What do I do, exactly?

I attended a Cognitive Archaeology meeting at Leeds Beckett last week. No, really! This was at the invitation of Andrew Wilson of @PsychScientists fame. It was a great day, thanks, and I learned a lot, but it did get me thinking: why would an engineer want to get involved in archaeology? And not the "Let's build Stone Henge" or "Let's build a seige engine" kind of archaeology, where interesting mechanisms might need designing and making. No, this is all about spheroidal rocks, and at the moment, mainly about throwing them. Hence the "cognitive" - as in Perception-Action-Cognition. Actually, there is a lot of interesting engineering in this, and learning more about things like knapping I'm excited to see where we can take it. There's a fascinating blog post there: but not this one.

No, this blog post is titled after a question asked of me about five years ago by one of my PhD students, jointly supervised with our ethics centre, IDEA-CETL. We were discussing engineering decision-making, ethnographic studies of engineering, as well as my work on iPAM and MyPAM (to which I often made reference when discussing engineering decisions, since it was the most direct experience I had of engineering a system), Together Through Play and Postural Assessment. Working with clinicians and physiotherapists on rehabilitation robots; working with sociologists on matters of inclusive play and social participation; working with psychologists and movement scientists on posture and later prehension, while also supervising a number of PhD students doing decision support in supply chains. Which raised the question: What did I do in all this? It's a good question, which is why it stuck with me, and I realised at that point that I really needed to have a sharp answer. Well, I've since added Professors of English (Stuart Murray), Law (Anthea Hucklesby) and Transport Studies (Bryan Matthews) - among others! - to my list of collaborators through the  Augmenting the Body, Tracking People and WHISPER projects over the last two years, and now here I am getting involved with archaeologists. When it came to writing up a blog post about this, it suddenly struck me that the obvious question was - Why? "What do you do, exactly?".

Allow me to explain. 

At heart, I'm interested in design. How the world around us takes shape, and how we can do that more effectively. I'm most interested in how we can make better design decisions, but that's a very, very nebulous area - and if I'm honest, it's the goal of almost all engineering research from Finite Element Analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics, to Sociotechnical Systems Analysis and Robotics. I mean, there's no point in any of this research if it isn't going to make someone's design decisions better, either by giving them better options, or helping them to identify good options more efficiently. I'll spare you a lengthy discussion on decision support and decision analysis (you can find a good account of it in my thesis), but suffice to say that design tools remain one of my key interests. I just think that generic decision-making tools aren't terribly useful - or at least, the ones that we've got are as useful as they're going to be.

No, if you want to develop tools to help engineers and designers make better decisions, you need to dig into some specific areas, and the area I decided to focus on is the link between task demands and person capabilities, and how we can improve the fit between them. That's where my interest in inclusive design and rehabilitation comes from, and it drives a lot of my bread and butter research - which is largely on finding ways of measuring motor skills and ways of improving them (hence my being embedded in PACLab here at Leeds). Which is all well and good, but if you're going to design assistive devices, or rehabilitation technology, or otherwise assess matters related to disability and inclusivity (rather than just study the underlying science), you're immediately getting into user-centred design, and questions of trade-offs and ethics. Hence my links with the Centre for Disability Studies, with Tracking People and with Augmenting the Body. These things don't exist in a vacuum, and assuming you're interested in having stuff that actually works and is actually useful to people, you need to take these perspectives into account. It's not easy, and I don't necessarily get it right, but still - you try.

So, how does Cognitive Archaeology fit into this? Well, archaeologist Ian Stanistreet of Liverpool University, hit the nail on the head when he noted that (and I'm paraphrasing): you have the objects, and you want to know what they're good for, but you don't have access to the users. And struck me as a very good analogy for design. It's a little bit different, of course: designers generally can get access to their users, but in my experience it's rarely as many as they'd like, and if you're working with people who have specific impairments, then testing time is extremely precious, and you don't want to spend it finding problems that you could have found another way. One of the goals of design tools is to find problems faster, and fix them. So, a lot of the work I want to do in relation to task demands and capabilities falls into exactly this category. I have a design: now I want to know if my intended users can make use of it before I go anywhere near evaluating it with them. Unless they happen to be an exact match for me, then I can't do this just by trying it out myself. The problem is, at some level, the same - Andrew's solution of affordance mapping, which he is applying to the Cognitive Archaeology work, could help to address that issue and it's something I've been chomping at the bit to apply to design. The Cognitive Archaeology work provides a great avenue for exploring that, and developing and getting my head around the methods involved: I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into it.

4 weeks commencing 25th April: Marking, Marking Everywhere...

...And not a drop to drink. Obviously, since you can't drink marking.

