Publication: Mutable Matter Practitioner Handbook Version 1.0
On a day where everybody is generously displaying their affections, sometimes in surprising ways, here comes another unexpected offering: the Mutable Matter Practitioner Handbook! The handbook is intended to introduce the project to people working in the field of public engagement with new technologies (especially nanotechnology). I have added ‘Version 1.0′ to the title to emphasise that it is a work in progress. Changes will be made on the basis of feedback.
The feedback will also inform publications on other experimental engagements that I have piloted and, of course, future experiments.
The electronic booklet can be downloaded as a PDF (4.5MB) here.
If you require different formats or resolutions, please get in touch with me by e-mail or letter.
Mutable Matter June Talks
This month I will be giving two presentations on and around the Mutable Matter project.
The first one, entitled ‘Articulating Matter – Reimagining Public Engagement with ‘Invisible Risk” will take place at the geography department at UCL on 7 June 2011 (Bedford Way, Room 113). The seminar will start at 2pm.
The second talk is at the ‘Visualisation’ conference at Southampton Solent. Below are the details for this event given to me by the university. I will talk about ‘Accessing the Invisible: the Politics of Inhuman Scales’.
Date: Tuesday 14 June 2011
Place: Solent Lecture Theatre, James Mathews Building, Southampton Solent University, High Street, Southampton
Time: 1.30 to 5.30 pm, followed by a Reception.
VISUALiSATION is FREE to students and staff of Solent University. For all others a fee of £5.00 is payable at the door. To reserve a place email Helen.marland@solent.ac.uk
Update: Start of fellowship
Just a quick update: As of last week, I have started an ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Geography at University College London. I will be working on a one-year project called ‘Creating Common Futures – Embedding experimental methods for public engagement with innovative technologies’. I will mainly be working on articles, presentations and a practitioner-orientated public engagement brochure on the Mutable Matter project. However, I also intend to put together an exhibition on experimental methods in Geography, as well as a workshop on ‘Material Methods’ (preliminary working title). More soon…
Mutable Matter @ OpenSpace
This coming Wednesday, I will give a talk about the ‘Mutable Matter’ project at the Open University’s OpenSpace Research Centre.
Date: Wednesday 14 July 2010
Time: 2-4 pm
Venue: Michael Young Building, Meeting Room 1, Walton Hall Campus, Milton Keynes
Behind the scenes of ‘Mutable Matter’
Image from Secret Garden Party Pilot
I have nearly finished my project report/thesis, and am now left with a pile of writing that ‘didn’t make it in’. Some of this, I feel, might be quite relevant for other research students, researchers and my project participants, so I am posting it here on the blog. One example is the learning process I underwent while designing, organising and facilitating ‘Mutable Matter’.
For those readers who don’t know what ‘Mutable Matter’ is – it is an interdisciplinary ESRC- and Open University sponsored project using ‘sensory methods’ to engage people with nanotechnology, focusing on the bridging between ‘public’ and ‘scientific’ spaces. As for myself, I am a research student in Geography at the Open University with a background in art & design and enough geekiness to scare older schoolkids with nuclear and quantum physics in my capacity as volunteer Science Ambassador.
Source: Tate Modern
Workshop Design
The idea for the workshops developed while researching different kinds of nanoscale phenomena (the computer game ‘Duckboy in Nanoland’, STM images, the NanoArt competition and Richard Jones’ book ‘Soft Machines’ offered some inspiring examples…). Around the same time, I saw the Hélio Oiticica exhibition at the Tate Modern which displayed some of his experiments with multi-sensory environments such as the ‘Box Bolides’. Thus, my first idea was to create similar boxes that would house different kinds of symbolic ‘experiments’ which engaged participants with different conditions at the nanoscale. Initial brainstorming resulted in ‘experiments’ involving treacle and magnets or a Perspex box of polystyrene balls that were moved about by an in-built fan. After drawing up some of the designs, I quickly discarded them, because I thought they were not only impractical, but they were also too close to ‘top down’ science engagement and did not allow many things to be done with them. The main idea was to give the participants more creative control, and to make the hands-on engagement conducive to dialogue.
