LRNG Playlist – Critical Photographer

Photography is a passion of mine. It offers a chance to look back on what I did paired with a certain anticipation of future possibilities. Photography can also be a space of salvage. I return to the photographs to browse in expectation to stumble upon an abandoned image that can be rescued to underscore a message, to convey a mood in ways that were unanticipated at the time of capturing. During my Master’s Thesis, designing a video workshop for and with youth, I experienced the use of photography to explore everyday challenges and a way to imagine future, perhaps more desirable, practices. Having thought back on this experiences from time to time through my work on Open Portfolios, which centers around understanding portfolios as a tool for capturing, curating, and assessing the rich learning of youth making, I wanted to try to bridge my current work with that of the past.

Playlist Overview

My LRNG playlist is called Critical Photographer. It is an introductory taste to exploring, imagining, and remixing impressions through photography. Through hands-on engagement right from the start, 6 XPs invite youth to question possible meanings of photographs, extending the camera as a creative tool, showing different experiences of the same situation, documenting everyday challenges, and editing images to visualize desirable alternative realities. Throughout the XPs youth capture and share their work online and build a portfolio that could potentially become the basis for bolstering a job or college application.

XP 1: 99 Snapshots – Youth get started by clicking 99 snapshots of anything they like. They are asked to upload all of their photographs online and to write captions or hashtags for every picture. The amount of images is intentionally high for three reasons. First, youth get used to the idea that any situation could become a photograph, a story. Second, youth build a repertoire of work as the basis for other XPs. Third, youth take a second pass at their work to get them to question photography as representation of one true reality.

XP 2: DIY Filters – The visual effects a camera can achieve is endless. Exploring the physical tool is one way to find out about this versatility. In this XP, youth question the fixed nature of the camera by creating DIY filters with everyday materials, such as cellophane foil, orange nets, and tape. The idea is for youth to see the camera as a playground for innovation, that can be added onto. The ideas explored here can expand the productions of later XPs by incorporating diverse visual effects.

XP 3: Petite Picture Plots – Photography can be a powerful tool for storytelling, underscoring emotional messages or highlighting key turning points. Expanding preceding XPs, youth select a limited amount of photographs from their repertoire and create three short stories by arranging and curating the same images in three different ways. Youth explore position and narrative order to produce nuanced alternative meanings.

XP 4: Rediscovering Home – Returning back to a space youth are connected to, youth view the place from two new and contrasting perspectives, for example from the perspective of a tourist and that of an artist. Youth consider what photographs by tourists and artists might look like and how they might contrast and select angles and subjects to represent. In the process, they create images that represent different possible experiences of the same space, and explore how to document them photographically.

XP 5: Empowering Photography – Building on the preceding XPs, the last XP before the Capstone is about identifying everyday challenges and envisioning more desirable alternatives. Youth explore a public space, document a challenge photographically, discuss the photographs with friends and/or family, and edit the photographs to represent a more desirable situation. The youth question the use of photographs as solely documentarian by crafting photographs that serve to imagine possible futures.

Capstone XP: Photography Portfolios – Having documented and captured their work throughout each XP, youth take another look at their repertoire of work. They curate their work for a specific audience, such as their friends, their family, or college admissions, and to highlight the work that is most meaningful to them and the work they think might resonate well with their audience.

Design Process Highlights

The written format of presenting design processes calls for linear representation, distorting some of the criss-crossing that often takes place in design. In the hope to preserve some unintentional tangents, I highlight three examples that shaped my playlist unexpectedly:

Once I settled on a theme, XP ideas started flowing. Of my 15 ideas, only 6 made the playlist. To decide which, I wrote short descriptions for all 15 XPs. The main idea crystallized into one hopeful learning outcome: visual questioning. I held onto this message as I made cuts. Along the way, I lost ideas, such as (1) Locating Legends, an XP for  youth to research photographers online, and (2) Capturing Characters, an XP for youth to capture creatures and faces that hide in everyday objects. Even with a very concise list of XPs, possibilities seemed endless. Each XP could be complexified into its own playlist. Consciously not overthinking helped keeping it simple.

As I cruised around the website, I design for speed. I discovered that I could underline text to highlight the essentials, facilitating quick reading. Applying this across XPs, this strategy became a way to explain away concerns about my Show and Proof. All of these written with consistency, producing coherence, minimizing reading time, and introducing familiarity. I liked the idea of inviting youth to build up their capstone along the way.

Knowing that other things would be on my plate, I wanted to get my playlist out of the door ASAP. When I published my playlist I realized that no further edits were possible. Feeling o.k. about my playlist, besides the many spelling mistakes, I wonder how intentional this design choice was. I understand that the badge needs to be connected to a stable playlist so that the badge can remain meaningful for the youth who earned it (e.g., earning a badge might mean that its holder can do the things the playlist asked for, but might not be able to do the things a revised playlist might ask for). – Designing around badges and with in mind seems tricky. While powerful, badges seem to lock in design processes and create overhead.

