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Value in the Network

Last Tuesday, Shveta, Matt and I attended BayCHI, a monthly gathering of area HCI folk to hear a couple of talks. Since Matt had a longer drive back up to San Francisco, we bailed on the second presentation so we had a chance to talk ourselves. However, the first one was thought provoking. hannon Clark—who very recently launched nela.mobi and is involved with Meshwalk—gave a somewhat confusing presentation on the economic value in network structure.

Last Tuesday, Shveta, Matt and I attended BayCHI, a monthly gathering of area HCI folk to hear a couple of talks. Since Matt had a longer drive back up to San Francisco, we bailed on the second presentation so we had a chance to talk ourselves. However, the first one was thought provoking.

Shannon Clark—who very recently launched nela.mobi (as in, “Never Eat Lunch Alone”)—gave a somewhat confusing presentation on the economic value in network structure. Visually, the slides were a lot like what Eli Blevis would promote, using lots of images to illustrate. However, it was never clear what the connection was between another of Clark’s projects—Meshwalk—and his hypothesis that value resides not in an object but in how that object is positioned in a network.

A Meshwalk is “a conference which is held in motion, outside, documented and captured digitally.” (This is something Marty would love.) The idea is to get people out of their element, participating in the world, and using the world as exemplars for whatever is being discussed. Of most interest to me is that a big group walking forces small group conversations. The driver forcing the small groups is the limitation of physical proximity, as it is difficult to have more than 3-5 people in conversation together while walking down a path. The walks include a few waypoints, where the entire group reconvenes to hear a short presentation to stimulate walking conversations (and to make sure the stragglers catch up). Everything is documented, mostly in pictures which can tell a story of what the collective found interesting. The last one in San Francisco on March 20th included some support from Twitter, which created a meshwalk group to which tweets could be directed and followed. The next one is being planned for October 19th.

Meshwalks might be a very interesting tool of design, sort of a combination of focus group and photo ethnography. Lead a bunch of different such groups down the same path with the same topic of discussion, and see what patterns emerge. The documentation could be further augmented using mini-messaging tools, like Twitter or Jott, which are accessible through cell phones.

The main point of Clark’s talk, according to the title, was to put forth the notion that networks themselves are the things of value. The example he repeatedly used was a gold bar; the object is only worth something because it is at the center of a network that craves it. It is in the transaction where the bar gains its value, not something implicit in the bar itself.

The argument wasn’t very well crafted, and that particular example is not the best. As Matt pointed out in our own little Meshwalk to discuss the talk, there is a difference between limited and unlimited resource. A gold bar is craved in large part because it is scarce. Someone taking my gold bar would have it while I would have nothing. In virtual property, like music files, the resource is something that can be copied. Craving a virtual object is not about transfer of possession. The gold bar is a poor example of Clark’s point because its scarcity gives it an inherent property and its physicality limits ownership.

Although the presentation was too abstract, there is a lot about what Clark implies that is appealing to me. Viewing value as situated in a bunch of relationship is exactly where I believe relational-cultural theory can impact design. The strength of a designed object is not the object itself but the relationships it cultivates. Those relationships may be between people or between objects. Clark’s emphasis on traditional transaction (i.e. sales) as the metric of economic value is also limiting, as social and cultural capital are equally important.

By Kevin Makice

A Ph.D student in informatics at Indiana University, Kevin is rich in spirit. He wrestles and reads with his kids, does a hilarious Christian Slater imitation and lights up his wife's days. He thinks deeply about many things, including but not limited to basketball, politics, microblogging, parenting, online communities, complex systems and design theory. He didn't, however, think up this profile.

4 replies on “Value in the Network”

head. Although you type alone, you benefit from the wisdom of the masses. The word associations you make are scanned for matches and listed with the rest of your recent work. You can view the cloud, which is really a visual thesaurus kind of weightednetworkshowing the connections to a given term.

A Meshwalk as a design tool seems like a promising idea. During our Sustainable Bloomington project, Will and I would often walk around town taking photos for inspiration. It seemed like a good way to get in touch with our location. Will has since begun a compilation of 30 second video clips entitled, “When design hits the streets”…

Thinking about the value in networks is, I think, an important concept for sustainability. In permaculture design, for example, useful connections and links between elements are the keys to a productive system. The yields or products of every organism should match with the needs of other organisms, which is how nature achieves zero-waste. Such systemic thinking of course applies just as well to the social. I am really interested to hear your ideas for bringing relational-cultural theory to bear on some SIDRG projects…

I’m currently reading “This Changes Everything,” a history of relational-cultural theory (and similar) written by Christina Robb. I’ve enjoyed reading about the experiences of the founders of this feminist movement in psychology because it explains it in the context of their own experiences of discovery from within a system of dominance. The framework evolved from a recognition that women were being valued (or devalued) based on a limited view of the world, and that many of the problems attributed to gender were actually the result of the system itself and the metrics used to analyze it. Gender issues are not so much about gender as a more generalized pattern of power-over and power-under roles.

Environmental issues are based on the math of human capitalism, where material effects are not really considered beyond the consumer. Because of our choice of materials, much of what we create doesn’t have a counterpart to return it to a natural cycle of consumption. It would seem like we either need to use materials that can be cycled back or come up with new ways to allow nature to consume the things we create. For a lot of things, though, it may be too late. The only recourse is finding ways to re-use the material products that can’t be cycled.

I think the potential value of RCT in this case is to better understand their path of discovery to their insights about women, and try to apply the same to the ecosystem. The power differential is there, although the methods will likely be very different.

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