 Okay we might get started. Good afternoon everybody. My name is Claire. I'm the chair this afternoon. I'm sure you've all got as cozy as I did in front of the fire and are just ready to kind of bed down. But I've seen Jeff's slides and they're looking beautiful and very exciting so we're ready to be woken up again. Not that Sibs wasn't amazing, it was the fire. The fire was dreaming of curling up in front of it. So Jeff is going to be presenting speculative design aka throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Jeff Hinchcliff is an academic at the Australian National University where he is developing a new program in digital design practice. Previously he was a core member of the digital treasures data visualization research program and head of the media arts and graphic design department at the University of Canberra. His current research and production focuses on new forms and practices in digital design and visualization and the center of his work is creative interpretation and the representation of data. So one thing, we will likely have time for questions at the end and if possible well please can you use a microphone because we are recording the session. Thanks Jeff. Hi folks, thanks for joining me this afternoon. Okay, that might give you a little bit of the temperature for this afternoon. So from my abstract, I might just recount these couple of paragraphs. It says digitalization presents incredible opportunities for increasing public access and understanding of our valuable collections. But obviously those opportunities are entirely dependent on an effective utilization of digital assets. The technologies required to work with digital collections are freely accessible, robust and widely adopted in the public domain yet new exploratory interfaces to digital collections have been slow to emerge. With impediments to digitizing physical artifacts are largely technical and financial. The barriers to realizing new interfaces to digital collections are predominantly cultural. Institutional attitudes are a typical hurdle as is copyright constraint real or imagined but the unknown is just as significant a barrier. What can we create with digital collections and how should we go about it? So in this presentation I'll attempt to respond to these two questions and argue for the importance of speculative approaches in addressing the opportunities that digital collections afford. So a bit of chatting before the bulk of the talk which is not me reading anything but showing you some work. So in many respects our problem here is akin to the fitness landscape. So that's from, I think it's from biology isn't it, physics? I'm borrowing it. A fitness landscape is a model in which peaks represent solutions and the higher peaks better solutions. So here I've got our red dot and our blue dot. And down in the foreground here are probably where we are at the moment. The houses and homesteads there in the foothills. And where we're aiming to get to is that red dot at the top of the hill. And so our current digital works will get there through generally iterative processes and time. And that's good. That's a worthy project and predominantly that's what we're occupying ourselves with. But over there in the distance are other peaks to climb and finding those peaks is quite difficult. It requires us to move away from local maxima, taking some big steps and possibly travelling downhill to cover ground quickly. So the big steps are particularly significant. The need for big steps are particularly significant in the domain of computer interface design where the culture is one of hill climbing in small steps. So compliance and iterative improvement rather than dramatic innovation. User centred methods have been excellent for optimising design, for hill climbing but not so good at delivering the lateral discoveries and finding those new slopes. So I think one of the big issues here is failure. Finding the new slopes may require travelling downhill, which is bad. Spending time flailing around in the wilderness, which is worse. And this is where speculative design can really contribute. It's concerned with exploring new terrain through speculative propositions. These are propositions intent on resisting the design norms that usually confine us to the known slopes. These are propositions which aim to take big steps into unknown territory. So by way of introduction, I'm just going to borrow a few quotes. So probably some of the most famous proponents of speculative design are Dun and Rabie English academics. And they ran an outfit at the Royal College of Art called Design Interactions. And they have many quotes. I'll just paraphrase quickly here. So they're pretty much saying design must move beyond designing for the way things are now and begin to design for how things could be. Imagining alternative possibilities and different ways of being. Antonelli commenting on their critical design process says critical design, which is what they call it, is not necessarily immediately useful, but rather food for thought whose usefulness is revealed by its ability to help others prevent and direct future outcomes. Design fictions is a related and very complementary field, if you can call it that. And so design fiction is a way of exploring different approaches to making things, probing the material conclusions of your imagination, removing the usual constraints when designing for massive market commercialization, the ones that people in blue shirts and yellow ties call realistic. This is a different genre of design, not realism, but a genre that is forward-looking, beyond incremental, and makes an effort to explore new kinds of social interaction rituals. As much as science fact tells you what is and is not possible, design fiction understands constraints differently. Design fiction is about creative provocation, raising questions, innovation and exploration. And so the name as an accidental bleaker was very much inspired by science fiction. So recognizing that the authors of science fiction, the filmmakers, had this unique license to imagine a future. It's very much based on the here and now often, but they had that license. And so he's arguing that we should adopt this in design, just to liberate ourselves. So onto the sort of fun stuff. I'm just going to show you a bunch of work, probably more than I have time for, but I'll see what I can get through. This is almost by way of introduction. This is one from a series of works that I would use to sort of characterize my own practice. So I did a, probably starting in about, whenever Twitter was born, 2006, I think, I started making versions of Twitter of reimagining how Twitter could be presented to the public and made a series