Design Altruism Project

April 19th, 2014

David Stairs

At 10:02am on Saturday, February 23, 2014 I officially became old.

X-ray of surgical plate to correct a multiple fracture of my right distal radius

As I left my house to take my dog Asali for a walk I noted that the front steps were blocked by snow. I’d been working hard throughout an unusually harsh winter to keep them clear, but a recent thaw— it had been 48°F the previous day— had caused snow to slide off the porch roof and pile on the steps.

My treacherous front steps, a disaster waiting to happen

Asali scampered down at the end of her leash while I tried to negotiate the snow. With my first step I knew it was no longer snow, but had turned to ice again because I was instantly airborne. My reflexes are sharp, and my arm shot out to break my fall. Unfortunately, my full weight came down on my right wrist, and it was the only thing that broke.

I stumbled back to the front door where I passed out. When I awoke my first thought was, “Where’s the dog?” She was sitting right beside me, waiting for me to wake up, a very doggish way to behave. As I began to recover from the shock, I drove myself to the hospital to verify what I already knew. I would soon be adding yet another image to my ongoing x-ray self-portrait project.

Selfie of cripple with dog

So I say I became “old” after a grandma fall at the tail-end of a brutal winter, but that’s only half the story. What comes next, what follows any such injury is the nightmare of living one-handed. It took awhile to fall into a routine. For one thing, a preliminary procedure failed, and I ended up back in the hospital after two painful weeks in a splint to have the wrist plated and pinned. I realized that medicine is an oxymoron, doomed to inflict an equal or greater amount of pain on the unwitting victim in its efforts to cure or correct his initial illness or injury.

Sectioning grapefruit requires sophisticated skills

With a hand injury, the preponderance of simple activities fall to the uninjured hand. I broke my pen hand, so I resolved to learn to write with my left. This isn’t a serious burden until tax time rolls around. And paying monthly bills is challenging for awhile. Opening a box of cereal, or unwrapping a soft caramel is akin to one-handed dressing: one’s teeth come in handy. But try to open a can, cut meat, or section a grapefruit one-handed. And tying shoes begets a fusillade of maledictions.

Cutting meat’s strictly a two-hand job

One-hand driving is not difficult; many people already drive that way. And left-handed texting is almost a cultural norm by now. But showering’s little fun, and sleeping is positively hideous, especially in an elbow-restricting splint. To say nothing of making the bed before sleeping!

Employing the third hand while dressing

Upon searching the internet for “one-handed enabling devices” I find mostly entries for smartphone applications. This is too bad. I can now see the benefits of one-handed devices for floor-sweeping, can and bottle opening, snow-shoveling, cutting, juicing, tying, snipping, unlocking… the list becomes enormous. How come no one’s figured out how to make a one-handed zipper? This would be a boon, especially when you are leaving home in the morning with an armful of stuff.

In the meantime, I imagine I’ll have plenty of opportunities to improve/invent some of the simpler items in my home, starting with my ***damn uncomfortable unpadded splint. My brother’s a contractor, so I’m aware of third hand tools, but they won’t do me much good. If you hear of any others, please send the news along. I’ll be working on a growing inventory over the next six weeks.

David Stairs is the founding editor of Design-Altruism-Project.

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Data Deluge

March 28th, 2014

Victor Margolin

I once thought that the greatest obstacle to reflective thought was the endless haptic texting that occupies the mental space of so many people but now I have a new culprit, data. Devices that have dissected our bodily functions into tiny shards flood the market, enabling us to either confirm the smooth functioning of our multiple organs, energy flows, and synapse synergies or else to detect glitches that merit our attention. Never have people had such an opportunity to be so aware of their bodies and take control of even the most minute irregularities in their physical performance.

Bodily functions are just one of the many new data sites that were once invisible to the naked eye. For the data revelations that now rain upon us in torrents we have to thank the new analytics. These are based on algorithms that were once more useful to spy agencies than to a vast public with an insatiable desire to understand the world in terms of data flows. I recently joined a service called Academia.edu in order to download several papers by a colleague. In exchange for the opportunity to access my colleague’s papers, I had to sign up and agree that any papers of mine that I uploaded could be downloaded by others. I chose not to upload any papers but some of them have mysteriously appeared on Academia.edu, prompting monthly reports from the service on how many times they have been downloaded. I learned from a recent communiqué that a short essay I wrote many years ago was recently accessed by one person, a fact that was reinforced by a visual that showed a little hill on a long flat line. The hill represented this single download within a long dry spell of inactivity.

I am wondering what value there is to my knowing that someone downloaded an almost forgotten essay I wrote a long time ago. Were I an active uploader of my papers, I could certainly multiply the data I receive from Academia.edu to an exponential degree. I could be aware of how many people downloaded the letter to the editor I wrote early in my career, complaining about a colleague’s misinterpretation of a sentence in one of my papers. I could know my rankings among other colleagues in terms of download numbers and could add the data to my CV. The latter is not a joke since the Citation Index, which keeps track of how many times an academic paper is cited, is often used to measure the worth of a scholar’s intellectual productivity. Academic journals now routinely publish their Citation Index ratings to induce scholars to submit papers to them. The academic value of journals is also measured by another and perhaps more insidious statistic – the percentage of papers rejected. A journal that rejects a greater percentage of papers will receive a higher ranking regardless of the reasons for the rejections. It may simply mean that a particular journal received a considerable number of bad papers.

Much of the validation of big data comes from the belief that the more we know about how systems function – whether they are bodily systems or social systems – the more we can make better decisions about managing those systems. I won’t debate the value of more data in improving city services but I do question the potential inundation of statistical data that is meant to aid people in making personal decisions such as what movie to watch or what book to read. Rather than relying on a good critic to evaluate a film, decisions are often made on the basis of how many other people liked the film or book. This data is converted into numerical ratings that have the same or more influence than a critic’s opinion.

The move to quantify human activity and consequently convert it into data for decision-making is nowhere more evident than on social media sites such as Facebook. The new category of “Like” now functions to tally votes in innumerable popularity contests. When I go to a café, I find a small announcement on the table that encourages me to “Like” the café on Facebook or another social media site and I am frequently implored to “Like” a service or product in order to boost its numerical ratings on a particular site.

Thus, big data is changing our behavior in multiple ways. By providing information about realms of experience that we once knew nothing about, it is making us hyperconscious of the activity in those realms, perhaps far more than is necessary. As we are invited to produce more data, we participate in the quantification of human activity that may tell us nothing about what that activity means and may also create false measurements of value.

To say that we were better off when we knew less about some things may sound like heresy but there is truth to it, particularly when decisions are based on quantifiable indicators rather than sound individual judgment. To the degree that we shift our personal and collective decision-making to data responsiveness, we are surrendering our capacity to make informed judgments based on sounder means. At the same time, fending off invasive data hordes leaves us more room to cultivate reflective thought. In the long run, that is far more valuable than making choices based on meaningless statistics or knowing all there is to know about things that don’t matter.

Victor Margolin is Professor Emeritus of Design History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He is currently working on a World History of Design to be published by Berg in London.

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Everything But Love

March 7th, 2014

David Stairs

Looking for love? It doesn’t matter if you have specialized tastes. Not only the “fetish-friendly” or the “transgerdered” are searching, but single moms, cancer sufferers, BBWs, middle-age widowers, cheating wives, and sugar daddies, too. The internet caters for all races, ages, and economic levels, no sexual preference too kinky or niche group too small.

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