pneumatic waste collection meet-up

You may want to consider a trip to beautiful Barcelona this November if you are a pneumatic tube enthusiast, particularly one interested in the ins and outs of trash disposal.

The International Pneumatic Waste Collection Association Conference is to be held on 16th November, as an official side event of the Smart City World Expo Congress. More information on their website.

Image my own.

post-postal conference

I have been to interesting conference destinations before, but I think that the Post and Tele Museum in Copenhagen takes the cake. How often do you get to go down slides with your fellow delegates, in a room filled with giant postage stamps? Or see a pneumatic tube system in action!? (thanks Andreas)

I am speaking about the New Directions in the History of Infrastructure conference, that took place in the postal museum last month, hosted by Andreas Marklund and Mogens Rudiger. It was the kind of conference where your museum tour guide asks "who here collects stamps?" and a good proportion of the attendees raise their hands.

Over two and a half days, about 20 or so scholars interested in histories of infrastructure met to discuss their latest research. We heard about people smuggling, eavesdropping, sabotage, tinkering and past futures, in amongst talks on railways, the telegraph, metro systems, logistics, bicycle infrastructure and other large scale infrastructure projects. You can read the conference abstract here and see the program here.

It was one of those incredibly inspiring meetings where everyone was open to exchanging ideas during talks, lunches, dinners and coffees. I received good feedback from my talk and found out about even more wonderful uses of pneumatic tubes. As one of the only non-historians in the audience, I was warmly welcomed and loved learning more about the historical approach. I hope to keep in touch with many of the fascinating researchers I met during this workshop.

Images my own, from inside and on top of the Post and Tele Museum, Copenhagen.

cfp edited book on steampunk

Brian Croxall and Rachel Bowser are seeking abstracts for inclusion in a proposal for an edited volume on steampunk. From their advertisement:

The anthology will present a varied look at steampunk culture and criticism, presenting a comprehensive look at the genre’s impact and development in the fields of art and material cultural. Accordingly, we seek proposals that explore any of a range of iterations of the genre. These may include, for example, analysis of:

• Steampunk fiction
• Steampunk film
• Steampunk visual art
• Steampunk fashion
• Steampunk performance
• Steampunk fan culture
• Steampunk in relationship to preceding science fiction and -punk genres
• Steampunk and feminism
• Steampunk and postcolonial paradigms
• Steampunk and Victorian studies
• Steampunk and technology studies

We hope to present this collection as of interest to both steampunk enthusiasts and non-specialists in the genre, as well as both academic and generalist readers. With this in mind, please submit proposals that are steeped in steampunk culture and criticism, that could be of interest to a generalist audience and that have a strong sense of the stakes of steampunk analysis for broader cultural studies.

Submit 500 word proposals to Brian Croxall (b [dot] croxall [at] gmail [dot] com) and Rachel Bowser (rachel [dot] bowser [at] gmail [dot] com) by 1 October 2012.

Image from the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, UK, from FlikrDelusion's photostream.

objects, things and stuff

A conference for the lovers of material culture, or in other words, things and stuff.

The Lives of Objects
September 2013
The Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW)
Wolfson College, Oxford

"Everything from scientific instruments, technological artefacts, mementos, mundane and domestic items, and aesthetic creations such as sculpture and portraiture can provide clues to lives lived, and this conference will go beyond biography to investigate the lives of objects and the relation of those objects to human lives".

See the webpage for more details - http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing/events/conference - and for a wonderful English ethnography of material culture/stuff and what this tells us about people, see Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things.

Image from conference website.

conference in a box

Knowledge in a Box - How Mundane Things Shape Knowledge Production

Venue; Kavala, Greece

Municipal Tobacco Warehouse-Tobacco Worker Square (Dimotiki Kapnapothiki-Plateia Kapnergati)

Some highlights from a conference for lovers of boxes, tubes, packages and other everyday objects ....

