Tag Archives: Collateral Archive

OHD_BLG_0093 Oral History ➡️ Design

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My masters in Multidisciplinary Innovation (MDI) taught me how design and its practices can be used in any field in order to create innovative solutions to complex problems. I believe that during this PhD I will use these techniques to help create a solution to the problem of unused oral history archives. This particular flow of knowledge I am completely aware of, however now I would like to discuss the reverse. How can oral history, its practices and its archives influence the world of design?

Let’s start with the reason oral history as a field exists. Oral history interviews are there to capture the history that is not contained within historical documents or objects. These histories often come from those whose voices have been deemed ‘unimportant’ by those more powerful in our society. It could be said that the work oral historians do is an attempt to equalise our history. However, oral histories, unlike more static historical objects and documents, are created in complex networks of politics, cultures, societies, power dynamics and are heavily influenced by time: past, present and future. Some oral histories take on mythological or legendary forms and are not necessarily sources of truth, but they do capture fundamentally human experiences that cannot be distilled into an object.

But how can this help the design world I hear you ask? Well, currently the design world is going through a bit of an ethical crisis. Ventures that started out as positive ways to help the world have brought us housing crises (AirBnB), blocked highways (Uber), crumbling democracy (social media etc.), higher suicide rates (social media), and even genocide (look at Facebook’s influence in Myanmar.) It’s all a big oopsie and demands A LOT of reflection. Why did this go wrong? How did this go wrong? What happened? Have we seen this before? How can we stop this from happening again?

We did a lot of reflection during MDI, but we also didn’t do enough. One, at the time we never shared any of our own reflections with the group and two, we now cannot revisit any of these reflections or the outcomes of our real life projects because they weren’t archived. The only documents I can access is my own reflective essays and a handful of files related to the projects, most of which solely document the final outcomes. This results in me only being able to see my own point of view and no process. Post it notes in the bin, hard drives no longer shared and more silence than when we were working in the same room. So what do we do if one of our old clients came to us asking how we got to the final report? Or after having implemented one of our designs are now experiencing a problem which they feel we should solve? Did we foresee it ? What are we going to do about it? I don’t know ask the others. It’s not my problem.

Now imagine this but on a global scale in a trillion dollar industry with millions of people (a relatively small proportion of the world) and very little regulation. And I am not just talking about Silicone Valley for once, but every global institution in the world. My supervisor told me that the World Trade Organisation once came to him asking for his help in setting up an oral history archive. The reason they needed this oral history archive was because they had all these trade agreements but everyone that had worked on them had retired and taken their work with them. They had the final outcome but not the process. Zero documentation of how they got there. Post it notes in the bin. They eventually did complete the oral history project but then did not have the documents to back these oral histories up because post it notes GO IN THE BIN. Whoops.

So, how did we get here?

In order to answer this question you need to be able to look back and see a fuller picture than your own point of view. We do this by not doing what the World Trade Organisation and MDI 2018/19 did. We create a collateral archive made of our post-it notes, digital files, emails etc. and we talk. We then put the collateral archive and the recordings of us talking together in one place. The reason we cannot rely solely on the collateral archive is because, as I said previously the documents cannot encompass the human experience to the extend that oral histories can. Also, not everything is written down some things will be exclusively agreed on verbally so the oral interview should (hopefully) fill in some of the blanks.

Once all this documentation has come together it needs to be made accessible to EVERYONE (with probably some exceptions.) This has two outcomes, firstly, it answers the question how we got here. People can analyse and reflect on the process in complete transparency. When something goes wrong we can look back and work out why. And secondly, in the case of design we now have a fantastic bank of ideas, a back catalogue of loose ends and unpursued trails of thought. Setting such a bank is already being examined in the field of design. Kees Dorst collaborated with the Law department at his university (I think) because he wanted to see how the Law department was able to access previous cases to help the present cases.

“Design […] seems to have no systematic way of dealing with memory at all” – Dorst, Frame Creation and Design in the Expanded Field p.24

In conclusion, people are increasingly aware that they need to capture their process in a constructive and archivable manner. Which is something I highly encourage for ethical reasons but also because archives are cool and you can find cool stuff in them. I am going to integrate this trail of thought into my PhD by being active in the creation of my collateral archive and also suggesting oral history interviews to be taken from all those involved.

(There is another reason why I would like to take oral history interviews of those involved, which hopefully is made clear in the ethics section of the site)

I hope that by integrating oral history into the design process it will push design into a more ethical space.

