Monthly Archives: June 2013

Naked Eye

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crocEver wanted to see the eyes, teeth and texture of a crocodile close up – enough to make you jump out of your skin and run for your life? The Solar Whisper Company in Queensland, Australia can help out. It offers ‘Croc Cam’ binoculars that can magnify wildlife by focusing “the camera on animals allowing you to identify using the onboard screen.” No more fiddling with the focus rings – just look at a zoomed digital image of the crocodile on the screen rather than using old-fashioned binoculars or even the naked eye…

I’ve spent the last week with friends in remote Northern Queensland, enjoying the unknown, the unexpected and the uncertain. We’ve been to an Aborigine dance festival, explored the rain forest, camped under a star-studded sky with the Southern Cross shining bright, and snorkeled in the Great Barrier Reef. What struck me about all of these out-of-the-ordinary places, besides being utterly magical, was how they didn’t need to be enhanced through digital technology. Their beauty in the raw took our breath away. To be swallowed up by a dense forest of over-sized tropical plants; to hear piercing mysterious sounds at every turn; to be surrounded by schools of dancing day-glow fish; to be floating above an amazing bed of multi-textured coral; to drive into a full moon rising slowly above you on a straight empty road – all leave you in awe and remind you of just how small you are. They don’t need to be enlarged or brought into focus. If you want to find out a bit more there are ample pamphlets, signs and maps, provided at the sites and information centers. And they don’t need to be spoken about by a jolly recorded voice. Every national park or discovery centre (e.g. Daintree Centre), it seems, now offer various audio tours in multiple tourist languages to transport you back to another time and place.
AudioJapCoupleDSCF0756-300x246 All of which causes me considerable dissonance since much of the research in my field is driven by a motivation to come up with novel technologies that will enhance our experiences of the places we visit. The aim is to enable people to learn more about what they are seeing and to decide where next to go whilst interacting with digital resources in situ. However, besides the joy of snapping photos, I am coming to the conclusion that many of these other technologies are superfluous. They seem like overkill, masking the magic of what it means to hear and see nature in the wild.

I have had many discussions with Margot, a fellow interaction design professor who invited me on the trip, about the value of technology interventions in places ‘out there’ (as opposed to ‘in there’, e.g., offices, homes, libraries, shopping malls). When walking through the rain forest we both agreed that whilst it seems obvious and useful to have ‘a mobile app’ that could answer the kid’s and our own questions whenever they popped up, such as what is that, why are those fruit so blue, who eats them and so on – the real joy is to simply wonder. Maybe we don’t need instant information at our fingertips that gratifies our here and now curiosity. Maybe, it is better to try to conjure up a response to one’s own questions and let this lead to further questions, however, lateral. Letting our minds wander and letting questions remain hanging, rather than simply looking up information on an app is what inspires us to think more deeply and to imagine. Whilst it can be rewarding to discover the name of a tree one has just seen or, see the eyes of a croc appear bigger than in real life using a croc cam, there is something special about unaided contemplation.
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Maid in Hong Kong

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hongkonghighrise Hong Kong is now one of the most densely populated cities in the world. Every square inch of the island is made use of and valued like gold. High-rise blocks are squeezed in everywhere, dotting the landscape, that makes me of think of rows of x-rayed teeth – long, close together, uniquely stained but uniform.

It is easy to think you are still in the airport when surfacing via the Express train at Hong Kong station. A vast, multi-leveled shopping mall welcomes you – that looks just like the one you left at the airport. There are rows of expensive boutiques interspersed with ubiquitous phone and electronic goods shops. All enticing and packed with wealthy shoppers.

