idea was stated in the Sunday morning plenary session. There was obvious contrast between the self-empowered activist/art colony work of Kate Rich, the crystalline video collage of Professor Lev Manovich's installation piece "Soft Cinema," and the work of generously endowed
(publicly and corporately) California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-(IT)2) as presented by its director Larry Smarr. That session revealed that artists can actively choose the medium and infrastructure they work with and that this choice in conjunction with necessity and the availability of tools helps to determine the possibilities of creative work. Technological determinism, the incorrect view that technology is a solitary force shaping human society, leered from around the corner on occasions but the strength of the many observations recognizing the influence of technical infrastructures upon humans was well stated at the conference.

There was no explicit attempt to define the meaning of 'infrastructure.' The definition was implicit in the different approaches and concerns. A central issue was whether infrastructure is necessarily something hidden. The keynote speaker, Professor Howard Becker, claimed that infrastructure is everything outside of the artist. Toward this end he recounted his wife's struggles to force commercial software to create a 32' x 32' scrollable collage of photographs. In the end he claimed that the necessary infrastructure simply was not readily available at the time she was working. Some audience members questioned this conception of infrastructure claiming instead that it is the deeply embedded and invisible structures lying underneath society. Promoting this view panelist Rajiv Shah focused on how code, both in terms of software and the rules of particular subsocieties, regulates production of artifacts. The subtleties of classification of infrastructure and its visibility can again be seen in the medical profession. New codes of classification alter even conceptions of illness. Mathew Kabatoff expressed this using the example of the mental illness 'traveler's fugue' where the inflicted are possessed of the urge to wander for kilometers in some random direction with little care for their well-being. The emergence of that particular illness intersected with the physical infrastructure of the city as it appeared in the early industrial period in Europe, as the viability of tourism and rapid travel was enabled by the transportation technology of the age. It is unclear here what exactly was the relevant infrastructure bringing about new classifications - it may have been the new travel technology of the age, the discourse of the medical profession of the time, the emergence of new social roles of travelers unavailable to all the society's members, or any combination of those. Scenarios such as this proved the role and nature of infrastructure to be fluid.

Infrastructure shimmered in and out of view as a topic, now the tangible undergirding of cities, now the socially determined regulations that shape design. Regardless, the consequences of designing infrastructure can be dire: Jericho Burg discussed the infrastructures of famine early warning systems. These systems attempt to monitor the conditions for famine so that efforts can be mobilized to avert it. The challenge was that emergency aid organizations often mobilize in the face of natural disaster, but are reluctant to intervene in political emergencies. Unfortunately, the causes of famine are typically a mixture of political, social, and meteorological conditions. The question was left unresolved as to whether the systems should sensitively monitor the true causes of famine and alienate some sources of humanitarian aid, or should naïvely consider only environmental data and let some signs of ensuing famine remain undetected in order to satisfy aid organizations' apolitical policies. Invisibly and remotely these infrastructural design decisions impact whether or not someone will starve.

The victims of famine, passengers of public transportation, patients navigating a medical bureaucracy all have stories. These stories are difficult to tell, it is often boring to listen to complaints about waiting in line and cutting through red tape, but they are crucial. The needs and values of the individual come into conflict with the needs and values of the system. The stories of the infrastructure are important to tell too. David Buuck's photoessay humorously presented chic but vacant work and living spaces in Silicon Valley, architectural carcasses exhibiting the excess defining the failed values of the dot-com boom. Information also tells stories. For this reason information visualization is a scientific enterprise that recently has colonized by new media artists. David Ribes presented a case of the reverse where a scientist attempted to mine the visual arts for techniques to use for the design of data visualization. The result was a culture clash where the implicit values of the tools of digital analysis and scientific production rendered the artistic ideas into an unrecognizable parody from the point of view of an artist. Probably the attempt might make sense if conceived within a value system of a third discipline without the preconceptions of either contemporary art practice or science. The stories told by information require means by which they can be read. Maps are one such means. The limitations of the map, both geographical maps and information maps, were explored by Patrick Deegan. The idea of total information requires new interfaces to view data, however, and these interfaces require the infrastructure of new conventions and technologies to implement them and entrench their use.

In the end it is always a human interpreting the story and it is the human story that matters the most. Professor and artist Sharon Daniel used internet technologies and technical training to amplify the voice of disenfranchised drug-addicts in Oakland, California. The participants of the program were provided with advocacy and their web presence provided artistic visibility for the project. There are many ethical considerations to make in such an exchange but these were circumvented through narrative. It was obvious that the interpersonal exchange, caring, and intentions of the project extended beyond superficial critique of what was exchanged. The reality of the project existed in the excitement and curiosity of a man who had lost his short term memory for the first time being able to reach across the threshold of the letters "WWW" that appear on every billboard. The reality was in trying to schedule meetings between incarcerations, in wondering if absence or tardiness was due to death. Personal narrative is crucial to consider also when working across cultural barriers. Kimberley Christen and Christopher Cooney told the tale of the production of "Aboriginalexperience.com," a website to act as an archive and advertisement for an aboriginal cultural center in Australia. An audience member commented on the slick commercial appearance of the website - the comment was an attempt to question an apparent recolonization of aboriginal space by the corporate aesthetic in the online realm. The presenters' response was that the people the site represented had explicitly rejected a website with stereotypical traits of an "aboriginal aesthetic." They had seen other websites before and they wanted theirs to be a professional, clean, and well-designed site. Another lesson narrative has to offer infrastructural design is that it is important to listen to the stories of others and not speak for them, everyone's story is intertwined. The emotional peak of the event was Saturday morning when, with the aid of Zara Mirmalek, Professor Leigh Star told her personal story of a painful and near fatal illness and her voyage through oceans of bureaucratic tape and absent classifications. The need to interpret and tell the story of the medical system's infrastructure held the power to separate life from death. There was a need to mold a system streamlined for cost-effective standardized medical care around the personal narrative of Leigh Star. Her own story clattered against the medical industry's financially motivated requirements for classification and impersonalization, tragically the battlefield was Professor Star's achy body.

Humans create infrastructures, presumably to satisfy human needs. Somehow this relationship often becomes contentious. Professor Geoffrey Bowker emphasized the dubious relationship between the inventor and the invented. The nature of this relationship can sometimes be characterized in the idea of technology as prosthesis. This is an apt metaphor for many of the relationships between humans and artifacts in a capitalist society. This is not the only type of relationship imaginable. The question of "how should we change ourselves versus how should we change our world?" and the triumvirate of "self, objects, and social formations" are not the only means by which to consider the challenges of traversing the infrastructure of human constructions. For some it is a quartet of community, ethics, spiritual needs, and physical production. The range of human values is infinite, selflessness, transcendence, compassion, materialism, imperialism… The artifacts created by humans encode an equally broad range of values. Examining the values of the objects and the nature of the infrastructure underlying societies and codes allows analysis of how well these objects serve human needs. Taking personal stories into account when designing and using artifacts can allow realization of infrastructures whose values are in line with the people they support. Most importantly, infrastructural analysis can lay bare the soul of a society. Values of a culture that are not always explicitly recognized by individuals or communities are displayed in the sun when buried infrastructure is unearthed. Exposed and gleaming thusly, there is an opportunity for squinty scrutiny and, where necessary, change.