Agency and Who's Got It

I want to briefly redefine and list the key concepts driving my design: Vibrancy seems to exist on many levels within a system, depending on your perspective. Zooming in or out within a "systems" view, a vibrant object becomes a cog in a greater machine, or seems to gain vibrancy. After reading about vibrancy from Bennet, Shaviro, Dourish, Ingold, Deleuze, Xi, Ingold (all from the vibrant group's reading list), one of the themes that stuck with me most was this process of finding the "zoom" or viewpoint at which to address the topic of vibrancy in a specific instant. When we talked about Facebook during one of our meetings, I at first was certain that Facebook represented the will or interest of Mark Zuckerberg, but later agreed that at some point Facebook has become an agent of its own. In trying to find the moment when this happened, I discovered the process of growing an organization as the possible key to this transition. As the organization grows, more people are included, more interests need to become represented. Perhaps the physical signing of legal contracts or the less official moments of agreements between parties involved represent this surrender to the greater system.


In trying to apply this to my phone application, I want to replicate this process in their interaction. While the individual phone is tied to the owner (dependent on the owner for its existence, and is only has access to information from the owner's behaviors and settings), the owner's phone's interaction with another phone can be quite unexpected. That interaction itself can achieve a level of vibrancy, which then influences the phone. Taking it a step further into the code of my program: I can write a more vibrant code if I allow most of the interaction to happen beyond my written code. Heather suggested incorporating the messages and conversations of the user into the phone's vocabulary, or training, and I had previously wanted to use the internet in the same way. This would give the phone a background stemmed in the user and the internet, as well as my code, that continues to develop over time. The code also needs to act as a set of building blocks for developing conversation and learned behavior. Although this will be the next next step, I think it is important to allow the basic code itself to learn from the code of other phones.


My interest in mobile phones and our relationships to them stems from this idea of vibrancy being so beautifully articulated by our behaviors toward them. I see it most clearly in the way that we have learned to hold the iphone. The forced rectangular flat grip, that seems so incongruent to the way we usually use our hands, has become so familiar and commonplace. Whenever I see somebody typing on their flat phones, hunched over the little things, completely involved in making themselves understood by it, I always see the phone as a more powerful agent in that phone-person system. The phone seems to recede in power once placed back into the pocket, but then reassert itself whenever it rings, updates, vibrates, or has battery issues.


On some level this sounds silly. Of course the phone is a tool, as misguided or not fully evolved as it may sometimes seem. On the other hand the person can also be viewed as a tool: a tool for a purpose, a tool for another person, or a tool for gene propagation. So is the phone the tool for the person, or for the task the person is the tool for? Certainly the phone does not exist or have behaviors completely on its own. It is specifically through the person's use of the phone that it gains a sense of agency or vibrancy. Through our reliance on it, we incorporate it into the system that is us. Together with the phone we become an enhanced version of ourselves, whether we are agents, systems, or parts of systems. Through our adapting to its limitations, we make this process of incorporation viscerally clear and perceivable. That is why our holding of the phone, learning the gestures to use on the touch screen, old people yelling awkwardly into phones, people shaking their phones, and other such instances of miscommunication between the person and the device are not just amusing, but are amazing moments of clarity, where this moment of negotiation, when an agent becomes part of a greater system, the moment when an organization envelopes agencies into itself through a sort of formal contract, can be seen. In this moment the agents experience an initial awkwardness during a negotiation of behaviors, that can eventually lead to the formation of a more complex, enhanced, efficient, system that includes both of them, or conversely to a dramatic break up, where the phone is exchanged for another, violently murdered, or resolutely disposed of in protest.