<div dir="ltr"><div><div><br><span style="font-size:12.8px">Hello all - <br><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">I'm excited to join this conversation. Patrick kicked us off by bringing questions of "flow" into the conversation. Natasha in her post raised the question of similarities between assembly line labor and gambling temporalities. I also had temporalities of labor, but of a different sort in mind when the question of "flow" was raised. <br><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">I have two projects that look at labor in the technology industries, and questions of flow and screening come up in different but (I think) important ways in each. <br><br>One question I'm interested in is how design ethics actually loop into designers' own efforts to shape their labor conditions. I am writing an ethnography based on 14 months of fieldwork with designers in urban India who were creating entrepreneurial spaces for their own self-actualization and to do the work of nation building by design. Csikszentmihalyi's books would be on designers' and architects bookshelves. Designers would talk about not wanting to "break the flow" of a conversation or activity in the design studio. Part of managing "workflows" and the "flow of ideas" -- if I can't loosely associated senses of flow on a mailing list, then where can I? -- was also managing the temptations of Facebook and online news reading. These online websites we've been characterizing in this conversation as producing ludic loops were necessary to designers' work of networking and keeping up with technology and technology trends. At the same time, they also were a threat. Designers spending too much time reading the web didn't have enough time for their own work -- especially more intense "creative" projects seen as requiring long extents of time. Bloggers' like Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" and designer Swiss Miss' TeuxDeux lists are the sorts of resources designers used to reflect on how to construct time for their design work to flow alongside the promising and threatening ludic loops of the web. In the words of one designer and friend, "I quit facebook today.... I want to create more, consume less." <br><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">What this suggests to me is that we might look not only at architectures of compulsion, but also as Luke's work might suggest, practices of management that people develop in response to these architectures. Could this be one of the reasons we have a surge in mindfulness and yoga -- to deal with the mental and physical strictures of compulsory and sometimes compelling computer based interactions? <br><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">The production of flow in "creative" work also is something I'm curious about in relation to systems like Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). When I spoke with engineer-employers who use AMT, especially in the first few years of its existence, they talked about it as "magic" -- as something that improved the flow of computational work for experimental engineers searching for new sources of value. This engineer, quoted in my New Media Society paper "The Cultural Work of Microwork" explained: <br>"You can work in a different way, you can work much faster, you can try things. To me, the try things thing is a wonderful thing about crowdsourcing on Mechanical Turk. You don’t have to get your questions perfect…When I was wrong, it really didn’t matter. I spent a few bucks. The loss was minimal. It inspires the willingness to try a lot of things."<br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8px">Another designer -- an American working in Africa -- I met during fieldwork in India was excited to learn about Mechanical Turk because he saw it as an opportunity to expunge awkwardness from his design studio. He and his partners had an app that required human workers to label web cam images and those poorer, less cosmopolitan workers were doing data processing work on site at the design studio. The obvious hierarchy and the exclusion of those workers from the creative play at the studio made things awkward. AMT promised the possibility of outsourcing the data processing work to people out of sight and at a distance, restoring the conditions of creativity, play, and flow to the design studio. <br></span><br></div>Czikszentmihalyi treats flow as a state that creative people can strive for to increase their "complexity" and work along the grain of positive psychological attributes. So one question is how to spaces, infrastructures, and social relations get arranged, divided, and cut in order to enable flow and to whose profit? <br><br></div>Lilly<br><div><div>-- <br><div><div dir="ltr">Lilly Irani<br>University of California, San Diego<div>Department of Communication<br><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" color="#0000ee"><span style="font-size:14.4444px"><u><a href="https://quote.ucsd.edu/lirani/" target="_blank">https://quote.ucsd.edu/lirani/</a></u></span></font><br></div></div></div>
</div></div></div>