Why digital physical design unity is not skeuomorphism

Unity in design praxis, blending the needs of digital and physical worlds is aspiration of many. It is at times a hot topic of discussion as well. Many design theorists look at skeuomorphism as the obvious choice and the approach to arrive at a unified design for digital and physical worlds. As we know skeuomorphism attempts to translate the physical features explicitly into digital realm. This is subject to criticism from various corners.


My critic is not from the angle of any pristine principles, rather from the perspective of a student of nature. And I don't make any loud claims that design is always the manifestation of truth and honesty. Design is as artificial as any form of art and exploration of truth as any kinds of science. Machine design will be largely driven by the forces of human machine interaction and reciprocal evolution. And I must say it is a misconception that the design is an explicit visual centered paradigm. Yes, it is true that visual features can quickly communicate design elements however there is a larger set of implicit design elements in every object, whether digital or physical. When you design a product or a service or an interactive experience for a commodity in a utilitarian relationship, explicit and consumer specific features are highlighted.

However this is not always true in the case of causal and natural relationships. When relationships evolve through a self organized network or a biological system, they abstract a lot of design aspects. Let us take the example of birds and their wings. Can we say that the evolution of wings in a bird is always driven by the use value alone. Of course not. Ecology also plays a role. Let us take the case of social signs and syntax in language. Can we have single design variable for describing the evolution of all the language symbols. Again it is not possible. Hence the analysis and investigation into the wide spectrum of natural and social relationships require multivariate analysis that goes beyond explicit forms.

Constructivism and the world of art: Beyond the noise

Investigations on the major milestones of Russian formalism took me to the foundations of constructivism. I found the following books informative on the historic role of constructivism in shaping a social aesthetics of art and literature in the modern times. However my pursuit to find the critical role of constructivism in shaping up a materialist consciousness in the emerging literary groups of Soviet Union needs further references.

In the book: Constructionism in Practice: Designing, Thinking, and Learning in A Digital World, I came across an interesting article by Mayakovsky here: How are Verses Made?. Quite thoughtful indeed. This book mentions that environment design and artifact design need to be worked upon separately.

The same book says about another conjecture that the markets are inherently reflexive when the author is speaking about the ‘open textured’ nature of designs. The rationale is that whenever the interpretations of human action can change the course of subsequent action and interpretation, it is said to be reflexive. While searching online, I could see that constructivism is almost used synonymous with the category ‘social constructionism’ and many authors perceive Marxism itself as a philosophy centered on social constructionism.

Going through one such book, Building Knowledge Cultures, we can see that there is a recent attempt to create mystery around the concept of constructivism. This book presents an argument that constructionism and constructivism are entirely different schools of thought. I will need to examine the authenticity of this laughable proposition.

On going further, the book Unfolding Social Constructionism speaks about a critical approach to cognitive psychology and its representational paradigms. It says that memories, perceptions, motives etc are not psychological entities, rather constructed in conversation.

The book, The Russian Experiment in Art, 1863-1922 says that constructivism achieved its most complete realization in the early films of Sergei Eisenstein. Another book, Realist Constructivism says that a constructivist will take a clearer position on the ontological role between individual and society than on the questions surrounding the power.

Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera : a Cinematic Analysis has finally landed me on the history of the movement in Russia at least. According to this book, constructivism was famously defined in the ‘Realist Manifesto’ issued by the brothers Naum Gabo and Antonin Pevsner. They wrote that ‘art is the realization of our spatial perception of the world’. The rhythms of the working men and the machines play an important role in the constructivist theater. Constructivist photo-montage is based on the principle of self reference and it precedes the emergence of the self referential cinema.

Like other constructivists, Alexander Rodchenko emphasized the self referential aspect of the photograph achieved through the dualistic relationship between the images content and the means by which the image is constructed. He suggested that the photographer should find the most expressive view point that would alert the viewer of the potential use of the medium. Implicit in this approach is the formalist’s method of ‘defamilarization’. This is an interesting development that constructivism becomes a tool to break the false consciousness.

When humans dream of Algebra, nature crafts our Geometry!

A Collection of thoughts on Mathematical Languages:

Natural Reflections on Algebra & Geometry

This post is inspired by an intriguing thought that disturbs me often when I try to relate the beauty of algebraic notions and their syntactical complexities with the physical dimensions and measures of geometric nature. Geometrical shapes of vivid complexity is all over us. Algebraic knowledge becomes richer and deeper day by day. 