Thursday 26 July 2012 

9:30-10:00 Cheng, Yi-Ping. Lancaster University 
The Flow and Storage of Things in Taiwanese’s Households: Things and Their Containers 

12:30-13:00 Goff, Alice. University of California, Berkeley 
Containing the Trees: The Schildbach Wood Library and the Eighteenth Century Box 

Friday, 27 July 2012 

13:00-13:30 Hammel, Tanja. University of Basel 
Botanical Knowledge in a Parcel 

13:30-14:00 Pettersson, Ylwa and Kandastar, Razia Asad. Museum Gustavianum, Uppsala 
The Travels of Folke Linder: As Traced by his Microscope Box 

Saturday, 28 July 2012 

11:00-11:30 Mechler, Ulrich. Medizin und Pharmaziehistorische Sammlung Uni Kiel 
Lymph Nodes in Folders – an Experimental System in Pathological Borderlands 

12:30-13:00 Rentetzi, Maria. National Technical University of Athens 
Calibrating Radiotherapy Equipment: Sending TLD’s in Postal Boxes 

Sunday, 29 July 2012 

11:30-12:00 Ma, Li. Nesna University College, Norway 
From Tokens in Envelopes to Clay Tablets: On The Early development of Writing, Counting and Mathematics 

For more information see:

http://knowledgeinabox.ntua.gr

Local contact: Maria Rentetzi, mrentetz@vt.edu

Image from askpang's Flikr page.

going underground

Travel underground to a conference that examines the subterranean nervous system of London: the tube.
Deadline in two days! 13th July 2012. See CfP below: 

Going Underground: Travel Beneath the Metropolis 1863-2013

A Conference to Mark the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground

10 January 2013 will mark the 150th Anniversary of the public opening of the Metropolitan Railway in London. It was the world’s first urban rapid transport system to run partly in subterranean sections. As the precursor of today’s London Underground, it was not only a pioneer of technological and engineering advances, but also instigated new spatial, political, cultural and social realms that are now considered to be synonymous with London and modern urban experiences across the globe.

The Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, is marking the anniversary by organising a two-day conference dedicated to the history and use of the London Underground.

Taking the construction and opening of the Metropolitan Railway as a departure point, this conference seeks to explore the past, present and future of the London Underground from a variety of perspectives that investigate its histories, geographies, cultures, politics and social characteristics.  

The conference organisers invite proposals for papers of 15-20 minutes in length. Please visit the conference website for further details:  http://www.history.ac.uk/events/london-underground.

sketches of the future

Do you find yourself drawing on napkins, keeping sketchbooks, pencilling in the margins of your fieldnotes or doodling while on the phone?

If so, this you will be interested in this sketching workshop:

We are seeking people who use sketching—for developing greater understanding, for conveying ideas as they are being formed, for communicating fully formed ideas, or for other reasons—to participate in a workshop to better understand the varied roles of sketching in design, research, and practice. Participants from all fields, with any skill level or experience in sketching, are welcome and encouraged. We are interested in how design methods are being adopted, adapted, and appropriated in various disciplines, using sketching as a concrete example and focal starting point. This workshop will therefore assemble a diverse group of participants to explore the methodological, epistemological, and practical issues, such as the tension between artifact production and knowledge production, that can arise in such work.

The workshop will involve presentations and discussions on the evolution and incorporation of design methods in a variety of disciplines, as well as hands-on sketching activities that will give participants the opportunity to try out a variety of sketching methods. This workshop seeks to document some of the myriad ways in which design methods, including but not limited to sketching, are being combined with approaches from other disciplines. Participants will also be encouraged to engage in a reflective dialogue examining the ramifications of these methodological crossovers and hybrids, both on the individuals involved and on their respective fields.

Potential attendees should submit a sketch and a statement. The sketch should come from their own work, though it need not be a sketch they have made, simply one they use. The sketch can take any form and is not limited to freehand drawings. The statement, up to 2 pages in DIS conference format, should describe the role that sketching plays in their work, using the submitted sketch as an example. Strong statements will reflect on the methodological issues in, and the implications of, using sketching in the author’s own field of work.

Submissions may be sent via email to the organizers (ericpsb and mkh46, both at cornell.edu). Submission Deadline: March 23, 2012Notification: April 6, 2012Workshop Date: June 11, 2012

For more information visit the workshop website.

Which reminds me, next on my reading list is Andrew Pickering's The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, because it has been recommended, because Pickering resides at my university, and because it has a great title!