Yes, we are at the end not just of term, but the academic year, and that means vast amounts of marking. Level 2 projects and a raft of Level 3 and 4 dissertations across engineering and Product Design. Time consuming, but fascinating. Dissertations can be a mixed bag: some are badly written, or just not very interesting; others are really interesting pieces of work that get on for the sort of thing you'd hope for from a PhD Student. One of the mixed blessings is that you don't just mark within your specialism, and that means digging out your knowledge of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. It's a good way of keeping your hand in, and finding out what's going on.

And on top of that, four grant proposals with short deadlines are coming up - a tight turnaround, but I always take the view with these things that even if you can't do the best job with them, or don't manage to get the proposal together in the end, it's valuable if it just encourages you to keep your links in contact, and push your ideas forwards.

We've been finalising PSAT, which has now had one unit survive PAT testing, and be ready to roll out into schools, with four more units waiting for us to apply the finishing touches. Which I will once all the marking is out of the way! Still, it's good to have reached this point.

In PhD-related news, things have been moving on apace. Oscar Giles has passed his PhD on measuring interceptive timing in children, following a marathon four-and-a-half-hour viva (great work, Oscar!). Anne-Marie Moore has completed her corrections and is ready to graduate this summer. And we welcome a new PhD Student, Awais Hafeez into PACLab, who will be feeding into our work on arm-movement and rehabilitation.

Coming up, June promises to be an exciting time (over and above the aforementioned deadlines). We have the third Tracking People workshop, at which I will be giving a presentation and running a workshop using some of the speculative design methods I've been champing at the bit to try. We also have the grand finale of the Augmenting the Body Sadler Seminar series in which Margrit Shildrick will return to Leeds to further our discussions on cyborgs and where bodies begin and end.

On top of that, I have two undergraduate summer students looking at expanding the use of Pete Culmer's (among others!) MagOne force sensor into FATKAT and postural support seating. I can't wait: there's loads to get stuck into - but first, better finish up that marking, eh?

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Well, I guess fitting an extra blog post this month was too much, so I'll be missing my two-post goal this month. Which paradoxically, in posting this, I've just hit.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

3.5 weeks commencing 1st April...

Did, er, anyone see where April went? One minute I was writing a quick second post for the end of March, and the next thing I know, it's the 24th of April. I'll need to post twice this week if I want to hit my two-posts-a-month goal!

It has been a busy month, quite aside from a PhD viva, a workshop for the Tracking People network, a family trip to Paris and Easter, my time has mostly gone on a Horizon 2020 funding proposal. It's a lot of work: five academic institutions (with three academics at Leeds) and two companies, all needing to co-ordinate. We've been working on it in earnest for two months, but this month everything has had to be nailed down. No more speculation, or "well, we could do this" - it has to be firmed up.

And there are lots of dependencies. You aren't ploughing lone furrows here: milestones need to match, you need to be on the same page when it comes to how technology is going to fit together, and decisions create ripples across the project. It's a lot of work, but I've rather warmed to the process. If nothing else, it at least forces you to prove you can work together, and it's better to iron out these issues before you get committed to delivery.

Of course, proposal writing is never wasted: it pushes your thinking forwards, it creates new networks, it gives (at least in my case!) experience of a very different grant writing process. It's been hard work,  but productive, even if the project doesn't get funded. Apart from anything else, it's made me glad of two things: that I wasn't co-ordinator (hats off to Nasrine Olson and Jonas Andersson for that formidable duty!) and that we have a hugely supportive admin and finance team here at Leeds. I really hope it comes off: you get very invested in these things, and challenges that start out as "How on earth will we do this?" become "I can't wait to do this!"

All of which is pretty abstract: one doesn't like to give detail away, since we might want to reuse bits elsewhere if unsuccessful. Suffice to say it would build upon the WHISPER haptic navigation project we did last year.

It feels a bit abrupt to shift gears to other things again. Builds of PSAT are coming together, I've a workshop to plan for the Tracking People network in June, thirty portfolios to mark, dissertations to assess, a studentship to interview for, two papers to revise, and more reach to grasp modelling to do.

Oh, and another blog post to write this week.

No rest for the wicked, eh?

Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman: Part 1

I need another post to fill my quota for this month, and I thought that rather than produce another "still busy" week in review post, it would be good to gather my thoughts on my current reading: Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman. You may have noticed that some of the Augmenting the Body crew (most notably Stuart Murray and Michael Szollosy) have been discussing this with me and others on Twitter (on the hashtag #AtBPosthuman). We've completed Chapter 2 and are busy with Chapter 3 as I write this, but it's dense stuff and waaay outside my field, so this seems a good point to sit down and reflect on what I've learned from it.

