- How do we make with what we consume/How do we not make when we don’t consume? Consumption as a mode of practice.
How do we make with food – we make it, there are cultural practices around ‘making do’. Some of us make baked beans, others make fine food. We make and consume, one doesn’t exist without the other. Like Voldemort and Harry?
Public transport treats us just as passive consumers, it’s service design has actually made it more difficult for us to travel legally and point at consumers for their model not working – they catch and punish us for not adhering to their rules. This is a mode of making. We consume because we are peers in the public transport, but they go against the culture of practice that was established with tram conductors.
- Why is it relevant today?
Your actions – everytime you buy something it’s a statement, even demand is a mode of making because it shows our interaction with our surroundings. We are no longer passive consumers. We cobble things together via simple tools.
We are not lazy consumers, we make conscious choices because we WANT to. Even just choosing to eat pasta is not naive. We are quite empowered by our use of the media, we understand advertising is trying to sell us something, we have subcultures.
- “A tactic is an art of the weak”
Informed, deliberate way of being and doing, we are smart and resourceful and bend the rules of strategic systems, we are in a position of inevitable weakness, yet we work with what we have. Tactics are provisional, in the moment, they dont try and change the rules, they happen in the margins of what the rules of allow. We make our own spaces within the margins. We are ‘weak’ because we are surrounded by systems that the define the things around us.
Shopping centre – mix between tactics and strategy, it was the first place where woman were allowed to go unchaperoned and has become a key place in women’s identity. Perhaps this is a tactical response to the rules that oppressed and confined woman.
We appropriate things from ads like popular culture and advertising because we get them and we understand we are being sold something? Is this true of advertising?
- How are we ‘making do’ in this course?
Our software is free, we can be tactical in the way we use it. We embed ‘ready in the hand’ technologies, we use what we have and make do filming on iPhones. The guidelines for the sketch videos are loose, we can make what we like, how we like.
- What is the best/most important question to ask a theory?
What can I do with it? The way we survive in networked environments is by ‘making do’.
On a final note, Michael managed to do the impossible and link all these ideas back to Weinberg’s ideas and got an actual lolly snake for his supreme intelligence -
‘Making do’ is a knowledge. To link this act to the Weinberger readings – its turning information into knowledge.
Korsakow Questions:
How can we make ‘Click Sounds’ – Add a sound to the library
How can we make our thumbnails start playing when we ‘mouse over’ them?
What resolution should we post our final videos in?
H264, put good quality in because Korsakow will compress it again. Small video files at a high quality. EG) 400 x 200 = 500 kbts per second.
How do we put our video online – Cyberduck.
How can we get help? Korsakow online manual, FAQ’s and each other.
What this list fails to say is that our ideas will evolve as we go and our interface will change as we tweak our skills and find more value in each affordance and how we can most tactically use it.