The most ‘free’ materials I could think of were clay and plasticine. As clay is very messy, difficult to get hold of in small quantities and high-maintenance (you have to prevent it from drying out all the time), I got a packet of plasticine at a local shop for some hands-on brainstorming. Initially, I found that plasticine did not lend itself very well to the symbolic description of nanoscale phenomena. However, while playfully reconstructing some ‘Nano Art’ images in 3D, I wondered whether I could ask participants to do a similar thing: to do ‘nano art’ based on STM images and verbal descriptions. On the other hand, this is not what I wanted to do. To me, getting participants ‘in touch’ with nanoscale forces was an essential part of the project. After hours of home experimentation, I decided to combine my two ideas – the experiments with nanoscale phenomena and the ‘free play’. I ran a few pilot sessions with willing and able co-student ‘victims’, to also experiment with the dialogue side of the workshops.
An opportunity to learn from somebody else’s experiment arrived in the form of a talk by Justin Dillon from the Materials Library, an interdisciplinary project to explore ‘material-objects that foreground the materiality of stuff’. The talk ‘what can the matter be?’ evaluated a hands-on event – coincidentally at the Tate Modern -and discussed the different strategies the project used to engage visitors with ‘matter’. These included talking strategies (‘otherwise people just talk to their friends’) and examples of how the team tried to engage visitors with materials relating to the artworks. The latter were designed by two artists and one material scientist and included helium balloons with weights, ‘pick n mix’ sweets, silly putty and a box of shear thickening fluid whose properties could be explored with a set of in-built rubber gloves. An experimental i-pod tour was also designed to accompany the project.
The problems the team faced was that people did not always make the link between the activities and the artworks (‘some people like ‘free associations’, other people don’t’) and sometimes ignored the artworks in favour of the activities. From the feedback that the Materials Library received, people seemed to enjoy talking and doing things in a space where one normally only gazes.
After another, more public, pilot session at the Guerrilla Science camp at the Secret Garden Party Festival 2008 (with the added morale boost from Grace Jones’ music), I ended up with the final workshop structure which I have described here.
Image from SGP pilot workshop
Recruitment
The next hurdle was recruitment. After much debate about how to recruit participants for this project and who to recruit, I decided on inviting Open University EDIS (Environment, Development and International Studies) undergraduates. Open University (OU) undergraduates tend to come from a diversity of age ranges and backgrounds and, also, I would also be able to use the OU Regional Centres as venues for the workshop. Recruiting participants was much harder that I had thought. Because I wanted to ‘use’ OU students, I needed to have the project approved not just by the ethics committee (the body that monitors the ‘use’ of human participants), but also by the Student Research Project Panel (SRPP). The approval of the ethics committee was dependent on the result of the SRPP evaluation. Because the SRPP almost exclusively deals with questionnaire-based research and intends to protect OU students from being over-researched, suggesting to do a series of nanotechnology workshops involving plasticine-modelling caused an impressive odyssey of misunderstandings and resulted in the initial rejection of my project on the basis that it had ‘no educational value’. A few months later, after many redrafts, the requirement to include questionnaires and the involvement of a handful of senior academics, I was finally given the go-ahead (any research students or researchers in similar positions, please feel free to contact me about my experiences). Approval from the ethics-committee followed soon after which a few more recommendations & conditions, but those were sorted out comparatively quickly (including an A4 page defending analogue recording methods…).
The Open University in Camden
Having by now arrived at the summer holidays, I struggled to recruit the participants I had fought for. I tried recruiting through tutors, the blog and through project flyers at the Regional Centres (I considered all regions as long as I could get a large enough participant group together). I also tried advertising for participant in the OU student Magazine ‘Sesame’, but did not manage to obtain permission. I also wondered whether OU undergraduates were perhaps too busy to participate in another project for which they had to invest time. Just as I was thinking about altering my recruitment strategy or group, I received an e-mail from the OU Alumni Newsletter editor who had come across my blog announcement and wanted to know whether I would like to post my call for participants in the next monthly Alumni newsletter. This newsletter goes out to most OU students who have completed an OU course… a figure at least in the tens of thousands. As OU alumni would have a similar profile to that of current OU students and are often also current students, I agreed. As soon as the advert was sent around (September 2008), I received not thousands (thankfully!), but about twenty enquiries, as well as the odd late e-mail over the next few months through snow-balling, so that I started off with around 25 interested people. I managed to group most of these volunteers into OU regions (I am sorry that I did not manage to include everyone!), ending up with nineteen participants.
Workshops were booked for Nottingham, Cardiff, Leeds, Milton Keynes, Southampton and London (between September 2008 and February 2009). It was surprisingly easy booking the venues. The only difficulties were short notice cancellations by participants (Cardiff was completely cancelled) and the worry about the recommendation that I should not reimburse participants.