Image drawn by, and used with kind permission of my dad, John Harris.

wiki who?

For a long time Wikipedia has been treated by academics with some scorn, lecturers crossing out students' Wikipedia references in essays with enthusiastic relish. It seems as if it is becoming increasingly difficult however for even these tireless teachers to deny the ubiquitous nature of Wikipedia in our lives. Nonetheless, academics, scientists and other 'experts' still contribute very little to this project ... and Wikimedia wants to find out why, in this anonymous survey (with more background here).

In my field, Science and Technology Studies, there has been much dismantling of the boundaries of expertise, and questioning of the kinds of categories that Wikimedia is using to distinguish between contributors. Even so, their survey raises the interesting subject of who contributes to Wikipedia, from where, why, and so forth. This is a topic which the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam is studying with vigor (for example see this project about Wikipedia as a place of controversy), and the topic of an upcoming paper I am looking forward to by René König at the Participatory Knowledge Production 2.0 workshop at Maastricht University.

So I wonder, who contributes to the Wikipedia entry about Pneumatic Tube systems? What are their motivations, their connections, their interests? What sources are they drawing from? Why are some images included and not others? Why is the popular culture section much longer than the historical section? Have you contributed to this page? If so why, and if not, why not?

Stereoscopic image by Prof.Dr. Nemo Klein.Gelegenheitsbenutzer at de.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

call for papers 2

These recent calls for papers tie in art, medicine and ethnography ...

AAH (The Association of Art Historians) Annual Conference 2011
31 March – 2 April, University of Warwick
Medical Media: The Aesthetic Language of Medical ‘Evidence’

Visual culture plays no small part in the field of medicine, historically and currently. In teaching and practice, the field has been and continues to be inundated with images: X-rays, before-and-after photographs, case records and illustrations, digital scans, recorded demonstrations, etc. At once document and representation, the image utilised for medical aims occupies a curious place, particularly when it is clear that the methods of its production have been mediated by the physician, the patient, and/or the artist-producer to emphasise its value as ‘evidence.’ The photograph is the most obvious, and yet far from sole, medium of medical imagery: three-dimensional models of varying media, posters, print media, and film have all played the role of ‘medical documentation.’ This session seeks to complicate the relationship between art and medicine as one in which images are passively illustrative of medical ideas or mechanisms, as visual simplifications of theories and practices. So too does it wish to investigate how medical ideas or devices affect perceptions and productions of art.The following questions are therefore posed: how has art – its grammar, forms, varying media – articulated or represented medical concepts, discoveries, inventions or models of perception?

How has medicine been understood through its visual culture? And how have medical explanations and new technologies informed aesthetic models and vocabularies? In other words, do Art and Medicine speak the same language? Diverse papers are welcomed from art and medical historians on any period and geographical location that explore new directions in the interconnected histories of these disciplines. Session Convenor:Tania Woloshyn, McGill University. woloshyn.tania@googlemail.com

Artful Encounters: on ethnography, art and conservation
Seminar November 18 & 19, 2010, Maastricht

Although highly critical of its colonialist connotations, many artists today employ methods that traditionally belong to the academic discipline of anthropology. They claim to use ethnography as an integral component of their artistic practice (Foster, 1999; Desai, 2002). Those studying the arts (academic disciplines such as art history, cultural studies, etc., as well as more “applied” disciplines such as conservation) may use these very same ethnographic methods to understand and deal with art worlds (Morphy & Perkins, 2006; Van Saaze, 2009). Understanding contemporary art today therefore increasingly asks for an approach that is sensitive to local and changeable meanings, to process and the ephemeral qualities of works-in-progress, and to the ways in which the public sphere can become an arena for artistic investigation. This combined seminar stages a series of encounters between ethnographic artists, ethnographers of art, and conservation ethnographers within this methodological hall of mirrors. Of special interest is the process of documentation within ethnographies. How do ethnographers hold what they find? Methodology-handbooks as well as reflections about fieldwork discuss exhaustively the art and pitfalls of note-taking, interpretation, categorization, narration, and writing. Yet, the variety of means of documentation is much greater and different styles of documentation allow for different effects.