At the outset, algebra appears to me as the attempts of human mind to find an order within the physical and its own humane cognitive nature. Hence at times algebra becomes associative and at times abstract. Geometry is mostly occupied with unique physical operators for measuring nature and natural objects. As human mind and its boundless imagination works in both the streams of knowledge, they always explore anew territories and often produce complex functions and abstractions. Humankind crafts nature in their own reflection. 

As we know, our innate tendency to imitate nature has been one of the fundamental driving force in all our scientific, artistic and engineering initiatives. This tendency gets transformed into further advanced forms of knowledge as we apply our reflections of nature into our labor process. This tendency can be seen in the mathematical languages as well. Our mathematical observations about geometry has helped our investigations to find patterns in the field of numbers and algebraic symbols. Is there a difference in the nature of measurement in Algebra and Geometry? Though the approach remains the same the challenges differ widely.

Some metric level contradictions in the nature of Algebra and Geometry

I was always perplexed about the physical differences between various elementary mathematical operators like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. When I add entities of different properties, the sum never accumulates in nature. It occupies a physical space less than or equal to the nature of individual entities. 

Taking an example, if we add one mango and an orange in a physical box they take space as equal to their physical dimensions. In the representational mathematical space also they occupy distinct locations. When we take two mangoes here they occupy same space in the physical box whereas they add on to the same quantity in the representational space. 

The question is whether the mathematical symbolic space is as accurate as the physical geometrical space. For convenience we may denote this representational space as algebraic. The algebraic space is often limited by the limits of our abstractions and the capacity to associate them whereas the geometric space is challenged by the scope of observation and the limits on the minutest quantum that we can reach. 

Numbers are the base constructs of the symbolic space. They become complex when the physical world in the scope becomes wider and deeper. We think of complex numbers and complex plane when we reach a limit to measuring the diagonal of a triangle made of single unit edges. Then the new symbol enters our mathematical vocabulary. This is just an example. Similarly when we think of trigonometric measurements, we find new sinusoidal and cosine patterns emerging in symbolic space. It is a new synthesis of physical and symbolic space.

Next question is can symbolic space travel ahead of the physical space. In other words, can we dream a physical entity before experiencing its real physical nature. I must say that at times yes. It is not magic or miracle. It is because of the intellectual capacities of human cognition and the power of knowledge to expand the horizons of our recognition. Each strides in the cognitive skills of human mind and our social experiences enrich our mathematical languages, whether they reflect our knowledge about symbolic space or physical space. 

De-Cognition: Social Media and the Information Architecture

Demystifying the Internet Pragmatism: A Cognitive Approach

Any media ecosystem evolves around the currents of communication. How different is Social Media from the mainstream media and the traditional formats of a communicative medium? The levels and depth of commoditization has liquidated the reach of communicative rationality in the media formats such as Television, Film, etc. Social Media has evolved around the concept of social networking and the inherent non-linear and decentralized nature of Internet. Social Networking as a concept has roots in Sociology and demands a wider narrative. To analyze Internet as a Public Sphere, we need to demystify various abstractions to reach the political economy of the worlds largest producer and consumer of information.

Can Social Media, with its base in Social Networking topology has always offered a potential for becoming the next generation cognitive network. It has even been visualized as the axis for a semantic web where information becomes a self organizing network. Is this technological pragmatism anywhere near real life possibilities? If not, why so? This is the vantage point of this critique. Why do we need this much of information in Social Media. What is the driving force behind the information architecture and the accumulation of information in the social media space. Big Data and the information overloading has becomes the prime movers for the Social Business. Social Business has been predicted as the game changer in the information technology landscape. Thus it is a big business now. 

The question is has the cost of business sacrificed the potentials for developing cognitive networks around Social Media. When it comes to the information architecture, we need to know the basics. Who is the producer of information. It is each of us. How is the Search Engine giants generating wealth of information and the uniform resource locators (URL). The URLs act as the nodes in the information graphs. It is each of us, consumers, who creates various paths around these nodes and make them alive. This is largely forgotten. Thus the real value of information is generated by the end users like us. Information machines are thriving on the cognitive networks created by our information production, consumption, circulation and re-production. Search Engines are only one side of the coin. The present generation content aggregators are also only dynamic nodes of information. 

