Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, Situationist International #1, 1958

“The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity. . . . The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.”

—Report on the Construction of Situations



Our conception of a “constructed situation” is not limited to an integrated use of artistic means to create an ambience, however great the force or spatiotemporal extent of that ambience might be. A situation is also an integrated ensemble of behavior in time. It is composed of actions contained in a transitory decor. These actions are the product of the decor and of themselves, and they in their turn produce other decors and other actions. How can these forces be oriented? We are not going to limit ourselves to merely empirical experimentation with environments in quest of mechanistically provoked surprises. The really experimental direction of situationist activity consists in setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a temporary field of activity favorable to these desires. This alone can lead to the further clarification of these simple basic desires, and to the confused emergence of new desires whose material roots will be precisely the new reality engendered by situationist constructions.

We must thus envisage a sort of situationist-oriented psychoanalysis in which, in contrast to the goals pursued by the various currents stemming from Freudianism, each of the participants in this adventure would discover desires for specific ambiences in order to fulfill them. Each person must seek what he loves, what attracts him. (And here again, in contrast to certain endeavors of modern writing — Leiris, for example — what is important to us is neither our individual psychological structures nor the explanation of their formation, but their possible application in the construction of situations.) Through this method one can tabulate elements out of which situations can be constructed, along with projects to dynamize these elements.

This kind of research is meaningful only for individuals working practically toward a construction of situations. Such people are presituationists (either spontaneously or in a conscious and organized manner) inasmuch as they have sensed the objective need for this sort of construction through having recognized the present cultural emptiness and having participated in recent expressions of experimental awareness. They are close to each other because they share the same specialization and have taken part in the same historical avant-garde of that specialization. It is thus likely that they will share a number of situationist themes and desires, which will increasingly diversify once they are brought into a phase of real activity.

A constructed situation must be collectively prepared and developed. It would seem, however, that, at least during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of “director” role. If we imagine a particular situation project in which, for example, a research team has arranged an emotionally moving gathering of a few people for an evening, we would no doubt have to distinguish: a director or producer responsible for coordinating the basic elements necessary for the construction of the decor and for working out certain interventions in the events (alternatively, several people could work out their own interventions while being more or less unaware of each other’s plans); the direct agents living the situation, who have taken part in creating the collective project and worked on the practical composition of the ambience; and finally, a few passive spectators who have not participated in the constructive work, who should be forced into action.

This relation between the director and the “livers” of the situation must naturally never become a permanent specialization. It’s only a matter of a temporary subordination of a team of situationists to the person responsible for a particular project. These perspectives, or the provisional terminology describing them, should not be taken to mean that we are talking about some continuation of theater. Pirandello and Brecht have already revealed the destruction of the theatrical spectacle and pointed out a few of the requirements for going beyond it. It could be said that the construction of situations will replace theater in the same sense that the real construction of life has increasingly tended to replace religion. The principal domain we are going to replace and fulfill is obviously poetry, which burned itself out by taking its position at the vanguard of our time and has now completely disappeared.

Real individual fulfillment, which is also involved in the artistic experience that the situationists are discovering, entails the collective takeover of the world. Until this happens there will be no real individuals, but only specters haunting the things anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated beings moving at random. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom. We are going to undermine these conditions by raising at a few points the incendiary beacon heralding a greater game.

In our time functionalism (an inevitable expression of technological advance) is attempting to entirely eliminate play. The partisans of “industrial design” complain that their projects are spoiled by people’s playful tendencies. At the same time, industrial commerce crudely exploits those tendencies by diverting them to a demand for constant superficial renovation of utilitarian products. We obviously have no interest in encouraging the continuous artistic renovation of refrigerator designs. But a moralizing functionalism is incapable of getting to the heart of the problem. The only progressive way out is to liberate the tendency toward play elsewhere, and on a larger scale. Short of this, all the naïve indignation of the theorists of industrial design will not change the basic fact that the private automobile, for example, is primarily an idiotic toy and only secondarily a means of transportation. As opposed to all the regressive forms of play — which are regressions to its infantile stage and are invariably linked to reactionary politics — it is necessary to promote the experimental forms of a game of revolution.


SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
1958



“Problèmes préliminaires à la construction d’une situation” originally appeared in Internationale Situationniste #1 (Paris, June 1958). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

What does an artificial design agent mean by being "situated"?

Gregory J Smith and John S Gero

Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

Abstract

Schön described designing as a "conversation with materials conducted in the medium of drawing". Both the problem and solution of many designing tasks emerge through this "conversation" between a situated designer and the medium of the design. Unfortunately, describing agents as "situated" means different things to researchers from different fields. In this paper we review work from different fields so as to describe what "situated" means for a design agent.

