Attuning to Ma (between-ness) in designing

Attuning to Ma (between-ness) in designing Yoko Akama RMIT University Melbourne, Australia yoko.akama@rmit.edu.au definite/indefinite state. Anderson (2009) describes how atmosphere in lay terms and aesthetic discourse uses the word interchangeably with a mood, feeling or tone. Haptic and visceral senses like encountering a frosty reception by a group of people or hearing someone’s heartwarming story are ways in which we intuit atmosphere. We can sense a shift in energy from nervousness to enthusiasm. The affect has intensity. ‘Atmospheres are perpetually forming and deforming, appearing and disappearing as bodies enter into relation with one another’, but ‘they are impersonal in that they belong to collective situations and yet can be felt as intensely personal’ (ibid:79-80). Designing is alive in these felt moments but it evades capture in a transcript or a video recording, whilst altering its trajectory and experience. PD is not only concerned with ICT design, but also co-designing articulation, understanding and how to bring people into the design of the invisible mediating structures around them (Light & Akama 2014). If these are prone to become lost in translation, we must turn to ways in which we, at least, can build an awareness of it. Fragments that appear in the paper are ways of this noticing. ABSTRACT This paper takes the position of plurality and ‘betweenness’ in designing, to sharpen our perception for things that emerge in-between that cannot be grasped and thus, falls outside of consciousness. Attuning to this presence is important because designing is an exploration and articulation of concerns and understanding among people, and specifically in PD, involved in mediating sociomaterial relations. In order to articulate this ‘between-ness’, the paper borrows the notion of Ma in Japanese philosophy to attune into a way of sensing the relational, processual and atmospheric. This notion is shared with the design community as a way to situate that we are, more often than not, working and designing ‘between-ness’. Author Keywords Ma, between-ness, attuning, Japanese philosophy ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous. General Terms Human Factors, Design. Currently, PD is at the threshold of grappling with plurality and heterogeneity (Bannon & Ehn, 2013), where methods, artefacts, systems and bodies are crossing over borders. Design can no longer be neatly delineated with a start and finish among identifiable stakeholders in an organisation. As we gather together in Windhoek for PDC14, I am further reminded of this plurality – in culture, language and backgrounds. Having a deep respect for diversity helps us to accept, as the condition of our confluence, that we are all different. This is in fact the norm than the exception as we live and work among this diversity. INTRODUCTION The aim of this paper is to discuss the plurality of ‘between-ness’ as central to designing with others, and questions the way relational dynamics can often be described too reductively. Instead, this paper is motivated by the things that are left out because they evade categorization; what Beck (2002) named the things that ‘doesn’t fit’. It shares a similar concern to Stuedahl (2010:7) who examined silences in a Participatory Design (PD) project and its political role as ‘the invisible and silent character of design negotiation.’ These include hesitancies, deliberate or accidental interruptions, indecipherable babble and exchanges that only partly overlap. These moments are rarely documented, perhaps only noticed as a challenge to overcome or intervened in, even if their presence is as important and profound as the things that are said and acted outwardly. Beyond noticing silence or oblique acts of communication, the plurality of ‘betweenness’ also includes the presence and absence of atmosphere. Again, atmosphere does not fit neatly into a category, precisely because of its ambiguous ‘in-between’ status with regard to the subject/object, singular/general, Boundaries no longer take the form of nations, and differences in culture is not a static, binary opposites, as argued by Merrit and Stolterman (2012) between Western and non-Western, North and South, advanced and developing societies, and extending it further, among us as individuals. As explained by Hall (1980), our identities are not an essential or static entity. It includes where you came from and how your current being in place moulds your becoming with others as growing, changing and consolidating individual. I am a Japanese participatory design practitioner, and my motivation for writing this paper was initially aroused by noticing how silence was misunderstood or undervalued and not seen as a form of participation in the contexts that I have lived and worked in (Australia, UK and US). The emphasis often given to voice over silence is evoked as the first ‘fragment’ in the paper. My ideas are put forward to open a discussion with the broader design community where differences are the norm and delineated boundaries Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. PDC’14, 06-OCT-2014, Windhoek, Namibia. Copyright 2014 ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-2256-0…$10.00. 