Cognitive networks created by us becomes commodity in the split of each second. This commodity again circulates among the networks of us. In each turn and twist of this information nodes and network, it generates money, the real money ! Thus we are working for a global system of finance capital virtually not knowing the sweet sweat that we shed in front of the the dumb terminals of computers. It is indeed a great state of hibernation or a glorified state of social pathology. 

+Gokul Alex 

New Languages of Mind : Beyond Philosophy and Fiction

Philosophy and fiction, it began with an attempt to negate the existence of philosophy. 
Is it a dead cat? Will it come up again and again with nine lives ? How will we posit philosophy in the quest for knowledge. Is it always congruent with the inquisitiveness to find what is truth? For sure, this question can never be philosophical in life. It can be ideological but I will have to rational in that attempt. 

Coining an allegory of a dead cat with philosophy, one of my psycho-analytic encounter is described as below. 

A corridor of myself
A window where I hug and hung my shadows
I am there again
With cats dead and with nine lives

Cat in his selfish tone said ...
I am born again to die
She smiled and murmured
A dead cat is just born again

She saw those words in a dream. Voices that speak themselves. Words into voices, thoughts bleeding themselves. Words into shells and snails of mind. As if they are leaving their ocean and hunting her down.

A dead cat, neither black nor white; it is having a mesh of letters all around its body. Those words look engraved in its body. It smiled her through eyes and cried aloud through its lovely small cheeks.

Again and again, she is seeing dead cats in her dream. She saw them while standing in the long queues, sitting in lone gardens, walking up and down irritating stairs and so on. Dreams that she see awakened. She is not sure what is real and what is not. I would like to omit the expression surreal because it has some tint of real in it. Now she begins to ask how can she see a dead cat and a stream of words together in a dream. She ask herself  is dreaming an act or an act of denying truth or not at all an act in itself? She took a pen and started hunting down the dead cats and paper tigers.

In the nakedness of truth
A lie is born
In the weakness of my genes
My death cells are born
In the hatred of my body
My mind begins to bleed
In the cavities of my heart
My flowers begins to bloom
In the boundaries of my lies

She laughed aloud and smiled at those shadows. She tore those papers into pieces. She wed the thickness of her summer blanket and started her cat race. In the dilating moments of her eyelids, those cats vanished in dream planes. Into their own space times ...

Novel writing and the Historicity beyond

Novel Typology through Historical Lenses

Points: Abstract Synthesis in writing novel.

Dilthey’s method was having traces of Kantian philosophy.

It showed a kind of inclination towards irrational-ism.

Hegelian influence in theory of novel:

1.     Mode of totality in epic and dramatic art. 

2.     One important legacy of Hegel is the historicisation of aesthetic categories. 

3.     Towards a general dialectic of literary genres. 

4.     Question of life & relation to essence in epics 

5.     World of platonic forms and methodological archetypes. 

Frederic Jameson on Georg Lukács:

• As a cultural object, Marxism returns itself against general activity in general to devalue it and lay bare its class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment. 
• Hegelian Lukács of the Theory of the novel
• The chief conceptual opposition within which all of the examinations of literature have taken place is the famous Hegelian one of the concrete and abstract. 
• Epic, Tragedy and platonic philosophies. 
• Abstract idealism of Novel typology. How Don Quixote differs … Heroes of abstract idealism no longer find their justification in the moment of history, but increasingly to become arbitrary, mere grotesques. Here the external world is merely temporal. 
• Cases in Dickens, Balzac etc – we can see a sort of de-totalized totality. With Balzac novel of abstract idealism has exhausted as a form. 
• Novel of romantic disillusionment. Here the external world achieves temporal qualities. Flaubert’s ‘Education Sentimentale’. Here again novel achieves a sense of unity. 
• Goethe’s Wilhem Meister and in novels of Tolstoy – A third category of Synthesis type.
• Marx dissolved Hegelian series of ideal forms into empirical reality of History. 
• Trajectory from metaphysics to history in Lukacs.
• It is history rather than nature which constitutes the privileged object of human knowledge.
• Class consciousness is not so much an empirical and psychological phenomenon, or those collective manifestations explored by sociology.