Artful Encounters wants to examine the interesting overlaps between academic ethnography on the one hand and artistic practice in its broadest sense – both its process and its conservation – on the other hand. The seminar has three aims: (1) to improve ethnographic research by sharing research experiences; (2) to explore overlaps and differences in ethnographic methods between two different but fundamentally connected positions: the artist as ethnographer and the ethnographer as artist; and (3) to investigate what the ethnographic research tradition could contribute to the field of artistic research.Through open discussion, paper presentations, workshops and special assignments participants are invited to
contribute to the revitalization of an old tradition by setting a new agenda in artistic practice and arts research.

artists in residence

I've often thought it would be great to work with an artist on project about pneumatic tubes in hospitals. A couple of months ago I started talking to my brother-in-law about a sound project here in Melbourne (and would love to continue the conversation Andy!). Sociologists are increasingly working with artists at their fieldsites (see this blog about ethnography-art collaborations) to explore themes about medicine, science and technology amongst others.

There are arts-based projects in hospital contexts such as Hearing Voices, Seeing Things, the two-year program of residencies with staff and users at North East London Mental Health Trust led by artists Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger, and Transplant, a collaborative piece of work from Tim Wainwright and John Wynne. Both of these projects explore themes central to many sociological studies of health and illness. Katerina Cizek's filmaker-in-residence project at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto was also incredibly sociological.

Artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Christina Lammers, Bill Viola, Heather Spears and Christine Borland have had residencies in hospitals, akin to hospital ethnographies. Barbara Hepworth produced a wonderful series of fenestration drawings of her time in ENT theatres, whilst Bill Viola's installation Science of the Heart is from his time at Memorial Medical Centre in Long Beach, New York. Heather Spears spends her residencies in neonatal intensive care units whilst Christine Borland spent a week at the University of Alberta Hospital, producing a piece of work presented in the exhibition, Imagining Science, at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Borland worked with two patients having kidney biopsies, taking photographs at the start of the procedure, then accompanied the tissue through its journey through the many processes of the Pathology Laboratory. It is a work which I think has a lot of relevance to the role of pneumatic tube systems in hospitals for the artwork brought the patient into the laboratory and the experience of the laboratory to the patient:

“Throughout the week (of her residency) the artist tread a path between the lab and the wards, building an intense, personal relationship with the patients and staff at each end. For the patients the ‘end product’ was a 10 minute long, self-running PowerPoint presentation of the hundreds of images documenting their journey through the hospital and laboratory system. As the patients watched this for the first time, entirely absorbed while it was presented to them on the artist’s lap-top, they were filmed from a tiny camera embedded in the frame of the laptop screen which captured their reactions and expressions in the most non-mediated way possible”

Artists are also taking up residencies in genetic research institutes and natural history museums, and their work is being shown in hospitals and other medical sites.

Artistic representations explore research topics in more ambiguous and incomplete ways than academia often allows, this work evoking different stories on common subjects. There are many parallels between artist-in-residencies and ethnographic fieldwork which are interesting to think about. No doubt ethnographers can learn from artists and vice versa. Collaborative work between sociologists and artists raises a number of theoretical and methodological issues which are challenging and potentially rewarding to investigate. There is a lot of exciting work happening in this area, and pneumatic tubes is only one topic, amongst many, that could be explored.

The photo was taken by Thomas, as part of a photographic study of overseas doctors' practices in Australian hospitals, in collaboration with my ethnographic work at this site.

love pneumatic tubes

Whilst I haven't posted for a month on pneumaticpost, I have certainly been thinking about pneumatic tubes, reading about them, and posting of a different sort - postcards. From Japan.

Japan. Home of raw fish, tatami mats, pachinko and parasols. Home of love hotels, where rooms are bought at the touch of a button and bills settled via pneumatic tubes (all in the interest of discretion of course)!

I was in Japan for a holiday and to attend the Society for Social Studies of Science's annual meeting. The conference was held at the University of Tokyo, tucked away off tiny streets near Shibuya and the wonderful Japan Folk Crafts Museum. Sessions were held in classrooms with wooden desks and blackboards, whilst crickets chittered in the humid air. I gave a paper about adjustment (here are my slides) and heard some fantastic talks about anatomical museums, biobanks, telemonitoring, online patient feedback systems and genetics. It was a small and friendly conference, and the attendees bonded by hanging out around the pond, guessing noodle dishes or waiting for drinks from the vending machine, paper fans flapping. I hope I'll keep in contact with many of the great people I met there.