1 are dissolving. In a sense, we are always working in the ‘in-between space’. This ‘between-ness’ is a concept called Ma (間）, borrowing the eloquence of Japanese philosophy, and this forms the conceptual framework for this paper, offered to the design discourse to enrich its predominantly Western theory. Introducing a term so specific to one culture can have its limitations. However, as seen in a classic art school exercise where students, in their first week, are asked to draw the ‘negative’ spaces as a strategy to switch their perception of looking at objects, paying attention to Ma can perform in a similar way, helping us begin to attune to the things in-between. Ma seems to have entered into design via architecture, and then into the Western discourse, as seen in the 1978 exhibition in Paris and subsequently in New York, Ma: Space-Time in Japan (Takahashi & Kimura, 2000). It showcased works of various Japanese artists, including the architect Isozaki, who had been exploring Ma throughout his professional life. Isozaki explains that Ma is ‘deeply related to the sense of balance in daily life and it’s a key idea for decoding those aspect’ (in Davidson 1991:66). Ma is the attention given to those invisible things and ‘denies the position of a fixed subject and drives it into a state of flickering … One can say that its function is infinitely close to Derrida’s espacement = becoming space’ (ibid). Ma dismantles the mind-created constructs and the orders that are imposed on the chaos of experience, operating experientially at the interstices of being (Pilgrim 1986). This paper is largely conceptual in that it seeks to promote discussion and reflection, rather than evidence methodology from case studies. I will be drawing from my own designer-researcher experience of working with people in many geographical locations and contexts or by recalling other people’s personal experiences as ‘fragments’, using a style of writing that is in first person and reflexive. I have called these fragments because they are anecdotal and recalled that way, as they were never documented as part of a formalised research programme. In drawing upon such fragments, I illustrate different qualities of Ma, especially for the non-Japanese reader in the hope that, even though the concept may literally sound ‘alien’, it can productively perform to ‘make strange’ a familiar experience. I hope to illustrate that Ma as between-ness is useful in awakening our senses towards liminality and ‘inbetweens’ of design – that which falls out of our conscious attention, but can be just as profound in our being and becoming. Ma’s literal definition as ‘in-between space’ helps to build awareness of the multiple dimensions in which codesigning takes place, among designers and users, among systems and technology, among the material and the social, always pulling at the borders of time and space. Designing with people brings to bear many dimensions as part of contingency. For example, Light and Akama (2012) discuss case studies on facilitating a community-centred workshop related to disaster mitigation where contingency is rife and personal relations are highly influential. Designing in this space reveals the high degree of arbitrariness and emotions that shape the process and outcome. ‘A chance word may bring in or redirect an uncertain participant, changing the group, the interaction and the outcome in unpremedidated ways … These small moments impact on the design that emerges and help decide it’ (p69). They argue that such inter-subjective nuances are lost in the descriptions of designing over tangible and defined methodology, and that the process of facilitation is centrally immersed within, and emerge from, very complex relational dynamics. What they describe as ‘small moments’ lost in description is what I see as Ma – haptic, visceral, sensed and felt like atmosphere – emerging among the between-ness and impacting on designing. ‘MA’ AS BETWEEN-NESS Many scholars agree that Ma is an ambiguous concept to define. The most literal way Ma can be described is ‘inbetween space’ – ‘interval between two or more spatial or temporal things and events’ (Pilgrim, 1986:255). It can also carry meanings like gap, among, pause, opening, space between, time between and even pregnant nothingness. A room is Ma, referring to the space contained by structure. A rest in music or the pause when delivering a punch line is also called Ma. By extension, Ma’s relational meaning applies to who and how we are with others – affinity, intimacy, animosity or strangeness – in other words, how relationality is experienced or perceived. The colloquial and indigenous use of Ma in Japanese language is so varied and often it is thought to be too familiar to be engaged with critically. Yet, it is precisely this plurality of meaning, interpretations, expressions and everyday embodiment that gives its beauty and potency. The next section illustrates moments, written as fragments, gathered from various encounters and experiences. It shares ways to notice and attune into a relational sensitivity that is Ma. Fragment one: A facilitator is using a ‘socratic’ method to visualise a discussion, drawing lines on a whiteboard that moves between people’s names as they speak. The frequency of lines indicates those who are most vocal. This seemed to affect these speakers. Some looked quite sheepish and subsequently self-regulated themselves. Others are pressured to enter into the discussion, but didn’t or couldn’t. In an attempt to gain a moment to speak, their body-gesture signals subtly – a slight opening of the mouth, sitting up in their chairs or leaning forwards. Ma carries both objective and subjective meaning. Its objective use can describe the space between two objects, but also subjectively when describing the relational distance between people. And because of its relational and ambiguous quality, Ma has been richly explored in the Japanese arts for centuries. Imagine, for a moment, how a few, black, inky brushstrokes on a white background can evoke a forest in a misty landscape. The absence of marks is important as much as its presence. Ma is expressed by the very absence of colour, sound or movement – accentuating our awareness of totality (Suzuki 2004). Later, everyone reflected on what happened, and most