Digital Alchemy

Moya Bailey 00:02
ICA presents

Moya Bailey 00:12
Hello all. Welcome to this episode of Digital Alchemy, a production of the ICA podcast network. I’m Moya Bailey, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University, and the founder of the Digital Apothecary Lab. For this episode, I've invited Aimi Hamraie to join me in talking about the importance of medium, form and design in their work. And how the digital helps with disability in their lab, and in their design.

Moya Bailey 00:47
I want to begin by just saying thank you for being on this episode of the Digital Alchemy podcast. For a little bit of an introduction for our listening audience, I'm delighted to be here with Aimi Hamraie, Associate Professor of Medicine, Health and Society and American Studies at Vanderbilt University, and director of the Critical Design Lab. Trained as a feminist scholar, Hamraie’s interdisciplinary research spans critical disability studies, science and technology studies, critical design and urbanism, critical race theory, and environmental humanities. They are the author of Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability, and host of the Contra podcast on disability and design. I love your history trajectory, where you are, and that very Gemini way that you use multiple mediums. Does medium mean anything important to you in terms of how you do your work?

Aimi Hamraie 1:57
First, let me say thank you for having me on your podcast. I think that the concept of medium or form is something that I'm really interested in with my work. In addition to or adjacent to my academic work, I also do a lot of designing and making and various things that involve making arguments with material things. In my work, I have found it really useful and helpful to explore things not just through the written word, or spoken word, but also digital media, and a number of other things. I think this is something that many academics actually do because we also design syllabi and classrooms and we think about how to present information and for me, the presentation of information is a helpful sphere of intervention, and that can take all sorts of material forms and epistemic forms. When I was in graduate school, I was fortunate that we were in this Interdisciplinary Graduate Program that also had pretty strict disciplinary training requirements, but they were also very capacious in that feminist way. For my methods courses, I actually took Architecture Studio courses. And so, making and thinking about form and thinking about perceptions and uses of material things, was part of the method that I was trying to put together. I think that just carries through everything I'm doing now.

Moya Bailey 3:31
I love that. When I think of form, I also think of your beautiful garden, and how you construct your own personal space. So it's lovely to see that light carries through and all these different aspects of your life. I'm curious now to talk about how you see form showing up in the work that you do around disability? And does the digital help with that? Or is the digital also part of the problem?

Aimi Hamraie 4:03
Something that is really foundational to disability studies is the idea that the built environment, at least in some ways, shapes the experiences of disabled people, whether those are experiences of oppression or of inclusion. A lot of my work has dwelled in that sort of space of questions about the built world. Thinking about urban environments, thinking about buildings. About eight years ago, I started the Critical Design Lab, and the first project that we had was doing digital participatory mapping of the campus environment. We were both looking at the material experience of navigating, buildings and sidewalks and things like that. But then also trying to create a digital presentation of that information that could be usable for people, so that if you were coming to our campus, you would know where to park based on your access needs, or where to go to the bathroom and things like that. I hadn't really thought a whole lot about the digital humanities and that sort of thing. Before that, I think that concept was really just emerging around the time that I was finishing graduate school. There were certainly these digital tools that I had been trained with and had become familiar with that were data centric in a particular way. But getting into critical and digital geography was really interesting, because those folks are reading media studies, and doing cultural criticism. And they're also tinkering with all the various digital tools that are available and trying to do unexpected things with them, like an inroad into thinking about all the information we gather on the back end. And then how do we create user interfaces and what happens then? Does someone literally just take something and use it or do they use something in a way that doesn't really work and somehow they're changed by that? That's an interesting problem, both to reproduce and to study. So, from there, the lab expanded and I started to admit people who lived in other places, and we're often in different time zones. All of our work became remote and digital, and it was just a lot easier and more available to work on digital media projects and things that involved using digital tools. The forms of that raise all sorts of new accessibility challenges, and also opportunities. There's something that's interesting to me about the digital that's very different than my background in architecture or in landscape design. I also do like woodworking and leather work. If you cut something wrong, you have to basically throw it away and start over. But in a digital setting, there's really much more opportunity for editing and repurposing things in interesting and creative ways. In that context, what is form is always at the forefront. And where can form be introduced and redesigned is always being put.