Apart from anything else it did give rise to my favourite critique from @hilarysutcliffe:

"I'm sorry to say it's just the sort of soc sci twaddle that makes me livid."

There's a bit more to what she says than that, but it raises a good question: not just "What is the Posthuman?" but, "Does it matter?" and "Does it have anything to teach engineers?".

Caveat Lector

We start with the customary warning: I have no expertise in Posthumanism, so can only give you a lay response to reading it. Indeed, there are a lot of terms that I don't really understand. For example, there was a comment that "vitalist materialism" is "inadequately theorised". I don't claim to know what vitalist materialism (a philosophy to which Braidotti seems to subscribe) is, nor how one would tell when something is adequately theorised. I don't say that to be facetious: I genuinely don't have the critical skills or domain knowledge to critique this from anything but a lay perspective. I may be completely wrong: if so, please feel free to chip in and correct me. Anyway, the point is, if you want a detailed critique of Braidotti and Posthumanism, you've come to the wrong place: if you'd like to know what I (an engineer) thought of it, right or wrong, then read on.

Post-"Humanism", not "Posthuman"-ism
Perhaps the key learning point for me is that the "human" of Posthumanism (as used here) is different from the "human" of transhumanism. The latter refers to the species, with transhumanism representing the next step in human evolution. I had initially taken this to be the case for Posthumanism as well, and the two do get conflated (transhumanism as a step towards Posthumanism, for example). Hence my naive Tweet that Posthumanism is bound to be a bit grim because it implies that our shared species has gone.

In fact, so far as Braidotti is concerned, Posthumanism arises from the end of Humanism, and its ideal of what a human should be (as modelled by Vitrivuian Man, apparently - I've not studied humanism, so I don't know if that's true): able bodied, independent, healthy, white and male. Under this assumption, it seems that the goal is to enable everyone to be as much like this ideal as possible. 

Instead, Braidotti asserts, scientific, technical and philosophical developments have outpaced this concept - hence philosophy has taken a "Posthuman" turn (I think the term Post-Humanist would be clearer, myself, but nevermind).

Clearly, if you are a dedicated Humanist, then this is terribly bad news. Whither Human rights, for example, if we were mistaken about the human? Braidotti comes from a school of Anti-humanism, so for her the Posthuman turn actually represents an opportunity to rethink our relationship to the world and each other. She criticises what she sees as an Anthropocentric view of the world, which places us as fundamentally separate from (and, I presume, superior to) nature, and independent of each other.

Becoming Deleuzian
Braidotti makes a lot of use of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Becoming and Nomad thought: rethinking and experimenting with concepts. It makes me glad I read A Thousand Plateaus first. Her approach captures much of the experimentation and deterritorialisation discussed there. In this case, it is the Humanist notion of the Human that is being deterritorialised and the rhizome surrounding it explored.

Anyway, her first two chapters are concerned with Life Beyond Self and Life Beyond Species, dealing (as I interpret it) with the individualism and anthropocentrism implicit in Humanism and Vitruvian Man. The first of these focuses on autopoiesis: the capacity of systems to self-organise. Braidotti challenges the binary separation of human culture from nature, arguing instead in favour of a nature-culture continuum: that the natural and artificial are not easily separated, but interact. The second posits three "Becomings": Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Earth, and Becoming-Machine.

It is important to emphasise, again, that this relates not to a literal transformation of our biology, but to changes in the way what it means to be human is understood.

Braidotti argues that there is an increasing recognition of our interdependence not just with each other, but with other animals (upon whom we depend, and to whom we are increasingly considered to have obligations), the environment, and technology. We may not be literally becoming these things, but growing awareness of these dependencies undermines Vitruvian Man and his ideal of independence. Resource scarcities and climate change, for example, create a very direct way in which even minor choices made by one person can have massive cumulative impacts on distant people. We've already looked at issues of technology and the body with Margrit Shildrick last year. 

Anyway - the key thing that struck me here are the engineering concepts of tolerance and coupling, particularly in terms of Nam Suh's  Axiomatic Design [1]. One of the Theorems of Axiomatic Design (specifically, Theorem 2.A.8: Independence and Design Range) notes that two design parameters can be considered uncoupled provided they have sufficient allowable tolerance (range of acceptable values): in other words, if the effect of their interaction is very small compared to the range of values that are acceptable. That way, even though they're technically coupled, we can proceed as if they aren't, and that makes life a lot easier. 