On the last night of the conference my husband flew in from Melbourne and we continued to explore Tokyo together. The technology around us was often mesmerising. We watched all our fellow subway passengers silently connect to their mobile phones, passed shops with displays of the latest gadgets, saw an exhibition where our biometric data was recorded and we interacted digitally with our fellow gallery goers. And yet, amidst this new technology, alongside the retinal scanning and artificial intelligence, we saw signs of older technologies too. We hopped on a little tram, from one part of Tokyo to another - the last tram in the city - and caught a train with brass fittings and bankers' lights in the dining cart. One night a vintage car hurtled past, with two young hipsters snug and smug inside. There was a certain nostalgia for the technological past, that nestled within a thirst for the new. It is something I often think about in relation to pneumatic tubes, and the nostalgic associations that many people have with them. Something to further consider, and more posts from my time in Japan to come ...

Photos of nostalgic transportation are my own.

building as both a noun and a verb

A call for papers from the Cultural-Theory-Space Group at the University of Plymouth, for the conference "Fixed? Architecture, Incompleteness and Change" raises some interesting questions that are relevant to thinking about pneumatic tube infrastructure in buildings such as hospitals:

"Are buildings fixed objects? At what point is a work of architecture complete? Architects tend to consider a building as finished, fixed, upon the completion of building works. The unpopulated images of shiny new buildings in the architectural press are presented as a record of the building as a ‘pure’ art-object at its temporal zenith; the occupation of the building and its subsequent adaptation, alteration, personalization and appropriation by people is often perceived in terms of decline. ‘Fixed?’ aims to question this view of architecture.

An alternative perspective is that all buildings are incomplete and subject to change over time as the users constantly alter and adapt their surroundings in response to changing cultural and technological conditions. Architecture is appropriated both intentionally and instinctively. In this way, often beyond the control of the architect, through their lifecycle all architectures become responsive to people and place. In theoretical terms, a work of architecture can therefore be interpreted not only as an ambiguous physical form but also as a shifting, responsive cultural construct.

Proposals for both theoretical discussion and case-study based papers are invited that engage with or challenge the theme of incompleteness and change across architecture, design and the built environment. Possible strands include: - changing, transient and adaptive everyday architectures and modern vernaculars - the afterlife, use, occupation, adaptation and appropriation of ‘fixed’ designed buildings, spaces and places - architects responses to the challenge of incompleteness and life-cycle design"

The deadline for submissions is November 30th 2010 and more information can be found here.

The conference raises interesting questions about technologies in buildings such as hospitals which are usually outdated by the time they are built. Hospitals are often considered 'fixed' buildings, adhering to the 'order' of biomedicine, yet I found in my PhD research that hospitals are much more open to the creative practices of its inhabitants. My recent tour of a pneumatic tube system in a Melbourne hospital certainly reiterated that this is also the case with pneumatic systems.

The idea of incomplete buildings is aligned with mat-building philosophy, a great example of which was Le Corbusier's (never built) Venice Hospital Project, represented in these collages in the MoMA collection. The conference will no doubt raise interesting points about how users adapt to architectural infrastructures, and how architecture adjusts to its users.

Sketch of one of the hospitals where I did fieldwork for my PhD, by my father, John Harris.

the inadequacies of job descriptions

At the beginning of his popular presentation for TED, Barry Schwartz outlines the job requirements of a hospital janitor. He points out that none of these requirements mention anything that involves other human beings, yet when janitors were interviewed by psychologists, much of their work involved human interactions and a degree of improvisation and 'practical wisdom'.