of interactive works based on it. And I'm just going to whizz through a few. There's a lot, probably more than I should have made. So, and they're concerned with different aspects of using that Twitter data in different ways of reimagining and remixing it. So here's one that is largely concerned with messing around with the text, you know, really operationalizing graphic design formats and operationalizing them with code, you know. So I won't even show you the real thing. I might just move through it pretty quickly. This one I might show you just because it's nice to see it come to be. So these are sort of technical exercises and anesthetic exercises in part. I'm using, you know, stock standard web technologies, CSS, HTML, JavaScript. So in this case, I'm hacking with CSS to create a kind of 3D depth of field. All that focus is just done with standard CSS. There's no such thing as depth of field in CSS. So I'm using some other attributes of the CSS spec to kind of fake that 3D depth. And so depth, there is time and I can move this little slider down here and refocus on a different time depth. Can solo different tweets and so forth. This is probably one of the works that got the most traction. It's called Twitter Modern Classics. So you can see how every tweet in my feed is reformatted into a Twitter pulp novel. And then they can be shared and uploaded to Flickr or Tumblr in the day. Yeah, and so it's repurposed in that way. And I know these are not what we would consider, you know, typical glam sector collections, but I think they're a nice place to start because it sort of shows how, I guess, a conventional data feed can be reimagined and remixed using some pretty standard technologies. And the last of the Twitter ones that I'll show you for now is just a report which is very much inspired by the work of Nicholas Felton, who does the Feltron Annual Reports. And in the Feltron Annual Reports he basically presents a year of his life as a beautiful infographic, worth looking up if you haven't seen it. And in this case I'm presenting my tweets in this report format. It's interactive, but by and large I'm obfuscating the text itself. I can't read the report, I can study its connections and many other aspects of it, but what I can't do is actually read it as a prose text. So I can find out things about it and about the network, who's doing what, who's mentioning whom, ratios of followers to followers. So it's kind of pretty silly. I think some of my favourite bits are like the briefest tweet, the mentionniest tweet, the hash taggiest tweet and the wordiest tweet. But yeah, some of it is useful and interactive if you care to do that around with it. So that's sort of some of my practice that I brought to this domain and so here's a more literal example that I'll just jump straight into. So this draws on the Tate Galleries data collection that they published a few years ago. And what I've done is gathered up that data which they published as an Excel file and then I've scraped their entire collection and done some pretty simple colour analysis across the whole collection. So fairly trivial stuff. And really just to provide a different way to explore that collection. So there's all the tags that I can draw from it. This is a timeline, a histogram at the top showing works and numbers of authors. So you can see the white dots represent the number of artists and the black dot is the number of works. And we get an inverse proportion here. So in 1830 at the time of Turner, there's one guy who's dominating the collection and then as we get into the contemporary times it inverts and there's lots of artists with few works. But probably the focus of this work is colour. So what we can do here is click on colours on each of the items or up here where what's happening in this is it's quite a technical exercise. This is all happening in the browser live. So it has a lot of colour information that it's drawing on for 55,000 items. Each item can have up to 16 colours and I'm not aggregating them down to a fixed colour set. So normally what happens with this is because of the sheer size of the colour set is it all gets aggregated down into 16 or 32 or 128 colours. I'm leaving it at its expanded view so that I can do very fine grain colour sorting on it. So this histogram at the top is getting rebuilt dynamically as I filter the collection. And so what I can do is just make some beautiful histograms there and get a refinement down here of what's on offer. So in every case it is sorting each of these items. It's finding those that match this sequence of colours and then it's ordering them in from the highest match to the weakest match. Yeah, it's just a really nice fun way to explore the collection. And it's entirely speculative. I don't think the Tate really knew I was doing this or invited me to do it. They have tolerated it. I don't know if it's particularly something they want to happen. But yeah, it's chosen approach. Definitely there's a lot that can be done with this kind of data, the colour data that I'm using. Here's another sketch based on the same colour data. If I can get it to run, what have I done? Oops, it's saying OK just to see. How's it got? You've seen behind the curtain. So the same colour data is being loaded up. But this time I'm just going to draw it into a 3D colour histogram, which I can sort of squeeze around here. Hopefully you can see that OK. It's pretty dark. So you can see down the bottom the histogram is building all of that colour data into the space. This is pretty raw. I haven't really refined this. It's a kind of work in progress, but I figured I could share. The plan is that's all of the colour data represented in space. So 58,000 works, time 16, colour chips. And so it's kind of pretty cool that the browser can even do it. This is just using 3JS. If I had the HoloLens it would probably look even better. And then down here, as I said, it's pretty much a work in progress, but I can solo particular years and look at what the colour signature of that year is. You can see in the time of Turner it's very monochrome, going across the spectrum there from black to white. And then as we get into the contemporary period, you'll see the colour kind of explode across the points there and occupy more of the space. This uses the same technique, but again, just a thought experiment. This time it's based on can I apply the same sort of techniques to Google's entire font collection. So I did much the same sort of thing. I put everything out of their font collection and then parsed every single one of the families out. So generally Google's fonts are wrapped within families and families can have up to 18 or 16 different weights within one family. So they've