Sensing and participating in numbers: creative outcomes (for designers!) of the new numeracy project
Nina Wakeford, Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London
Monday 12 January, 4 PM
The Bison Building, 421 NE 10th, Portland 97232 With special thanks to MFA Applied Craft + Design
Dr. Wakeford will explore a research project, funded by Intel, which sought to look at numbers not in terms of the learning of math (and associated discourse of talent and phobias) but rather in terms of knowing, sensing and participating. She’ll offer examples of the types of fieldwork which were undertaken and explain how we tried to make these encounters into creative outcomes for technologists and designers. The talk will finish by suggesting an alternative set of terms with which we could discuss numbers‐ and perhaps other forms of data‐ which move us away from the language of metrics and measurement.
Nina Wakeford is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her publications include studies of feminist and queer internet communities, internet cafes and mobile devices as well as the use of powerpoint and theories of atmosphere. She has also produced installations and interventions in academic conferences using film and performance. Alongside Celia Lury she edited “Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social” (Routledge, 2012). She is interested in how to enact demands through material engagements, the way in which identification/disidentification is forged, modes of empathy and inhabitation, and the risks of staying loyal/respectful to the kinds of materials that initiate the work. She often supplements a vocabulary of the handmade object with time‐based media or live performative elements.