Table just before the first Mutable Matter workshop
Facilitation
From the pilot experiences, I had concluded that the project sessions worked best with small groups of people (about 3-4). The group size seemed to positively contribute to the dynamics of the conversation and seemed to lower the threshold for working with the ‘messy’ materials.
Because of the anxieties about my ‘playful’ methods that various observers had shared with me, I paid special attention to making the room look like a ‘serious research project’ by e.g. placing the consent forms and questionnaires – that I had previously loathed putting together – on each participant’s place. I became slightly paranoid about my appearance (did I look enough like a ‘serious researcher’? did I want to look like one?), my manner of speaking, my accent. Advice along the lines of ‘act normal’ did not really help.
Unsurprisingly, the way I experienced the facilitation process in the end corresponded in many ways to the reports I had found in facilitation handbooks (I thought it couldn’t hurt to check some of these out). One book in particular (John Heron’s The Complete Facilitator’s Handbook) distinguished between three modes of facilitation: hierarchical, co-operative and autonomous, which I thought delivered a good mental image. I knew that I needed to be somewhat ‘hierarchical’ to lead participants through the project and persuade participants to explore the topic with the materials. Also, I had to direct attention away from distractive factors such as my accent which tends to lead to not particularly relevant conversations about my country of origin. Autonomy was also important, in the sense that I wanted participants take charge of the conversation and the degree of engagement with the modelling. And, while hoping that my participants would mostly talk amongst themselves, I almost needed to be ‘cooperative’, too, almost like a participant (particularly, when participants cancelled and I ended up in a 1-2-1 situation).
In this particular mode, I noticed how some examples I used as explanations or conversation stimulants gave direction to the conversation. Inter-participant dynamics also needed to be considered. Did I want to intervene when a conversation went too off-topic or did I want to study how a particular conversation developed? How should I deal with refusals of using the materials?
Some of the materials used during the project
Another difficult part was consistency. While I had fixed project phases, I tended to adjust to my participants and make little changes to how I explained things.
I also felt that my ‘form’ impacted on the consistency, although this might be a misconception. On some days, I felt more nervous (shifting confidence about the project), tired or stressed (e.g. from delayed train journeys).
The hardest part was to explain enough about the project, but not give too much away. For instance, a few of the participants wanted to ‘help’ get the right kind of results, which was a very kind thought, but defeated the object. I was asked questions such as ‘what are you exactly trying to find out?’ Explaining this would have potentially made participants too self-conscious of their actions, especially when it came to the modelling.
In the end I had to admit that I could not do everything perfectly and that the project was a learning process. When I now listen back to some of the recordings, I frequently find points I could have done or organised better, but despite these ‘blunders’ I am happy that the workshops went as they went, because they highlighted so many different aspects of the kind of engagement I was trying to facilitate. Thank you again to all my participants and everybody who helped get this project off the ground!
Mutable Matter on Tour
Here are the first five dates for the Mutable Matter workshop. If you’d like to join, please e-mail me or leave a comment!
29 September 2008 – Open University Nottingham, 4-8pm
24 October 2008 – Open University Leeds, 2-5pm
25 October 2008 – Milton Keynes Shopping Centre (with MK Science Festival/Open University) all day
30 October 2008 – Open University Campus Walton Hall from 11 am
There are going to be a few more dates which are going to be announced next week!
Request Post: Images from the Universe ‘up and below’
Source: NASA
During the first workshop, there was a discussion whether you can compare the process of imaging the nanoscale (Nobelprize.org now has a cool STM simulator!) with imaging the far reaches of space. Isn’t it the case that some Hubble images are ‘coloured in data’ and not ‘actual representations’ of what goes on in space? They always seem so photoshopped! Just look at this:
Source: NASA
I had a look at some Hubble-related websites and found that the telescope actually carries several different types of ‘cameras’ and detection devices. Makes sense, I thought. The Hubblesite gives you a quick description how the Hubble captures different images from space. The NASA site also gives you a fairly good description. Sounds like they do take ‘normal’ photographs, just with bigger and better equipment. Or do they?
Source: NASA
I then came across the Hubble Heritage website. The description of how the images are put together sounds almost like a team effort that involves personal choices of, for instance, colour. First of all, they also have a black and white gallery. Do they colour these in like scientists colour in STM images? On this page and this page it almost sounds like it. Mind you, the black and white data is impressive enough!