got a beautiful interface to search their whole font collection. But oh my God, that's my alarm to myself. But it's bound to that. So if I say I want a heavy font it'll give me two fonts, four fonts. What it doesn't realise is that many of the fonts it has have heavy fonts inside them, but it's based on human metadata. If the person who uploaded the font didn't put in the fact that it has a heavy font it can't find it. So this is just using a computational approach. It's just saying, well, I'll just parse them all and I'll tell you based on the amount of pixels I can count, what's heavy, what's light and what fonts look like other fonts. So you can sort the whole collection in the same way that I can sort the Tate collection by colour. I can sort this entire collection by likeness. So if I say I would like the whole thing sorted by this typeface down here, it does so and it gives me the heat maps of how it's determined that match. So on every one of the letters that I typed. And so in that way it can give me truer matches to what I'm actually looking for. It will reveal typefaces that are obscured. If I need heavy ones, I can do it based on mass. And mass is just counting pixels. So if I need something about this weight, it just counts up all the typefaces that have a similar amount of pixels. So again, I'm just leaning on the browser. It's doing all this processing and computation live in the browser and it nearly works on a phone. It will kind of crash it, but it's done close to working. So more good things to come. This is very much work in progress. So I'm currently the recipient of one of the DX Labs. They're having a forum right now talking about incubators. And I think it's really relevant to what I'm talking about here. Speculative approaches, scratching an itch, just trying stuff out purely for the sake of it without any kind of real commercial pressure. That's a very, you know, lucky position to be in. I'm an academic working outside the field, and it's a nice position to be in. The DX Lab at the State Library of New South Wales is a whole project that's kind of trying to support that sort of practice to see what we can do with these digital collections. And so I'm doing a project at the moment with them, working on this quite small collection. It's about 18,000 images and about 400 records that all relate to a HSC curricula. And so this is just, I guess, a little bit of the sketches of my work in progress. It's very much work, it's really raw. It works, but it's revealing pretty much this speculative process that I'm engaged in, which is that at this stage all I'm trying to do is get to know the data as deeply as I can. I'm making sketches I can show you if you'd like to see it, where I can just, where I get to sort of understand the data more plainly. It won't open it for me. I can look at the whole set of images. I can filter it and I can sort it. It's not with a view to necessarily releasing that to the public so that I understand it more intimately. So I get a really close proximity to that data set. And then I can do other experiments. So I'm working with colour. I'm not allowed to show you. That's really annoying. I've got to show you this one, because it's really silly. And they're my favourite ones. Yeah, so I probably should start wrapping up. On this one, much as I'm inclined to do, I thought, what if I can use the Box2D. It's used in lots of iOS games, Box2D. It's the physics engine that drives all that stuff. And so I'm using it here and I'm representing that collection that we've just seen. So each one of those blobs is a record. And the size of the blob is how many images are wrapped within it. So for 1773, this is a pretty big blob. And if I grab onto it, it magnetises to the other blobs representing 1773. And so I can't tell you what this is good for. It's actually, it's really good fun to play with and throw things around. And then when you get more, you can see, when you get one of the years with lots, it's really chaotic. I don't know. I mean, in some respects it's a technical exercise that I want to know, can I do, will it work? How well does it work? And then I'll determine if it has a kind of practical purpose. In the forum with Seb, just before they were talking about somewhat this sort of practice, perhaps not as ridiculous, but the idea that, you know, you can make mistakes, put them away, and then another day they'll become relevant. So this is for an audience of, you know, 17-year-olds and younger. And I was sort of thinking, you know, perhaps a sort of really playful interface like this would be a great inspiration. I don't know. I'd have to get back to you on that one. Look, I should probably wrap it up because I think I'm about to run out of time. What I wanted to say also, and I didn't get to talk about, is that I'm doing this stuff with data and I'm sort of putting into Google Sheets and making my own APIs out of it as well. So it's all very kind of sketchy and playful. And I think I really want to invite my institutional partners into that process as well as what an API is. So this API is a Google Sheet. All of those things are running off Google Sheets. I think that's pretty cool. So you can tell from my practice and this proposition I'm putting to you that really it's an idea of design as a discourse in which the designer really puts forward propositions and makes critical arguments through designed artefacts. I'd really like to just close on... I wouldn't like to close, but I've run out of time, but Navalski sort of gives us this call to arms and she's sort of reminding us that we really need to go beyond memorialising conservative and limited, you know, linear views of history. This is what digital collections can represent to a public. But she is asking us to build improv platforms that should be spaces for projection, planning, performance and speculation. And so in the works that I've presented I hope that I'm sort of trying to sort of map out some of that terrain and offer those sorts of opportunities to the public because, you know, digital collections they are different to our physical analogues and I think speculative processes are very good at kind of exploring that opportunities they afford. So in terms of the two questions what can we make and how I would say what we should make exists out on the borders. It exists out on the fringes. Well, we should be exploring new terrain and how I think the web is instrumental to what we do. It's both the platform for sketching. You can do really quick, easy, cheap experiments and it is the platform for publication. So it's a beautiful thing and I think it's critical to this process. I hope that's been enjoyable. Sorry if it ran over a little bit. Thank you.