Theory-based Design

The Critical Photography playlist is production centered. Youth create photographs, camera attachments, imaginative collages, and a portfolio of the work they feel good about and would like others to see. The documentation of work is at once a way to keep track of and remember the amount of work and thinking done, a way to share rich learning experiences with others, and an invitation for youth to broker new opportunities and new connections. The optimistic gesture towards the future is by design. The playlist was designed based on Connected Learning that emphasises production-centered, openly networked, purposeful creativity with interest and peer driven learning (Ito et al., 2013). Emphasizing open and public sharing of work, the learning of Connected Learning is intended to foster personal development and a collective shift (Ito et al., 2013). This is particularly predominant in the XPs, where youth look sideways to see familiar spaces in new ways, notice things about the spaces they had not seen before, and identify alternative ways of doing.

Photographs can shift in meaning over time be it by looking back at a snapshot or re-mixing or narrating a large body of work. These engagements can surface the layered ways of photographs: An image can be blurry one day and on another funny or tragic. The XPs are sequenced to complexify possible uses of photographs. This way the photographs and the camera are encouraged to become objects to think with, inviting youth to document, explain, and imagine. The creative practice with the object can surface new ways of understanding the world and can help explore what it means to know and how knowing comes about (Papert & Harel, 1980). With an object to think with, anyone can engage in epistemological work (Turkle, 2007). This very much connects the playlist also to material feminist approaches to learning and design for learning. Material feminist theories consider that the sense-making instrument that detects a phenomena (Barad, YEAR), e.g., the microscope in biological research or the camera in the LRNG playlist, have a way of shaping the way in which the phenomenon comes about. This dynamic shaping means that there is always necessarily a multiplicity of realities and that the person behind the camera and the camera itself shape how these realities can be perceived, read, and made meaningful. While not explicitly referencing such complex theories, the Critical Photography playlist was aimed at inviting youth to think about underlying assumptions of what reality might mean to them and how the camera work can shape and shift the way reality is documented and put back to work.

Wind-up Toy Hack

Taking apart toy, exploring their inner workings, and remixing different kind of characters using scissors, tape, screwdrivers, and thread can disturbingly destructive while being at the same time satisfyingly creative. During this week's activity, we were asked to hack a toy in the context of the constructivist idea of evocative objects. Turkle (2007) describes evocative objects as those everyday materials that bring together practice and thinking. Through the doing with an objects new ways of thinking about the world can emerge in action. Through interactions with these materials, often surprisingly mundane objects, the materials can ground deep understanding about knowing and being in everyday practice and in this way teach us about ourselves (Turkle, 2007).

While I brought a few toys to class with me, I was most drawn to a plastic round character of a mummy. Turning a knob in the back of the mummy made it waddle forward. Maybe a character from a television program, this figure seems to have the power to inspire playful stories and adventures when brought together with other play-things. An evocative object? It seemed like it was made for adventurous storytellers, easy to get started and potentially leading to complex plots.

To get to its inner workings, I carefully observed how it might have been constructed. There was a crease that indicated that two pieces of molded plastic were put together - the mummy's front and back side. There were holes where the legs could stick out, having enough room to waddle. In the back of the mummy, a small button was positioned to wind-up the toy. The screws that held the body together were not common, and I had to find a special shape to unscrew the little guy. To my surprise, the two molds of the body did not fall open once the screws were out. The plastic firmly stayed in place. It seemed responsible, given the target age for the toy, however, less convenient for my purposes. The careful deconstruction was over, and I started pecking away plastic with a wire stripper. The plastic, bent away with little effort and as I slowly made my way along the crease that held the mummy together I lost connection to the mummy and started feeling more interest towards the gear based mechanical motor inside of the plastic mold. It was the material that blew movement into the character for me, the material that made it waddle. It was perhaps something I could use to create something else, something bigger, something fun.

In the design of powerful objects that are created in an attempt to call out these kind of entanglements between people and objects, Resnick and Silverman (2005) present ten design principles based on their experiences of designing construction kits for children. One that particularly resonated with me while engaged with the mummy, was Resnick and Silverman's (2005) design principle Choose Black Boxes Carefully that explains a way of selecting the materials and components that are part of a construction kit for children. Similar to the idea of evocative objects, Resnick and Silverman (2005) argue that materials invite children to explore ideas that can be far reaching and ways to understand the world. Ideas are entangled with materials and they can become graspable through the active engagement with materials. Hence, the choice of kind and form of materials inside of a construction kit can have implications on the kinds of ideas that unravel in play. The idea of black box references a certain transparency of the construction kit materials, asking the designer's to responsibly consider how easy it it to explore the bits and pieces or inner-workings of a toy or parts of a toy.

