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[Lilly Irani]

Hello all -

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.

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.

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."

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?

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:
"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."
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.

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?

Lilly
-- 
Lilly Irani
University of California, San Diego
Department of Communication
*https://quote.ucsd.edu/lirani/ <https://quote.ucsd.edu/lirani/>*
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