I had arranged to meet a couple of friends, who are currently living here, outside a Prét-a-Manger (that ready-to-eat sandwich shop with the same fillings everywhere). Rather than drink their frothy coffee from a brown polystyrene cup we chose to go upmarket to a Tea Boutique (sic), called TWG further down the mall (there is also one in the UK based in Harrods). They claim on their website that they “will carry you away on a journey of sensations, spiced with elegant samovars, brass weighing scales, Italian marble floors and hard wood tea counters.” We discovered from the menu that they also serve over 800 different types of tea from all over the world. How surreal is that? I thought there was only posh tea, builder’s tea and herbal tea. It made choosing just one from an endless list of exotic sounding teas nigh on impossible. I was tempted by ‘sexy tea’, ‘desert mirage tea’ and ‘dancing tea’ but in the end selected a Jasmine tea (being in China) that had a few other nice sounding adjectives added to it. Someone in the marketing department must have had a field day.
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After drinking our fine Grand Crus tea we walked out onto one of the many ‘walkways in-the-sky’ – that provide covered spokes to other neighboring high-rise buildings. It was mobbed with Philippine girls, huddled together in small groups, sitting on the concrete, demarcated by makeshift walls made from cardboard boxes. These are the maids of the wealthy and the middle classes. At first glance, it looked like they had set up market stalls but, on closer look, it turns out they have colonized the concrete paths, turning them into temporary living/dining rooms. In each one, you can see them chatting, laughing, sleeping, reading, texting, playing, eating, drinking and grooming – as if in their own homes. This is how they spend their one day off from serving the natives and the ex-pats, bringing with them their umbrellas, blankets, food, drinks, magazines, Scrabble sets, iPads and mobile phones. Because they live in terribly cramped apartment spaces – barely enough room for a bed let alone a kitchen – they decamp to the shopping Mecca’s many arteries to socialize and relax with their fellow maids, against a backdrop of Gucci shoppers and gourmet tea drinkers traversing from one tower block to another. What struck me, was how they had appropriated the cardboard boxes to make their living spaces; the flimsy barriers providing them with just enough height for a level of dignity, privacy and territoriality whilst low enough to be seen and to see. A creative way, indeed, of horizontally inhabiting a vertical city, whose earthly goods are mostly out of their reach.
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Doing Good

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volunteer-890x502 Last summer London was awash with the feel good factor, fuelled by a sea of volunteers going out of their way to help tourists while jollying visitors to and from the Olympic Park. You couldn’t help noticing them and then remarking on how cheerful they were. Moreover, how it rubbed off on the normally, sullen-faced, cynical city-dwellers. Strangers smiled at each other and then sparked up conversation. The clocks slowed down as the athletes got up to speed. Urbanites joined in the fun and London was transformed into a convivial city.

All sorts of people will go out of their way to work all hours of the day on crazy shifts without getting paid – whether it be the Olympics, manning museums and galleries, working in charity shops or helping out at festivals. But, why do they volunteer? For the young, it can add to their CVs, improving their chances of getting a job; for the retired, it provides a lifeline back into the community, making them feel they are doing something worthwhile, whilst for others, it provides a chance to be an ‘official’ at an event, like a music festival, and if lucky schmooze with the big names.

Last week, I had the pleasure of being looked after by a string of impeccably-dressed, good-mannered and well-educated volunteers at the Cheltenham Science Festival. From the moment I arrived, I was chauffeured from the station to the VIP room, given food and drinks, set up with a mike and tested in the tent I was to speak in – by very delightful volunteers from different walks of life. It made my visit very enjoyable. I was mightily impressed by how genuine they all were and how they did not mind working 10-12 hour days.

But there is a darker side to volunteering, sometimes people want to please or do too much. During the festival, one of the science editors from The Times, Hannah Devlin, was talking animatedly about how some doctors, who volunteer their services in disaster zones, do more harm than actual good. She mentioned the 2010 earthquake in Haiti as an example where it was claimed that some of the doctors were a little too eager using the surgeon’s knife, amputating legs and arms, that was later considered by experts, unnecessary. It seems they jump into the deep end, often working outside of their specialty. Whilst we praise the heroics of a doctor who volunteers their services mid-air on a flight to help deliver an emergency premature baby, chopping a leg off in a disaster area, without proper consultation with other experts, is seen as overstepping the mark.
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Might we consider other ways of helping? I have been having an ongoing discussion with one of my PhD students, Mara, for the last few months about how and why it might be good to encourage people to be more pro-social rather than to volunteer. By this, is meant promoting behavior that both parties benefit from, leading to more social acceptance and even friendship. So, instead of seeking out ways of helping others worse off or perceived to be in need, it frames the relationship between giving and receiving as one on a more even footing. Whilst someone in Haiti, whose leg is bleeding profusely, would prefer morphine over a cup of tea, there are many other situations where sparking up a conversation with a stranger might lead to something shared and special. Last Friday, Mara sent us a quote by Theodore Zeldin, that although a bit cheesy, makes a lot of sense:

“It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, and to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world. But it is careless to do so without remembering how previous efforts have failed, and how it has never been possible to predict for certain how a human being will behave.”