In comparison, the IBM lab website explains how they arrive at those ghastly coloured atom imagery (‘colour mapping’ they call it).
This one is not too bad, but makes me crave jellybabies…
Source: IBM
Interesting for me is that the colour use seems to serve a dual purpose in both cases: to help researchers identify certain boundaries – and to make the research visually more appealing to the public. In the case of the Hubble telescope, several websites tell the story that because the telescope was paid with ‘taxpayer’s money’ and was subject to so much bad luck at the beginning, it initially suffered from a lack of public support. However, once the space telescope started sending those amazing colourful images back to Earth, the public was not only pacified, but wanted more! I guess that the IBM gallery serves a similar purpose to make people curious about the nanoscale.
According to the NASA website, there will be another Servicing Mission (number 4) to the Hubble telescope on the 8 October which is supposed to bring new equipment on board. Naturally, already curious what that does… ;)
Guerrilla Science Workshop
What a weekend! Spent four days travelling back and forth between Abbots Ripton (site of the Secret Garden Party Festival) and various parts of London in the boiling heat and on very little sleep! Today I had to take some time off chilling by the Thames doing hyperbolic coral crocheting!
So how did the first Mutable Matter workshop go?
The above picture shows the tent in which the Guerrilla Science workshops took place. The tent was surprisingly well visited – sometimes it was so full that people had to squeeze in between other people. I really appreciated the variety of speakers – astrophysicists, neuroscientists, biologists, IT engineers, a ‘ROUGH SCIENTIST’ and a geographer… erm ;D – and it was cute to watch that some festival visitors take notes like in a proper lecture theatre! A lot of the visitors were not science students, but people who had science as a ‘hobby’ or used to like it at school. There were even some college students who were not sure what to do after their A-levels and wanted to find out what it was like to study science.
At 12 noon I was the first one on, and because there was quite a large group of people at once, I modified the workshop accordingly. Quite a number of families participated, and while their kids were messing around with the gooiest of substances, the parents, also kneading their plasticine or other materials, asked lots of questions. Some of these questions went into quite a bit of scientific detail. Luckily, a friend of mine happened to be there who had a natural talent for answering them, so I did not have to answer everything (thanks, Cos!). A maverick ‘red goo’ (see above picture) and a ring made from asteroid metal also provided unexpected material for discussion.
Afterwards, in true festival spirit, the table got hijacked by kids who started to experiment on the behaviour of various materials when you mixed them up with others… and also asked me lots of questions because they thought I was a scientist!
The afternoon was then spent listening to other presentations. Unfortunately I had to miss the dissection of the brain-shaped cake and the accompanying tea and talk, because I needed some dinner to prevent fainting in front of Grace Jones! On returning from my food hunt (ah, the dangerous wild chick peas!), I was interviewed about the connection between science and geography – what a trip! Afterwards, I was faced with my biggest musical heroine – and the organisers cut the electricity off halfway through the set, because of noise laws or something! I was extremely upsetting – Grace Jones should really be above the law – including the laws of science! Here, some guerrilla science would have been needed until this is finally established: electricity for the Queen of Cool!
Mutable Matter On Tour
While I am still negotiating with different Open University Regional Centres, I already have two outside dates confirmed where Mutable Matter will be taking place!
Mutable Matter @ Guerrilla Science
Secret Garden Party Festival
(near Huntingdon)
24 – 27 July 2008
www.secretgardenparty.com
I’m going to be there for the Saturday mainly,
but might be there on other days, too, so keep an eye out!
Mutable Matter @ Milton Keynes Science Festival 2008
25 & 26 October 2008
I’ll post something closer to the time, but I think I’ll be
locacted in the MK Shopping Centre!
Hope to see you there!
MM
Playing with Scale – Mutable Matter pilot has finished
A big thank you to all the people who took part in the pilot and talked to me about matter – and produced a series of amazing plasticine sculptures!
It was suggested to me that I also offer Fimo as an alternative for people who might want to turn their models into more permanent features, which I will look into. Of course this was not the only outcome of the pilot, but more in good time! ;)
In a few weeks, Mutable Matter will start its journey across the British Isles, finishing in late October 2008 in Milton Keynes. If you would like the project to come to a science festival, community centre, ecology fair, art gallery, adult education fair, education busking event etc. near you or would just like to have a chat about the project, please leave a comment or contact me through the contact page.