I was interested in the job requirements of hospital technicians who may be dealing with pneumatic tubes, and came across these job advertisements for a lab tech at Ochsner Health System and a diagnostic scheduling technician at St Luke’s Health System:

Lab Tech: Gross Room, Ochsner Health System

Duties: Accessions surgical cases, biopsies and autopsy specimens from various departments, and clients via Central Specimen Receiving (CSR), the train, pneumatic tube or courier. Verifies patient’s demographics, accessions patient information and test requested in Laboratory Computer. Accurately labels specimen containers tissue cassettes with assigned number. Assist Pathologist and residents in the gross dissection room. Maintains record of Gross Room workload and data entry. Records all specimen errors or discrepancies. Performs staining, autopsy specimen procurement under direct supervision by a Pathologist, Pathologist Assistant or Histopathology Supervisor. Demonstrates actions consistent with Ochsner Expectations as duties are performed on a daily basis.

Diagnostic Scheduling Technician, St. Luke's Health System

Duties: 7. Operates medical center equipment such as computers and software, phone systems, paging systems, intercoms, fax machines, copy machines, pneumatic tube system, and printers in order to perform the duties of the job. Accept change in a positive and professional manner while willingly learning unfamiliar tasks.

Whilst the job descriptions do mention work with other people (I have only included a section of the second job description), they do not explicitly describe the work that I am interested in: the adjustments, the ‘repair work’, the tinkering that technicians perform to get their work done. There are hints of this buried in words such as ‘record discrepancies’, ‘accept change’, ‘learn unfamiliar tasks’, however so much is left out. Although when does a job description ever really describe a job?

politics of design

Last week there was a two day conference in Manchester about the politics of design. I found the call for papers for this event interesting to think about in relation to the design of pneumatic tube systems in hospitals.

The workshop was organised by the Manchester Architecture Research Centre and was directed towards scholars from the fields of STS, architecture, geography, political economy, environmental psychology and planning, design studies, sociology, cultural studies and political sciences. The brief states that the conference aimed to explore a range of questions pertaining to theory and methodology such as:

"To what kind of politics can we get access when we strive to unravel design not through ideology but through the work of designers, their rich repertoire of actions, their controversies, concerns, puzzles, risk-taking, and imagination? And likewise, what kinds of politics are embedded in the objects of design, with their multiple meanings of materiality, pliability, and obduracy?

How does design’s potential to bring an ever-greater number of non-humans into politics contribute to the re-composition of the common world, the cosmos in which everyone lives? What are the politics of the relations invoked by design practices? Is design “political” because it brings together land and NGOs, gravity laws and fashions, preservationists and zoning regulations, architectural languages and concerned communities, dives and stakeholders, land registers and modernists, and if so, how?

What are the multiple design sites where political action might be seeping through? How is politics carried out today in sites often unrelated to the traditional loci of political action: in building development companies, planning commissions, building renovation sites, urban spaces, local communities, architectural offices, public presentations of designers? And what can we learn from the different, even unexpected forms of concernedness that we may come across in such contexts?

How and under which conditions does design become one of the means through which politics is being carried out? How does design turn the “public” into a problem – and thus engage and mobilise it – triggering disagreements and generating issues of public concern? How do designers and planners make their activities accountable to citizens?

If the “political” is considered a moment in the complex trajectory of design projects, processes and objects, what are the methods we use to account for them? How can we map, track, trace and document ethnographically and historically these moments of becoming political?"

I love the questions raised in conference calls for papers - so many possibilities and points of inspiration. There is a lot to consider here in regards to the politics of pneumatic networks.

Plans for pneumatic elevator via Daytona Elevators.

researched design

Goldsmith's Department of Sociology is holding a one-day conference on social science and design. It would be wonderful to go to London for the day and think about how ethnography could engage with hospital design and vice versa ...

Making and Opening: Entangling Design and Social
Science
24 September 2010, 9.00 - 5.30Ben Pimlott Lecture
Theatre Goldsmiths, University of London
How might design and social science speak to each other’s practices? How might social science and design remake one another’s objects?

Bringing together a group of leading practitioners and academics, this day conference will explore innovative ways of further entangling Design and Social Science disciplines through a range of open issues: Speculation/Anticipation; Participation/Impact; Discipline/Contamination; Making/Method. Speakers will include: Bill Gaver, Pelle Ehn, Mike Michael, Bill Moggridge, Harvey Molotch, Michelle Murphy, Lucy Suchman, Nina Wakeford.

Conference fee: £15 (full price); £10
(concessions).To register, please email sociology[@gold.ac.uk] Sponsored by: Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process, Interaction Research Studio, Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography.