Introduction:
Mike: [We are going to] discuss [Alfredo and Rolf’s] article on the emergence of
boundary objects. … I am finding this article enormously generative of ways to think
about some perennial issues that have recently been on my mind. …formulation of
transforming spaces into places (and recreating spaces in the process)… [and] "practices
of imagination"…that is just how Alfredo and Rolf characterize their two installations
and the professional teams that cooperate to create them. And they make a new linkage
by referring to distributed imagination, which is most certainly going to require
imagination to fill in the ineluctable gaps, and provide us with some insight into the
processes involved.
Alfredo Jornet: Rolf and I did our PhD as part of two different projects that had a science
museum and an art museum as settings for the design of technology-enhanced learning
environments. …we begun talking about notions of space as central in our respective
projects.
…[in] a design meeting…a discussion that concerned a wall in the museum space
unexpectedly appeared to trigger lots of good ideas in the design team. It stuck me that
something as banal and simple as a wall had been important in making it possible for the
participants to achieve shared perspectives on the task and go on.
…the aim was to consider boundary "objects" from the perspective of the participants'
"bodies," which stood out in our analyses as particularly relevant for the achievement of
co-operation despite lack of substantive agreement. …what seemed to allow the
participants to proceed was being able to orient towards and perform specific situations
that were lived-in (experienced, gone through). …notions of place-making and placeimagining to emphasize this per-formative aspect that has to do with inhabiting a place
and finding one's ways around it.
…we managed to put together some ideas, we may have taken many risks in bridging
across the different frameworks. I hope that those risks taken may now open space for
questions/comments to emerge in the discussion….
AJG: …In this paper we accomplish a little of this project of specifying the relation
between doing and undergoing in interdisciplinary design work, and how, by being able
to refer back to a history of shared performances (rather than to prior knowledge or
shared concepts), goes on despite lack of substantive agreement….
Rolf Steier: The two aspects that Mike brings up are also very much of interest to me,
and I think quite closely related. I think we treat 'distributed imagination' in this instance
as a form of place-making for a space that doesn't exist yet (the museum exhibition). At
the same time, the place where this design work is occurring is also undergoing a
transformation from space to place as the participants construct representations and begin
to collaborate. Alfredo and I were playing with an illustration of these trajectories as
merging, though we weren't able to bring it together - so maybe this discussion can allow
us to flesh out these thoughts.
Conclusion:
AJG: Thanks all for having brought this discussion to these heights. I am personally
learning a lot….
Thanks, Ritva, for emphasizing the links between the discussion and the article when
they may had seemed to be no longer there. I just want to wrap up in a think-aloud
fashion, and from my view, how the issues that have arisen in the discussion relate, but
also expand, on the ideas in our article; as a learning exercise.
In the last entry, Larry notes that we need to include an "imaginal" aspect, not just
actions, as part of the larger units of experience(s) that bring both forth. So the challenge
is to think, theorize, research both action and imagination as aspects of a common unit,
and one that is not only psychological, but also and at the same time societal.
Following that line of thinking, I want to bring attention back to "bodies" and "space",
which feature prominently in our paper, by means of a quotation from Nancy (Corpus,
2008):
"With thoughts about the body, the body always forces us to think farther, always too far:
too far to carry on as thought, but never far enough to become a body" (p. 37).
That is, doing, being a body, carries us "too far to carry on (only) as thought, but never
far enough to become (only, purely) body." Thus, there is not a real division between
body and thinking, but a delay, which is but feature of their unity. In this regard, Nancy
argues that bodies are about spacing (which is another way to say that being is about
making place). Again space crops up as (subject) matter here. Dewey (1929, nature and
experience) refers to that space between the doing and the undergoing in terms of "an
adventure," where "the old self is put off and the new self is only forming."
So, if my thinking here makes sense, the challenge is to link this characterization of being
as going through an adventure (an "advening" (from "advenire") of oneself to oneself, to
use Claude Romano's terms) with that of activity (or collaborative projects) as collective
and historical achievements that provide for the possibility of any experience to go on.
David writes: "In a very important sense the ideal image of the painting exists long before
any action at all is taken." So, although we may take the first-time-through perspective of
the one (body) who goes through an experience, there is something on place (is on
"place" the right word?) before she does/undergoes it. As Andy notes, playing is done in
and through actions, although play, or the game, is not reducible to any single action. So
play, as a societal feature or category, is larger; it is a method of organization. And, not
many e-mails ago, we did notice Dewey's and Bentley's reference of experience as
precisely that: a method of organization. But experience and activity are not the same
thing; how are they different?
So, it seems to me, the difference is not about substance. They both are about actions,
concrete and material. The difference (between experience and activity) might be then
about time. The notion of heterochrony that Lemke brought in his 2000 paper "scales of
time" seems most appealing to me here, although I do not know of much work that has
continued to develop research in terms of the diachronies and delays that may exist
between history and experiences thereof (or rather there is lots of literature I don't yet
know/understand properly). In any case, these loose ideas seem relevant for further
understanding how creativity and imagination develop as part of (design,
teaching/learning, etc) activities.
RS: Thank you to everyone for such an engaging conversation! This thread has
developed into a really rich resource and I'm looking forward to returning to it over the
coming year as there is quite a bit to unpack.
MC: It is great of you to lead us in a wrap up of your paper, Alfredo. The
discussion sits in my active arena of attention because it opened up and enriched so many
different concerns.
We had a thread not that long ago focused on imagination. It might not be a bad idea to
return to those threads and pick them up to see what can be woven from them now.
…those who, like myself, believe imagination to THE core process in human
experience/perezhivanie. But I think we could find the time to look back, at this long
thread, we would see that the word imagination (and experience!) are used in somewhat
different ways/have slightly different meanings (if we could settle on what we meant by
meaning!
How could all of that happen if imagination were not there picking up
dropped threads, making new ones, and then trying to "make something of it"?
…Thanks for the two of you for taking the time to create the discussion.
That must be our record long thread.