Last summer, a group of Fjordians took an inspiration field trip to the Park Avenue Armory to experience Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s “Murder of Crows.” In this spatial-sonic installation, Cardiff recounts an uncanny dream through the subtle use of natural and urban sounds, machine-like distortions, intertwined with classical musical scores and a Russian anti-fascist war song.
"[R]ules for self-organization […] govern how, where, and what the system can add onto or subtract from itself under what conditions." (Meadows, 1999:15)
Self-organizing structures allow a system to change, evolve, and sustain itself as external actors and internal entities affect and impact its systemic structure overtime; thus, developing new response mechanism and enacting new rules and behaviors.
Ethnographic research is important when interaction designers start raising questions about the core values and place that technological tools have in people's everyday practices. The methods used for understanding user behavioral patterns and cultural realities focus on interaction as inseparable from the environment in which it occurs. Rather than analyzing separate data points, ethnography restores actions within their contextual settings and examines behavior as part of a holistic system in which people, things, and the environment affect each other and intertwine with one another.
Decentralized Computing emerges from the understanding of self-organizing systems in nature. This model, by its implicit plurality and distributed scope, makes use of the behavioral patterns and systemic structures of micro-world organisms to facilitate communication between objects (hardware) and non-objects (software). It allows individual devices to communicate as a unified whole. For Mitchel Resnick (1994) decentralization is crucial to redrafting our images of ourselves and the larger social and environmental system we live in.
In 1999, Nathan Shedroff asked: "How do we as designers create meaningful experiences and interactions for others?" (Shedroff; 1999:288). He introduced the importance of Information Interaction Design as the design of information for contextual user-centric interaction. According to Shedroff, emerging trends in information processing of designed products and experiences include: "information overload, information anxiety, media literacy, media immersion, and technological overload." (Shedroff; 1999:267) Those, in turn, define the focus of HCI and the practice of Information Interaction Design.
The contextual scale of information matters; that is, to design at the human scale with considerations for accessibility, readability, and reachability, that correspond to user-centric demographic and psychographic requirements. To design for user-centric perceptual processing is to coherently integrate a belief system. Whitehouse explains how belief may contribute to the ways in which information is assimilated and interpreted, thus affecting the understanding of what one sees.
If we look at systems behavior and the similarities and particularities found within decentralized systems, we see how the conception of an environment built around rules or patterns might generate parallel effects wherein environments are created at the human scale and with the equal consideration of functional and experiential coherence, while yet remaining distinct and separate entities in their particularities.
Alexander’s A Pattern Language promotes a bottom-up approach, which places users of buildings as builders of their environments through the process of co-creating a common ground with the collective consensus of a “shared pattern language”; to give users better control over the spaces they dwell in.