For example, I rarely worry about gravitational pull between components in a design: it exists, it must do, but next to all the other forces around, gravity is very weak. I've noted before that in most day-to-day engineering we don't need to consider the gravity of planets or the moon: just the earth, since that's the only thing that applies a gravitational force on anything like the scale that would affect our results significantly enough to be a problem. But if you're sending a probe to Jupiter, these things matter. All physical objects are coupled by gravity, by heat transfer, by magnetism or their influence thereon - it's just that most of the time we can get away with pretending that they aren't.

The same sort of thing applies here, I think. If you're Bill Gates, or Elon Musk, you can afford to live in splendid isolation: if sea levels rise, you can just move somewhere else. Or build a floating house. If you don't like the government people have voted in, you can (mostly) up sticks and go to another country. If you lose your job, or become ill, it's a nuisance, but you have resources to offset that. 

If you're living hand-to-mouth, you don't get these choices. You can't decouple yourself from your neighbours' choices so easily. If the rest of the country decides to, say, join/leave the EU, it's not easy to just nip off to somewhere that is/isn't in the EU (delete as appropriate). If you don't like the liberal or conservative stripe of your government, tough: you can't just up sticks and move to somewhere that has the laws you like (I mean, this is the very basis of Seasteading - just pull up a boat with the people you want to be with and ignore the people you don't!). If you live in a mansion and own the land around you, you don't need to worry about party walls or parking spaces, or communal gardens. If you live in an apartment, you are much more dependent on your neighbours and how they behave and even how they look after their residence (as anyone who has enjoyed a leak from the flat above will attest!).

To Recap (For Now)

I suppose then, that I have two main takeaways from the first two chapters of the book: that "Posthumanism" relates to Humanism and its assumptions, not to the human species; and that one of the major assumptions being challenged is that if the independence of human beings from each other and the environment.

I suppose it recalls that idea of selective engineering. If engineers are taking that Humanist model, wherein independence is something to be aspired to and encouraged, then it certainly raises questions about the whole idea of selective enabling that I have raised before...

Anyway, we'll be tweeting more on Chapters 3 and 4, on #AtBPosthuman. Keep your twitter feed tuned in!

Reference

[1] Suh (1990), The Principles of Design, Oxford University Press, 1990

Three weeks commencing 1st March

In a bid to keep to my "2 posts a month" goal, I thought I'd provide a brief update! It's hard to believe that three weeks have gone by since my last post, but this is always a frenetic time of year. Open Days and teaching are intense enough in the run up to Easter, but add to that a PhD to examine, PhD corrections to read, a Horizon 2020 bid to write two work packages for, the ongoing (indeed, fimishing!) PSAT project, interviewing for summer studentships and some familial illness, and there's really not a lot of time to blog anything substantial!

Of course, if you've been following on Twitter you will see that discussion of Rosi Braidotti's The Posthuman has been underway. We've made it through the Introduction and Chapter One so far - then got too busy to discuss last week. But stay tuned to #AtBPosthuman as we resume discussions!

Coming up before the end of the month: another Future of Care workshop! An N8 robotics meeting in Sheffield! The second Augmenting the Body workshop! The grand finale of PSAT!

Here goes...

Month commencing 1st Feb

In a bid to offset my failure to blog twice in January, I am going to blog thrice in February in order to at least claim that I am meeting my goals on average. Also, the end of the month seems like a good time to draw a retrospective.

And it's been quite a month. A Visiting Lecturer, Open Days, a new project for my Level 2 students to get underway, reviewing a grant proposal, writing a conference paper (after the deadline was extended at the last minute and I thought I'd have time), decoding some experimental data (which meant learning MATLAB), a prospective Horizon 2020 bid, my Staff Review and two workshops. All over and above the usual teaching and PhD student supervision. Busy, busy times.

It's those two workshops that were the highlight of the month. The first of these was the start of the Augmenting the Body Wellcome Trust seed project. Not to be confused with the related Augmenting the Body  Sadler Seminar series which is closely related. This was the big kick-off as Stuart Murray, Sophie Jones, Amelua de Falco, Peter Culmer and I (from Leeds), Luna Dolezal (from Exeter) and Tony Prescott and Michael Szollosy (from Sheffield) spent a day talking about our work, our interests and where we see the project going. Really exciting, and thought provoking.

The second worlshop was Amelia's 2nd Future of Care workshop: a presentation from the Foundation for Responsible Robotics' co-founder Aimee van Wynsberghe on The Ethics of Ethical Robots. In other words, whether we should programme robots with ethical principles. A really thought-provoking talk (my brain has been working hard this month!). It introduced me to Value-centred Design, which was new to me, but might well be a useful tool for my students.

Anyway, coming up in March: the final month of PSAT development (at least in the current project), full steam ahead on a Horizon 2020 bid (I hope) and Michael Szollosy and I will be tackling Rosi Bardotti's The Posthuman on Twitter - stay tuned!