February 6, 2007
the jazz age
One of the guiding lights of the Institute over the past few years has been a belief in the increasing value of collaboration, following the open source model the underlies much of the web. This has been something that came up during our very first project, thinking about the Gates; it underlies the concept of the networked book, and our subsequent pushes in that direction. Here's an issue with collaboration, as it tends to happen over the Internet, that's bothered me for a while: collaboration seems, at its face, to be inimical to design. Open source design is almost never good design. It may well be average design – the market is extremely efficient at sanding rough edges off of things – but I have a hard time thinking of instances where collaboration produces what could be acclaimed as good design.
(A pause to explicate my terms: in setting up this binary, I'm using "design" in a loose sense. Certainly I'm talking about how something looks, and the interplay of form and function. But I'm also talking about "design" in the sense of a designed object, a planned object, the disegno that Vasari describes as underlying a painting. Another caveat: this is mostly off-the-cuff writing. If this were if:book, I'd have more sources lined up, as opposed to vague generalizations and half-remembered references. But: this isn't if:book.)
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What do we think of as good design? The canonical example is Apple; it's not original, but I'll take them because everyone's familiar with them. Apple's design is good because they set up the constraints on their products very carefully. An iPod doesn't have as many features as many other MP3 players on the market, but it does the things that it can do very well. The iPod in the hand is the result of a hierarchy of values. Though there are almost certainly a lot of people (probably even a number of companies) involved in designing something like an iPod, we can presume that it's done in an authoritarian manner, with someone in charge of the various stages of the design all the way up the ladder to Steve Jobs, the benevolent despot. It's a top-down methodology.
This authoritarian model of design didn't begin with the corporation. It's roughly analogous to the way in which most art is constructed. To take a supremely designed piece of fiction, Joyce presumably began Ulysses by declaring that there would be three main characters, and each would have a section of the book, and the book would be divided into 18 parts, one for each hour of the day. Readers coming to Ulysses must realize that there have been distinct stylistic choices made in the design of the novel, and that the novel they're making their way through has been carefully constructed by a single guiding intelligence, that of James Joyce.
This isn't simply a matter of design: this is, in a sense, how we come to accord value to something. We think of Ulysses as important in part because we can tell that Joyce went to a lot of work to make it. This is far from the only component in how we come to declare something important, but it is an important part. Maybe what I'm getting at is really the modernist project: Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, a total experience.
Historically, collaboration requires concentrated resources: you generally needed to have all your people in one place. Opera, springing out of the theatrical tradition, is a good example of this. The advent of film wedded the creation of art to capitalism, in which vast amounts of capital and people were required to create a single work, creating an enormous industry. Though Final Cut and YouTube might bring film back from the industry to the people, the model's not dead: look at the game industry.
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"Design by committee" now has its own Wikipedia entry. There are no shortage of contemporary examples of what happens when too many cooks spoil the soup; look at the Freedom Tower; look at Microsoft's video satirizing how they would design iPod packaging; look at the ongoing disaster that is A Million Penguins.
I think the problem with "design by committee" is at the heart of Jaron Lanier's critique of Wikipedia and new forms of collaboration in "Digital Maoism," though I'm not sure his treatment of it is particularly useful. Rather than tarring everything with the same brush, I'd take a more nuanced approach: some collaborative projects work (like Wikipedia or YouTube) and others fail (as A Million Penguins almost certainly will). Why? I think the Institute needs to be looking at this. I would suggest that one major determinant of success or failure of collaborative projects are the constraints built into them: how they are designed.
We've been presupposing books that arise more or less organically, probably with some central idea from which all branches out. I think we need to be paying more attention to what can constitute that central idea. If Wikipedia is a networked book, we could say it centers around an idea something like "everything in the world can be described in summary". Contributors by and large follow this rule, adding and changing information. Wikipedia is based around the idea of objective truth: that whatever's been written can be gauged against the world. This gets Wikipedia into trouble whenever it ventures near areas where there's not really a single objective truth, but it's a decent idea for many things.
Compare A Million Penguins: Penguin's project is built around the idea of making a novel. Penguin seems to have gone into this in good faith; they even went to the trouble of putting together some ethical guidelines. I think there's a conceptual problem here: a novel, which depends on an animating intelligence, isn't the sort of structure that lends itself to being collectively written. You'd probably have the same problem with a cathedral (hey ESR) or a symphony.
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I'm not arguing that collaboration can't create something as grand as a symphony. It certainly can. But the things that collaboration can create are qualitatively different, and should be understood as such. (Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects could be brought in here, though that's been explored before.) When we think of collaboration in music, we don't think of the classical tradition; we think about jazz. I think that's a useful reference point: collaborators on networked books could be like jazz musicians, not having a score, but knowing how to improvise within predefined structures like twelve-bar blues. Even free jazz isn't free, though: when you listen to those old Ornette Coleman records now, the first thing you notice is how carefully structured they seem.
(There's something interesting about jazz becoming culturally dominant at the height of modernism; perhaps this is a natural response. Around the same time, the Surrealists were denigrating the novel as a form because it was too planned, too rational. They declared a similar preference for the improvised: automatic writing or drawing for example. There's an enormous amount of Surrealist poetry; a near-complete count of Surrealist novels could be made on two hands.)
What we need to be thinking about is how jazz players learn to be jazz players. You can't stick a classically trained trumpeter in a jazz combo and expect he'll do a fine job: he won't. But that's essentially what we're trying to do.
And: we need to be looking at how jazz is designed: what sort of structures lend themselves to improvisation and collaboration?
Posted by dan visel at 9:28 PM | Comments (3)