Technoculture(s)

Sunday Quotation "Digital fluency should mean..."

 

"Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting"

Mitchel Resnick

Mitchel Resnick develops in a recent article the rationale for designing the Scratch programming environment. As he stresses right from the beginning, this is a project aimed at developing digital fluency" at a deeper level than current approaches to teaching technology to kids. It tries to enrich the experience and abilities of children well beyond their typical behavior as "Digital natives".

The Scratch team goal was to create a programming environment that were:

- more tinkerable: i.e., extensible, adaptable, an environment where it is to try and try and try new ways of getting things done

- more meaningful, easy to relate to its users' goals, exploiting in the same environment programming, media and digital narratives so that users could express themselves and communicate through an environment that was first and foremost a programming environment. This is one of the keys of Scratch as it bridges the usually separated worlds of programming and media narratives (this is why game programming environments are also very powerful but usually lack the pedagogicla  and methodological orientation embodied by Scratch).

- more social than other programming environments: i.e., easy to share  your programs with other people and also to connect your projects with other projects. The worldwide Scratch community is really huge.

In their own words:

Since the public launch in May 2007, the Scratch Web site (http://scratch.mit.edu) has become a vibrant online community, with people sharing, discussing, and remixing one another's projects. Scratch has been called "the YouTube of interactive media." Each day, Scratchers from around the world upload more than 1,500 new projects to the site, with source code freely available for sharing and remixing. The site's collection of projects is wildly diverse, including video games, interactive newsletters, science simulations, virtual tours, birthday cards, animated dance contests, and interactive tutorials, all programmed in Scratch.

More interestingly:

It has become commonplace to refer to young people as "digital natives" due to their apparent fluency with digital technologies. Indeed, many young people are very comfortable sending text messages, playing online games, and browsing the Web. But does that really make them fluent with new technologies? Though they interact with digital media all the time, few are able to create their own games, animations, or simulations. It's as if they can "read" but not "write."

Which is something that Derrida and Stiegler almost said exactly word by word in discussing the current traits of digital culture and the "contributor culture" and how important it is for the majority of citizens to be able to "write" this new world.

Of course, here "writing" gets a stronger sense than blogging, creating wikis or else. It is in fact, "designing" and "building". That's the reason we chose Scratch at Citilab as the first environment into the digital world for kids. And that's why Jordi Deglado and his team  are currently very busy extending  it to connect it with a whole variety of robots, sensors and other devices. Because "building" involves also acting in the physical world. And connecting to a wider community of kids, parents and teachers.

Citilab, The Fun Palace of the (post) digital era?

I was browsing through the interesting issue of Wired UK on Digital Cities. Being busy at Citilab, a place where the city intersects with citizens, innovation, and digital technology I am specially interested in getting to know other views on how innovation and digital technology impact on citizens, cities and urban design. Moreover, as we are here preparing Urbanlabs 09, I couldn't resist reading some pieces, specially as one of the writers, Adam Greenfield, will be a guest speaker at Citilab.

It was, however, an interesting piece by Carlo Ratti, the director of MIT Senseable city Lab that I want to comment here. He discusses how the new possibilities of networked cities could impact on architecture and points to a possible return to rigidity in buildings. Read the article to know why. 

What grabbed my attention in Ratti's article was a reference to Fun Palace.

In 1963, the British architect Cedric Price created the idea of a Fun Palace. "Every town should have a space... where the latest discoverings of engineering and science can provide an environment for pleasure and discovery," he said. We need Fun Palaces for the post-digital era.

As you can see in this 1963 vision, in the idea of the Fun Palace there was a mix of Science or Technology Center with and Exhibiton Hall, somewhat close to an Exploratorium of Technology and Enginerring. It also put a  strong emphasis on interaction and transformability. The work of architect Cedric Price and ciberneticist Gordon Pask inspired by actress and activitst Joan Littlewood resulted in a building that never got built but inspired other centers that never attained the degree of interaction and fluidity that Fun Palace championed.

So it might be helpful for me to use this comparison in the future when I am asked "What is Citilab?" or "What is the Citilab model?". The fact that "every city should have one Fun Palace" reminded me of one of our goals when we created Citilab: citilabbing. That is Citilab doesn't start and finish with the current Citilab, we are currently cooperating with other cities in defining their own citilabs. As Dr. Jordi Colobrans of the University of Barcelona will explain in his upcoming conference, "citilab is a common noun not a proper noun". That is, there will be citilabs not just a Citilab. Every city should have one citilab. 

There is one point that Citilab also shared from the beginining with some of the ideas of Fun Palace: to be a place where the "latest discoveries" of digital technology "provided an environment for fun and discovery". In our case, this environment tries to foster the appropriation of technology by citizens and a strong bias towards selflearning.

We are currently exploring how to include another important aspect of this vision, namely, how to create and exhibition program to convey what is going on and learned by people at Citilab. Not the usual exhibition I guess, but stay tuned!.