Mediated business: Living the organisational surroundings – Introduction

This special section builds upon Deirdre Boden’s work on the constitutive nature of talk for organizations and the Culture & Organization 2004 special issue that developed her concern. Specifically, we aim to further engage with how business is managed, formed and locally accomplished by means of the organizational surroundings that the participants make themselves part of and the multimodal resources that they have at their disposal, in other words: how people live the organizational surroundings. Our hope is to shed light on future directions in the multimodal analysis of workplace interaction and studies of organization in general, and encourage a further interconnection among scholars from various disciplines

Enactive individuation: technics, temporality and affect in digital design and fabrication

The nature of creative engagement with computers and software presents a number of challenges to 4E cognition and requires the development of analytical frameworks that can encompass cognitive processes as they extend across material and informational realms. Here I argue that an enactive view of mind allows for better understanding of digital practice by advancing a dynamic, transactional, and affective framework for the analysis of computational design. This enactive framework is in part developed through the Material Engagement Theory (MET) put forward by Lambros Malafouris, in part from the phenomenologically inspired philosophy of Bernard Stiegler. Both advance temporality, technics and technique as key to understanding human creative imagination and their work can support each other in different ways; Stiegler allows for a theorisation of digital tools largely missing from the cognitive archaeology of Malafouris, whilst Malafouris provides a cognitive theory to further develop key ideas in Stiegler’s philosophy. Bringing their work together through Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, I develop the concept of enactive individuation and apply this to the analysis of a case of robotic design and fabrication from my fieldwork with digital architects and engineers. This case allows for further exploration of how enactivism might productively be extended into the digital realm by underscoring the explorative engagement at heart of even highly systematic work with computers and software

Ethnographic notes on visualization practices in tissue engineering research

Visual information is central to several of the scientific disciplines. This paper studies how scientists working in a multidisciplinary field produce scientific evidence through building and manipulating scientific visualizations. Using ethnographic methods, we studied visualization practices of eight scientists working in the domain of tissue engineering research. Tissue engineering is an upcoming field of research that deals with replacing or regenerating human cells, tissues or organs to restore or establish normal function. We spent three months in the field, where we recorded lab sessions of these scientists and used semi-structured interviews to get an insight into their visualization practices. From our results, we elicit two themes characterizing their visualization practices: multiplicity and physicality. In this article, we provide several examples of scientists’ visualization practices to describe these two themes and show that multimodality of such practices play an important role in scientific visualization

Thinking in action

“The original publication is available at: www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]While computers can be used to model human competencies, formalization has its limits. Sensori-motor dynamics are probably necessary to intelligence. Applied to language, verbal patterns become constraints or, in Elman’s (2004) terms, cues to meaning. Unlike symbol processors, humans act, mean and use the feeling of thinking (Harnad 2005). While language has an artificial (or formal) aspect, human intelligence is embodied. In spite of widespread belief to the contrary, brains do not need to generate sets of sentences. In challenging code views of language, we find parallels with the complex systems we call cells. Given DNA code-makers, formal features constrain protein synthesis. Life, Barbieri (2007) argues, can be traced to natural artifacts.1 This parallels how culture enables us to bring biodynamics under the control of physical and non-physical (or cultural) patterns. In turning from physical symbol systems, weight falls on DEEDS: human thinking is Dynamical, Embodied, Embedded, Distributed and Situated (Walmsley 2008).Peer reviewe