Methods for Noticing Workbook

Methods for Noticing Workbook This workbook proposes a methodology for noticing. Please cite: Maya Livio, Jen Liu, Kristin Dew, SzuYu Liu, and Patrycja Zdziarska.“Methods for Noticing Workbook.” 2019. First implemented at Designing Interactive Systems Conference: DIS ‘19 . We believe, after Tsing, that noticing can help researchers better understand “the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds” (22) by amplifying, augmenting, and attuning their attention to a wide range of actors, perspectives, and relations. Here we present a set of generative methods for noticing in research. We hope this workbook can be used as a step in re-examining research assumptions, and pursuing pathways towards preferable presents and futures. SECTION 1: Beginning to Notice Noticing In her book on Deep Listening, composer Pauline Oliveros distinguishes between two types of attention, focal and global: “Focal attention, like a lens, produces clear detail limited to the object of attention. Global attention is diffuse and continually expanding to take in the whole” (25). She compares how attention to sounds at a baseball game can shift between the dispersed noise of the crowd and the distinct crack of a bat hitting a ball. In the practice of Deep Listening, Oliveros encourages a balance of global and focal attention, and we suggest that the same can be applied to noticing across differing perceptive modes. For the first set of methods in this workbook, we center global and focal noticing, and begin noticing our own patterns of noticing. Method 1: Global noticing Set a timer for a duration you feel comfortable with (we recommend 3 minutes as a starting point, but feel free to adapt the timing based on your experience). Sit quietly for this period, and try to take in as much of the whole environment around you as possible. If you notice your thoughts drifting away from the time and place in which you are present, gently bring them back. What did you notice? Method 2: Focal noticing Choose something you noticed in the previous exercise (an actor, relation, process, etc.). Set another timer for a duration you feel comfortable with (suggested time: 3 minutes). Sit quietly for this period, and direct your attention to what you have selected. Again, if you notice your thoughts drifting away, gently bring them back. What did you notice? Method 3: Noticing noticing Reflect on the previous two exercises: What did you notice about your own noticing? What kinds of details were you drawn to? What kinds of details were more difficult to notice? Did you favor particular sensory inputs over others? How might your own positionality affect what you did and did not notice—what noticing biases may you have? SECTION 2: Spatial and Temporal Noticing Noticing, like Oliveros’s conception of listening, is both spatial and temporal (26). It requires sustained, or repetitious, attention over time. As Jenny Odell writes, drawing from William James and Hermann von Helmholtz: “What passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency.” (120). These temporal dimensions of noticing are coupled with spatial ones, through factors such as perspective and context. For the next set of methods, we invite you to extend the time and boundaries of your noticing practice. Method 4: Proximal noticing This method was partially inspired by Deep Listening. Set a timer for a duration you feel comfortable with (suggested time: 3 minutes). At the start, begin by noticing what is most distant from you, at the farthest reaches of your perception. Slowly and gradually shift your attention to what is closer to your own body. By the end of the exercise, center your noticing on your body, and even its internal processes. What did you notice? Did shifting your attention through space change how and what you noticed? Method 5: Panoramic noticing Choose something you noticed in the precious exercise (an actor, relation, process, etc.) and rotate your position to notice all that is around it. Pay close attention to its full surroundings, including the y axis—what is above and below. What did you notice? What effect did broadening your perspective have? Reference projects: — Cynthia Brinich Langlois’s Books of Hours, fin which she draws a place over 24 hours while rotating her gaze, resulting in a more holistic view of place. Method 6: Temporal noticing Return to the same thing you chose in Method 2: Focal noticing . Set a timer for another duration you feel comfortable with, ideally longer (suggested time: 5-10 minutes), and carefully notice it again. Were you able to notice anything new or different? Was there anything that affected your ability to notice differently in the second round? Reference projects: — John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen is a composition with accompanying light installation that was composed based on noticing factors like daylight, phases of the moon, and seismic vibrations in Alaska. It is the foundation for his notion of ‘musical ecology.’ — Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (T.e.j.a.s.)’s Toxic Tours bring tour groups into areas and communities affected by activity from point source pollution to connect to the histories of place. Section 3: Embodied Noticing As you have likely already encountered, noticing is an embodied experience, filtered through the senses, and influenced by factors ranging from affect to ability. Here we can of course connect with Haraway’s work on the social construction of scientific knowledges. Noticing, too, requires situated and embodied knowledges in order to push against “unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims” (583). In the following set of methods, we invite you to direct your noticing to your body, and to how it in turn shapes your external capacities for noticing. Method 8: Affective noticing Spend a duration you feel comfortable with (suggested time: 3 minutes) noticing the affects and emotions you are presently experiencing. What did you notice? How might these influence your capacity to notice what is external? Method 7: Sense-based noticing Choose something external to notice (an actor, relation, process, etc.) and draw your attention to it through as many sensory modes as you wish for a duration you feel comfortable with (suggested time: 5-10 minutes). As bodies are differently abled, choose the senses you feel most comfortable with. Shift between noticing inputs from an individual sense and combinations of them. What did you notice? How did different sensorial methods facilitate different modes of noticing? Was