 

It was not easy to get to the mechanical machine, and the desingers of the toy likely did not consider this as part of the play-activity of the storytellers they might have designed for. Once the opening in the mold was large enough, I used the wire stripper to prop open the mold even further. I reached into the mummy with my hands, and, careful not to break it, I pulled out the wind-up motor. It was a white, rectangular box with a handle to wind up the gears on one side, and a flat circle that had translated the motion of the gears to the legs. On the thin sides of the box, there were holds that revealed the gears inside. Repeatedly I would up the gears to observe how they worked. It was quite fascinating to watch, and I discovered that the flat circle was not centered, which seemed to have caused the waddling effect. I placed different objects, including a 3d printed sphere, on top of the moving flat circle to see how this combination might behave. The exploration inspired me to think about different sets of adapters that could be part of a construction kit along with the wind up motor for children to create their own imaginative waddling characters and to explore the motion in relation to position and shape of materials – I hope that I will find time to continue exploring this idea!  

References 
Resnick, M., & Silverman, B. (2005, June). Some Reflections on Designing Construction Kits for Kids. In Proceedings of the 2005 Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 117-122). ACM.

Turkle, Sherry. "Introduction: The things that matter." Evocative objects: things we think with (2007): 3-10.

Reading Glassie's Folk Housing in Middle Virginia using Fröbel's Kindergarten Gift

This week, two classes I am taking this semester converged in interesting ways. In Constructionism our task was to explore one of Fröbel's gifts. My gift was number 6, a square shaped box containing wooden blocks that can be explored through various spatial and pattern arrangments. Gift 6 is an extension of Gift 4 and 5, which all represent simple play things that are intended to foster a child's creativity. The solid parts teach relativity, metamorphosis, and unity: as the child assembles different shapes out of the parts, she notices that various formations can be created our of the same building blocks (Brosterman, 1997).

For my Material Culture course we are reading one book each week. This week, we read Henry Glassie's work on Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, in which he is presenting a structural analysis of architectural structures. In short, Glassie is drawing on semiotics and a language metaphor for the study of materials by suggesting that there is a certain grammar that underlies the architectural competence of the builders. In his analysis Glassie presented specific rule for building deduced from close observations. The rules are detailed and it is at times challenging to imagine the way they represent themselves in buildings and how some rules seem to be presented as dependent one others or necessarily have other rules follow them.

To better understand Glassie's structural analysis, I used Fröbel's Gift 6 as a way to layout the rules on my kitchen table. By making the rules visible and tangible, I was able to better connect to Glassie's analysis. Here is a picture essay that lays out the main rules using the building blocks in Fröbel's gift 6:

I laid out an approximation of the scale of the basic shapes.

I used base shape "X" to start my structure. To extend my base shape built up in 3 dimensions by treading the shape equally, meaning that I did not change the base shape as I built upwards. 

 I explored rules of massing and piercing, by adding windows to my 1 story tall structure

Here a backward expansion is shown, to illustrate the way the structure would be pierces to create an opening between the first and second base shape. 

I added roofing onto the shape in order to further extend upwards.

This is the final presentation of the rules combined. 

Lastly, I tried to construct a Type 1 house with the building blocks of Fröbel's Gift 6. It was actually quite complicated to construct the house with the materials available, and I had to employ mathematical reasoning related to geometry and fractions to make this simple structure.

This exploration helped me appreciate the value of the gifts in a practical way beyond early childhood education. The shapes themselves made it possible for me to approach complex analysis of a field that I am new to in more concrete ways. I think that it would be wonderful to include more concrete, yet simple tools like the Fröbel's gifts throughout educations rather than only during Kindergarten and doctoral studies. 

From a construction site to makerspaces

Me playing with a bucket – Malchen, Germany 

From as long as I can remember, the construction site for the renovation of my parent's turn of the century German timer framed house was my playground. There, the piled up wooden planks formed serendipitous caves that became imaginative make-shift shelters. Plastic buckets filled with water, sand, or scrap materials became rhythmical instruments. The stumbled upon crooked nails and hand tools became ways for building remote controls for communicating with outer space.

The construction site, what later became the yard of the house, was a ground for endless journeys of imagination and seems to have been the headquarters for planning adventures among the neighboring children and me. From here, we set off to the nearby forrest to concur the fleets of foreign waters that were represented by the trees a hurricane caused to fall and shuffle one on top of the other. While perhaps the stuff of nightmares for a caring parent, one of the greatest adventures of my earlier years was setting off with a group of friends to the other side of the village to slide down the sand dunes of a large scale construction site. 

Besides imaginative, adventurous explorations and serving as a space for connecting with others, the site allowed me to find my play space within the larger context of an adult construction site. I learned how to differentiate adult tools, such as buzz saws and cement machines, from more child-friendly materials, such as buckets, water, and sawdust. I was tasked with important decisions, such as seemingly selecting the color of the plaster of the house.

It is challenging to pin point in a few sentences what made the construction site special to me, how it conditioned my learning trajectory, personal development, the way I am or going to be. What I know is that the experience of growing up in this unique environment was particular. The opportunity to try myself out, to connect to others, to use as a jumping off point for developing ideas, to truly listen to the oddities of materials are things I am truly grateful for. The creative play I was able to experience perhaps inspired my love to exploring new things, taking off for new challenges, setting my own goals, and perhaps even conditioned my interest in making to learn. I believe the site gave me the chance to learn to be comfortable with the uncomfortable, being at home in makeshift environments, and to see the potential of the unfinished.