OHD_BLG_0107 DIGITAL FORAYS: ARCHIVES & ACTIVATION // PLATFORMS AND PUBLICS

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With Kristine Khouri (Arab Image Foundation), Yazan Kopty (Imagining the Holy), Sana Yazigi (Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution) & Discussant Laila Shereen Sakr (UCSB). 08/10/20

This talk was recommend to me by Joe because he is on the mailing list for talks at NYU. He joined me for the zoom (obviously it had to be a zoom).

The talk was interesting and generally it was nice to attend a talk again even though it was in my living room. Many different topics were discussed but there was less discussion around digital archives and the consequences of digitising. This was a little disappointing although not surprising, because as you often get with talks the speakers will always bring the conversation to their research. And who can blame them, we all suffer from ‘the researcher’s lens’ where you view the world completely through what you are thinking about. However, during this talk it meant less talking about the digital and more talking about post colonialism and decolonising archives, which is still very interesting. And not surprising as the talk was organised by middle eastern studies at NYU.

Anyway what follows is some of the things I picked up on during the talk.

Archive as collateral

Something that was briefly brought up in the talk was the idea of a collateral archive. In other words, an archive that exist because at the end of a project you realised that you had enough stuff to make an archive. If you take this term in its broadest sense everyone has a collateral archive: diaries, planners, notes, shopping lists etc. All of these can make up an archive of your life. The same can be said for any project. If we take the Hand Of school summer project, NTSW then you could very easily create an archive from the kids sketchbooks to the notes of the planning meetings. Every thing can be archived. 

But there are some questions to be asked, one: should it archive in the first place, and two, if so how should it be archived? Now the first question is a big one and one I will probably revisit several times. The second question was triggered because in the talk one of the speakers had set up a completely new archive because they looked at all the stuff they had collected for their project and decided that they might as well make a archive, hence collateral archive. So should they have made a completely new archive? Or should they have added to an existing one? Or should have created it but then have it live in a network of other collateral archives?

Another big question is whether people should think about their collateral archive before they start a project or after? Should there be a software that allows for easy archiving as a project progresses? I guess it is often the case that you don’t know what you are going to collect until it has been collected. But then again the internet has led to an increase in document production, so maybe we need to start preparing more for an influx of stuff in order to avoid a desktop soup of documents.

The ‘home’ of History

As I previously said the talk was arranged by the school of middle eastern studies, hence the steering of the conversation towards decolonisation. Unsurprisingly the topic of where documents should be stored came up. This was mostly concerning Yazan Kopfy work on Palestine. He is working on gaining more information on photos of Palestine that are stored in the national geographic archive (one hell of a collateral archive by the way, as they were not initially stored there for archiving proposes but as leftover stuff from articles. Which they were thinking of throwing away somewhere in the 1980s as a clearing out exercise.) Many of these photos only state who took the photo and not who is in the picture or any wider cultural information. So he has started to flesh out this information. What was interesting was his comment that people outside of Palestine view it as the holy land when in Palestine it is first and foremost viewed as home. So where do you store photographs taken through the (literal) lens of a coloniser? And how does this work in the digital context? Because even if there is a digital copy there is also a physical copy somewhere.

EXTRA NOTE: this is also where Joe mentioned ‘Nice White Parents’ and how this might be another case where diversity and decolonising is in fact benefiting the white-western academic world more than the people of Palestine.

The Scale of the Digital

There were three main speakers Kristine Khouri, Yazan Kopfy and Sana Yazigi. All three had a very different approach to digital archiving.

On side of the scale I am going to put Khouri, whose project was ‘Past Disquiet’, which she described to be like a website in an exhibition space. She seemed to be slightly fearful of algorithms and digital space. On the other end of the scale Kopfy, who used instagram to collect information on his pictures. Interestingly he struggled to get information on images from the 1920s and 30s, but got lots on photos from the 1970s. I feel this really shows the age of instagram users. And in the middle of the scale I will place Yazigi, who created the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, a rather epic website, which is kept update. The only thing I worry about is the actual user friendliness of it.

To me this wide range of approaches to the digital is typical of our time. There are those who embrace it and those who are fearful of it. Either way there are questions to be asked around big data, data rot and the environment. Because all these digital things are stored on servers which use a lot of energy. Sadly this was not fully disgusted which I do wish they had done.

Hauntings

Nearer to the end of the talk Kristine Khouri started talking about hauntings in the archive. An idea that Joe could get behind if it was art but not necessarily if it was academic. But the idea of ghost and hauntings I do not think is too much of a far fetch idea since going through an archive can be like going through someone’s knicker drawer. I think this is especially true with oral histories because you are listening to the person’s voice. There is a responsibility attached to going through people’s archives. Maybe an increased awareness of people’s presence when researching will deliver a more ethical research or an awareness of their intentions or maybe even warnings about the future.