recalled who had spoken, on what, and how often. The traces on the whiteboard marked out a handful of active speakers, and the rest who didn’t speak. Attention was then turned to these non-speakers. They each admitted that they 2 perception of Ma, their between-ness of the group by disconnecting their attention and awareness towards something else that had little to do with the concerns and movement of the collective. It was noticeable for my Japanese friend because they were breaking apart the momentum of the group workshop, subsequently reflected in the lag in the task that they needed to do together. wanted to, but explained that by the time there was an opening to jump in, a topic had moved away from the point they wanted to make. Another person took it quite defensively, folding his arms, saying that he didn’t want to or felt the need to. He said he was happy to just listen to the discussion. It is obvious that the man who didn’t say anything was participating in the discussion, through listening, but was made to feel embarrassed because he wasn’t vocalising outwardly. We also see others who were attempting to catch an opening into the discussion, trying to jump inbetween a pause to quickly fill it with a rushed utterance. The pace and flow in which a discussion happens can be tricky to navigate, and in this fragment, the facilitator is very attentive to those who are speaking – helping some self-regulate their dominance over the discussion – yet doesn’t do enough to create a comfortable opening for others to speak, or in fact, to notice the active listening and participation taking place non-verbally. Similar to the first fragment, those absorbed in their own worlds through their phones were silent and not saying anything either, but this is a different kind of participation to the one before because it shows Ma as ‘lost’ – a relational sensing of the between-ness that dissipated. The Japanese phrase of losing between-ness sounds odd in English, and it might make more sense to evoke a flow of inter-relations that went in another direction (towards their phone), albeit temporarily, away from the presence of people and situation they were in. The Ma here describes the intensity and attention that shifts from moment to moment, shaped by the relational dynamics inside and beyond the room. The unstable, ephemeral and transcendent nature is similar to how atmosphere forms and disappears. Like Anderson’s (2009) description of the atmosphere of an aesthetic object, its incompleteness and constitutive openness shimmers, at once belonging to the object or the content it displays (smart phone and social media postings), simultaneously re-worked in lived experience by those who ‘apprehends’ them through feelings or emotions, and which contributes to the atmosphere emanating and enveloping the entire group. Ma, like atmosphere, is singular and pleural, general and specific, and able to be qualified differently flowing in, out and through inter-connected layers. Communication is never precise and cannot be ‘passed physically from one to another like bricks; they cannot be shared as persons would share a pie by dividing it into physical pieces’ (Dewey in Carey 1989:22). Ma embraces the oblique and serendipitous reality of communication in its muti-varied forms. Decision-making is a delicate process that, as this fragment illustrates, cannot be based on the active and vocal participation alone. Attentiveness towards Ma as betweenness is one way that the Japanese have attuned to such silent dynamics. Hara (2011:34) explains the way some people in Japan communicate is often criticised as ambiguous by leaving so much unsaid, though he argues that ‘it may not always be appropriate to deliver information … if both sides exchange their thoughts through their eyes, it can be understood as a successful communication.’ This form of signalling is not unique in its use by people in Japan – cinematography in general use this to great effect when, in the absence of dialogue, the actors communicate their emotions and intentions through their expressions, bodily gestures or background music to the audience. This is one dimension of Ma – the betweenness – in attuning and reading meaning in the tone, pauses and glances that emanate relationally. Fragment three: “I was looking at the scenery out of a hospital window with my 99 year old grandmother who was in a wheelchair. In reality, we were viewing the direction to the west of Tokyo but I heard her say in raptures, ‘we can see Mt. Aso there, so beautiful…’. I knew that Mt. Aso cannot be seen through the window since it's a mountain in the south island of Japan. But for a moment, I became lost in space, it is there, but not there, personal but somehow can be shared, and though it can be seen as misunderstanding, it felt most beautiful and true to me.” Fragment two: There is Ma of time and place of in-between worlds that is so beautifully evoked in this fragment by Utako Shindo (2014), who is a Japanese visual artist. It describes the phenomenological encounter of two people as they sit in close proximity in a hospital room, yet their presence in relation to one another breaks apart when the grandmother is swept away, momentarily, by seeing a mountain that isn’t outside the window. Utako knows her grandmother is mistaken, but that doesn’t matter because her grandmother’s misunderstanding has transported Utako temporarily, connecting the two in an imagined in-between place where Mt. Aso’s beauty is evoked as more real and true than actually seeing it outside the window. During a group workshop, a few people are checking their smart phones, absorbed in their own, individual world of messages and social media postings. Upon seeing this, my Japanese friend turns to me and whispers, ‘they have