there any relationship between what you noticed within your own body and what you noticed outside of it? Reference projects: — Brueggemann, Thomas, and Wang’s Lickable Cities is a research project in which surfaces in various cities were licked in order to consider licking and tasting as interface in HCI. — Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk encourages new listening habits that challenge dominant soundscapes. — Kate McLean’s Sensory Maps are a series of projects that map cities based on smell. — Kuznetsov, Odom, Pierce, and Paulos’s Nurturing Natural Sensors centers noticing non-human experience as a mode of sensing. Section 4: Mediated Noticing Technologies, both digital and analogue, can expand and unfold sensing tactics and practices, (Gabrys) as well as mediate and augment capacities for noticing. In the following method, we suggest testing one or multiple tools in order to draw attention to the ways in which noticing can be enhanced, reduced, or modified through technology. Method 9: Sensor-based noticing Choose something you have already taken time to notice in a previous method. Choose one or a set of sensor-based technologies (e.g.: environmental sensors, wearable tech, photographic, video, or audio recording, your phone’s pedometer, etc.) and use it/them to augment your noticing. How did the tool/s alter your capacities for noticing? Were those capacities enhanced, distracted from, or both? Did any features or affordances of the sensor/s or outputs work well for noticing? Reference projects: — Janet Cardiff’s audio walks use sound to encourage noticing of particular features in a place. — Howell et al.’s work on emotional biosensing suggests the use of technology to cultivate slow noticing of emotions. — Forensic Architecture’s diverse projects use a multitude of processes such as remote sensing and audio analysis to layer and enhance noticing. — Allegheny County Clear Air Now’s Shenango Channel links multiple technologically-based sensory modes: video recordings of smoke stacks, air quality data, and smell reports, to encourage richer noticing. — Ingrid Burrington mediated her experience of network infrastructure through the kind of analogue sensor of rubbings, making them of objects such as manhole covers in Networks of New York. Section 5: Noticing the Unnoticable Returning for a moment to Pauline Oliveros, she reminds of the significance of what is in between—inaudible, invisible, or unnoticeable. She writes: “There is no sound without silence before and after” (25). Even while carefully honing noticing, there are always aspects of a thing which are difficult or impossible to notice. Keeping these lacunae in mind is critical for a rigorous and situated research practice. We now invite you to consider what you will never notice. Method 10: Unnoticing Choose a thing you have already taken time to notice. Try to map any unknowns around it that you are aware of, and aspects which may be challenging or impossible to ever notice. Reflect on the unknown unknowns, too. Section 6: Noticing Noticing, Reprise Now that you have practiced multiple methods for expanding and enhancing noticing, we ask you to reflect once more on your own noticing. What have you learned about what and how you notice, and which methods have been most effective in this work? Method 3 x 2: Noticing noticing What have you noticed about your own noticing? What kinds of details are you drawn to? What kinds of details are more difficult to notice? Do you favor particular sensory inputs over others? How might your own positionality affect what you do and do not notice—what noticing biases may you have? Section 7: Develop Your Own Methods So far we have identified dimensions of noticing, alongside methods for exploring each one. We have deliberately left these methods somewhat open-ended, in order to facilitate their flexible use across disciplines, as well as to promote suspension of the “tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit[ting] with the unfathomable fact of their existence” (Odell 113). In the final section, we invite you to develop your own methods based on what you have found successful and unsuccessful so far, and drawing from your own research. We hope that what we have proposed here may be useful to concretize the ‘arts of noticing’ (Tsing 22). Your Own Methods: Your Own Methods: Your Own Methods: References John Luther Adams. 1994. The Place Where You Go to Listen. Retrieved from https://www.uaf.edu/museum/ exhibits/galleries/the-place-where-you-go-to. Allegheny County Clear Air Now. DTE Shenango Channel. Retrieved from http://shenangochannel.org. Cynthia Brinich Langlois. 2015. Books of Hours. Retrieved from http://people.uwm.edu/brinichl/books-of-hours. Manu J. Brueggemann, Vanessa Thomas, and Ding Wang. 2018. Lickable Cities: Lick Everything in Sight and on Site. In Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ‘18). ACM, New York, NY, USA. Hildegard Westerkamp. 1989. Kits Beach Soundwalk. Published in In Transfomations. DIFFUSION iMeDIA (pub 1996). Noura Howell, John Chuang, Abigail De Kosnik, Greg Niemeyer, Kimiko Ryokai. 2018. Emotional Biosensing: Exploring Critical Alternatives. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, No. CSCW, Article 69. Stacey Kuznetsov, William Odom, James Pierce, and Eric Paulos. 2011. Nurturing natural sensors. In Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp ‘11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 227-236. Kate McLean. Sensory Maps. Retrieved from https://sensorymaps.com. Jenny Odell. 2019. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Melville House. Ingrid Burrington. 2016. Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure. Melville House. Pauline Oliveros. 2005. Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. Deep Listening Publications. Janet Cardiff. 1991-2014. Audio Walks. Retrieved from https://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/index.html. Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (T.e.j.a.s.). Toxic Tours. Retrieved from http://tejasbarrios. org/toxic-tours. Forensic Architecture. Forensic Architecture. Retrieved from https://forensic-architecture.org. Jennifer Gabrys. 2019. Ocean Sensing and Navigating the End of this World. e-flux. Retrieved from https:// www.e-flux.com/journal/101/272633/ocean-sensing-andnavigating-the-end-of-this-world. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 2017. Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press. If referencing this workbook, please cite it. If using in a classroom, please just let us know. Thanks!