Introduction

Designing is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order (Margolin, 1986, quoting Victor Papenek). Conceptual designing is an early phase of design which is characterised by abstractness and an incomplete understanding of the problem and/or solution (Gero, 1998). Designers cope with this by exploring the space of design requirements at the same time as they begin to try and understand the space of conceptual designs. This is achieved by interacting with the media of the conceptual designs as exemplified by Schön's (Schön and Wiggins, 1992) "conversation with the medium". Designers, human and artificial, have therefore been described as situated agents. But what is meant by "situated" varies across disciplines. What Suchman (Suchman, 1987) understands by the term "situated" has a cognitive and sociogical character that is distinctly different from a common AI understanding that equates it with "embodied". So, when talking of design agents, what does "situated" mean?

The traditional computational approach presumes that designing is search and planning; achieving design goals through internal reasoning with inference rules over models in a suitable logic or language. These methods search an encoded space for a goal state, and require good heuristics to be effective. There is no notion of interaction revealing alternatives not encoded in the space. It is an approach characterised by (Coyne et al., 1990).

A logical proposition, however, is not necessarily the same as a design proposal as design problems often cannot be comprehensively stated (Lawson, 1997). Some aspects of a particular design problem do not emerge until an attempt has been made to solve it. So how does search or planning in a solution or plan space account for designing if knowledge of the design environment or design goals are incomplete or in error, or if design knowledge itself contain errors/omissions, or is incomplete, or if the design task can be formally stated but planning is exponentially complex and over a large solution space?

The heuristics that are required of any search are a part of the domain and common-sense knowledge available to a designer. Expert systems programmers have been trying to program disembodied common-sense knowledge for decades (Horgan, 2004). One reason suggested by Brooks (Brooks, 1995), Clancey (Clancey, 1997) and others for why this has been a struggle is precisely because their systems are not situated and embodied. By contrast with conventional planning, in a situated view plans are constructed as an artifact of "reasoning about action, not the generative mechanism of action" (Suchman, 1987, emphasis is Suchman's).

Fig. 1. Man standing on window ledge, from (Milligan and Shand, 1996).

An example is of a designer and sketches made during the early conceptual phases of a design task. There is a difference between this viewed as an interaction with a drawing and, say, viewing it as searching of encoded model of a drawing. One difference is that expectations of what is in a drawing influence how it is perceived it, and this influence feeds back into ongoing perceptions of that drawing. Consider the scene shown in Figure 1. We naturally believe that the man is contemplating jumping from the ledge. Now look at Figure 2, which is the same scene a few seconds later. The reason that this is funny is that it contradicts our expectations.

Consider now Figure 3(a). We do not simply look at Figure 3(a) and parse what is sensed into objects; we interact with the figure. Biasing our perception are expectations of what will be perceived. The concepts that Dali had in mind when he produced Figure 3(a) most likely include concepts of a greyhound, the mythological beast and so on as well as others that associate in his mind with those.

What we conceive of while interacting with this figure, as a viewer and independent agent, is not necessarily as Dali intended. Indeed it is not assured that what the painter conceives of afterward is only that originally intended. Many people viewing Figure 3(a) for the first time will not find all of the interpretations intended by Dali without the assistance of the Figure 3(b) sketches. Equally, just because Dali produced the image does not mean that those six interpretations are exhaustive or even necessarily correct. How we interpret the figure depends on our expectations, the current situation, and we construct the memories, beliefs and expectations that bias our perception.

Our work has therefore been motivated by a desire for a model of designing that is based on interaction; of a situated agent that can interact with an external representation of a developing design. It is the intention of this paper to describe situated design agency in the abstract, not applied necessarily to human designers or artificial agents, so as to inform the future development of artificial agents. Descriptions inspired by human behaviour are therefore intended only to that end. We do not intend these descriptions to be taken as a cognitive model of human behaviour. Computational details in this paper apply to artificial agents but will be informal (in a computational sense); a forthcoming paper will introduce formalism to this discussion. In this paper we consider research that at first blush may seem disparate. The research reviewed in this light comes from AI, computer science, cognitive science and philosophy. The common theme is a situated, interactive approach to intelligence and problem solving. We consider these ideas in the light of the actions of human and artificial agents so as to determine what it means to say that a design agent is situated.

(a) "The Endless Enigma", Salidor Dali, 1938, reproduced from (Descharnes 1985)

(b) Sketches by Dali of the images overlayed in "The Endless Enigma". They are (i) Face of the Cyclopean, Cretin (ii) Greyhound (iii) Mythological beast (iv) Philosopher reclining (v) Mandolin, compotier, figs on a table (vi) Woman seen from the back mending sail sail (Descharnes, 1985).

Fig. 3. Dali's "The Endless Enigma"

The above copied from: http://people.arch.usyd.edu.au/~john/publications/2005/05SmithGeroDS.pdf