lost Ma…’. The group takes a while to get going with the actual task at hand… This Japanese friend had found the actions of those checking their phones a reflection of their poor social etiquette. They weren’t talking loudly on the phone or disrupting other people’s conversations. These small, inconsequential distractions are commonly seen everyday, but my friend’s description of ‘losing Ma’ is interesting for the discussion here. In Japanese, someone who has ‘lost Ma’ of have ‘bad Ma’ means they are poor in considering others, timing, or attuning to the relational dynamic among those around them. In other words, they have lost their I chose this fragment to attune us to imagination and experience of place-making. ‘Such place making is not merely the apprehending subject’s awareness of an objective three-dimensional space continuum composed of 3 an arrangement of things’, explains Pilgrim (1986:266), just as Utako is cognizant that Mt. Aso cannot possibly be outside of a hospital window in Tokyo. Rather, Pilgrim continues: ‘it is the thing that takes place in the imagination of the human who experiences these elements … Such experiential “places” evoke, by their very nature, a sense of reality characterized by a dynamic, active, changing, poetic immediacy instead of being merely objective or subjective’. Glimpsed in the fragment above are two people encountering and making place where distinctions between mental and physical, interior and exterior landscapes, time and space – the very act of naming and distinguishing – collapses and becomes an ‘opening or emptying of oneself into the immediacy of the everchanging moment’ and be taken to a ‘boundary situation at the edge of thinking and the edge of all processes of locating things’ (p267). Ma as between-ness enables us to go towards there – to make a co-created place, beyond the boundaries of ‘you’ or ‘me’ and explore what could be possible – it goes towards the very core of participation. and all. When we design among the plurality of between-ness, we are implicated and embedded within a part of a whole of ever-changing moments. The relational sensitivity of Ma can further blur the boundaries of temporal, spatial, subject and object, beings and non-beings, opening out to situate us in inter-relatedness – designing, transforming and becoming amongst us all. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to Ann Light and Utako Shindo for their input, and the helpful advice from the reviewers of this paper. REFERENCES Anderson, B., Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2009. 2:77-81. Bannon, L. J., & Ehn, P. Design: design matters in Participatory Design. In J. Simonsen & T. Robertson (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, London and New York: Routledge, 2013: 37-63. Conclusion Beck, E. What Doesn't Fit: The" Residual Category" as Analytic Resource. In Social Thinking-Software Practice, 2002: 161-179. Derrida, in a discussion with Isozaki, grapples with Ma’s translation and explains ‘Where does this urge for translation come from? I do not want a translation to be possible. That would be the end of any event…’ (in Davidson 1991:90). Derrida speaks of a paradox in our desire to want mutual understanding on one hand, and on the other, the boredom of achieving a precise carbon copy of the other’s thoughts. He points to the impossibility or even the undesirability for translation, feeling at the edges of Ma by saying, ‘Ma as the place for translation is untranslatable’ because the between-ness is what keeps the communication open – open to interpretation, imagination, potential and ‘creatively understand each other’s intentions’ (Hara 2011:43). Ma as between-ness has this creative potential – what Isozaki called a ‘becoming space’ (in Davidson 1991:66). Carey, J, Communication as culture: essays on media and society, Routledge, London, 1998. Davidson, C. C., Ed., Anyone. Anyone Corporation. New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 1991. Hall, S., Cultural studies: two paradigms, Media Culture and Society, 1980, 2(1): 57-72. Hara, K. White, Lars Müller, 2011. Light, A. and Akama.Y. Structuring Future Social Relations: The Politics of Care in Participatory Practice. Proc PDC 2014:1-10. Light, A. and Akama.Y. The human touch: from method to participatory practice in facilitating design with communities. Proc PDC 2012:1-10. The potency of attuning to Ma is such that one can no longer feel part of a world of predefined boundaries that seek to distinguish self-other, object-subject, human-nonhuman, time-space. Ma, at its simplest asks; why do we separate when there is richness that occurs across, inbetween and beyond it? And what will it mean if betweenness, and not individual subjects, is the ground for being and ‘becoming with’? Merritt, S & Stolterman, E, Cultural Hybridity in Participatory Design, Proc PDC 2012: 73-76. Pilgrim, R. B. Intervals ("Ma") in Space and Time: Foundations for a Religio-Aesthetic Paradigm in Japan. History of Religions, 1986, 25(3): 255-277. Shindo, U. ‘A new milieu - Materializing a presence of the untranslatable’, PhD confirmation paper, The Centre for Ideas, Faculty of VCA & MCM, The University of Melbourne, 2014, www.utakoshindo.info/writings/phdresearch/Utako_Kanai_ConfirmationPaper_2014.pdf Most interestingly, the Japanese word for ‘human being’ is made by combining the character of a person (人) and between-ness ( 間 ） as ‘between person’, signifying the interrelatedness of the individual and the social (Watsuji 1996). It also implies that a person is not a human being without between-ness, in contrast to seeing self as autonomously individual. This etymology recognises that one’s being is constructed in the plurality of this world. 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