Moya Bailey 7:12
I've really admired about how your lab is set up, and the projects that you work on. I wonder if you have any advice for somebody who's trying to start a lab thinking about how to integrate some of the principles of design that you've been thinking about? How one might think of the lab space as a fruitful way to imagine a different way of doing things?

Aimi Hamraie 7:42
The way that we use the word lab is very strategic. A lab is a really recognizable format for many of our colleagues in a university setting. It also implies that there's experimentation happening there. It's a financial unit. It can receive funds, and it can hire people. It can have a certain organizational structure, or not, depending on how you want to do it. It does these things that both replicate and are outside of the classroom. So in a similar way that a classroom is a social microcosm, and you create the vibe that you want. You create the norms that you want. How are we going to talk to each other? How are we going to create community here? You do that in a lab too, but because it's usually smaller, more intimate, people get to know each other. They work together more closely over a longer period of time. You really have an opportunity for creating different ways and talking about how we're going to make things, managing projects measuring or talking about what it means to contribute and trying to do that in anti-ableist ways, and also getting resources and using resources in creative ways. Until this year, we were working on a relatively small budget. When you work in the realm of the digital, it's possible to do that. There are so many very inexpensive tools as long as you have the hardware to support them. I would say for anyone who's trying to create this kind of space or intervention, it's really great to figure out what you can do with almost no money. Then if you have money, there's so much more that you can do obviously, but the one thing that's strategic about not having a lot of money is that you also don't get your projects taken away from you. If funding is denied, you can still continue to do them. Setting the organizational culture for a lab that is something that is free basically. It's about how you facilitate and direct it. Creating relationships between people across time are thinking about how power works? Who's in charge? And how does each person have a say, and how things are run. You don't need to pay anybody for that, as long as you have the skills to facilitate the conversation.

Moya Bailey 10:11
If I can venture a little bit out of our academic side into our astrological side, I wonder if astrology is one of the tools that helps you when you think about your lab culture?

Aimi Hamraie 10:24
I've never asked people for their birth times, and pulled up their charts before admitting them to the lab. But maybe that would be something that people would be into after the fact. I'm Iranian. I come from a culture where astrology is just part of our everyday understanding of the world and how time passes and things like that. And it's just very mundane. People use astrology to figure out when to get married, or when to make certain decisions. But I have found a lot of helpfulness in thinking about time. I made a zine about planning your courses for the semester using the moon phases. That was because my grandfather, who is this amazing gardener, taught me how to garden that way. The tool that he had, and that people before him had for measuring the number of days in a month and a very visual way so you could figure out if I planted radish seed today, when the sky looks like this, this is when it's going to be ready to pick. I noticed things after the fact I think about, like the personalities of people who I tend to recruit into the lab and that sort of stuff. I think I've learned a lot about myself as what it means to be someone who's in charge. And also Gemini needs a lot of variation and activity, and it's very communication centered, but can also get burnt out really easily.

Moya Bailey 11:49
I really think that there's something about whether it's astrology or not, just paying attention to people's personalities and how they show up can be really important for thinking about lab culture, and the things that you want to reinforce and the things that you maybe want to shift.

Aimi Hamraie 12:07
For sure. I think something that's interesting about contemporary astrology is how it uses all these archetypes and so if you're well versed in the archetypes even think about what's the vibe here? Do we need to bring in a little bit more of this? Do we need to do some grounding because we're all just super frazzled? Do we need some more fire in here because we're not as motivated? Do we need to bring in some more empathy and get in their feelings a little bit more? It would be interesting to think about what different configurations of people in a lab setting would produce too and I would think about they are Mars or they are Mercury as well.

Moya Bailey 12:48
Thank you, again, so much for taking the time. It's been really a pleasure to talk with you on this latest episode of Digital Alchemy.

Aimi Hamraie 12:58
Thanks so much.

Moya Bailey 13:02
Digital Alchemy is a production of the International Communication Association Podcast Network. This series is sponsored by the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Our producer is Lacie Yao. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Matt Oakley. Please check the show notes in the episode description to learn more about me, my guests, and Digital Alchemy overall. Thanks for listening.