Keynote for Louisiana LOUIS Users Conference (LUC) 2019; Baton Rouge, LA

1. Binaries, boxes, the
grid and sorting—
why?
An exploration through
habit, form, function, art, and philosophy
I’m not sure, to be honest, that this title means anything. So, stick with me, this might be a wild ride…
We might talk about binaries, boxes, the grid and sorting — why do we do it? An exploration through habit, form, function, art, and philosophy and my Junior year in
college.

2. Your 2 Things
And for your part, I ask you do the following. While we’re on this wild ride together, please remember 2 things — that way, when it’s all over, I can ask you what your 2
things are and you can tell me what they are and what they mean to you.
Some things might be strange, it might feel as though you have no idea what I’m saying or trying to say! That's ok — actually, that’s kind of the point, so don't feel as
though you have to have clarity about your 2 things.
Try to let go of clarity…

3. When I was asked to deliver this keynote, I got really excited. I tweeted this publicly: I think my head might explode with excitement. I’m going to Louisiana and I’m going
to make a new preso: Heidegger, Mondrian, Gregory Schufreider, space, taxonomies, perspective, Julie Mehretu, capitalism, representation, and the circle in indigenous
cultures.
Wow, that what a bad idea. I have no idea what all that means.
I should have picked one thing, something I knew EVERYTHING about, something not so abstract, so complex, so philosophical. But I can tell you’re a forgiving bunch.
So, it’s ok that I’m doomed and I've publicly declared I’d do this impossible thing — on Twitter no less.
Doomed indeed.
I’m going to ask you to tolerate me wandering recklessly, unsophisticatedly, and sometimes incoherently through the following presentation where I hope to show you
there is another way — one that is not constrained, does not succumb to relativism, one that doesn’t make us all socialists, and one that does not throw us down a
slippery slope to nihilism. Woah, you might say, what does this have to do with Louisiana and Libraries? Am I in the right place?
YES! Hang in there with me. I hope to make all of this clear as mud! Just squint if it all falls out of focus.
When I asked my boss if I was getting too abstract in this talk, she said, “no way, they’re librarians, they read, they’ll get it!”
But really, I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know whether viscerally or intellectually or personally: we all know the system is broken or at least not quite
right. And some are slipping through cracks. I might just put it all together in a strange way.

4. So, I want to tell a story of a pretty pivotal moment in my life. I went to University in the city that care forgot. I knew next to nothing about the place, but I knew that in
March (when my hometown in Missouri was a mix of mud and snow and filth), the magnolias and the jasmine were blooming in New Orleans and it smelled amazing. So, I
followed my nose…
The city felt like magic…
I spent most of my time with the misfits, the outsiders… And if you saw my OpenEd ’18 keynote, much of my time in the Music Library.
I majored in Philosophy as an undergraduate, but to be honest, I’m not sure I knew what Philosophy was.
I liked thinking, I liked the way Philosophy tickled my brain and made me feel a little queasy. So, while the other kids were taking LSD and getting high, I was feeling
queasy reading Plato. Kinda nerdy.
When I was a Junior, 3rd year, an LSU professor was going to be offering a graduate-level seminar on Heidegger at my University. I didn’t know squat about Heidegger, I
didn’t know squat about LSU. I had no idea how long it took him to drive to New Orleans each Wednesday night, but I knew that I wanted to be in that class.
I wanted to see what graduate students did — they seemed fancy… I wanted to watch them be fancy, I wanted to be fancy-adjascent. But I was an undergraduate. So, I
begged to be in the class. And this man,

5. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/New_Orleans_1841_1880_map.jpg

6. Professor Gregory Schufreider, Dept. of Philosophy, LSU said sure. He didn’t judge me. I think he asked me a few questions and that was it. I was in. He made an
exception! He didn't follow the rules!
There were about 8 of us in the class.
His lectures blew my mind. I was thankful they were only once a week, because I’d spend the rest of the week gathering the pieces of my brain and putting them back
together…
Schufreider was teaching the philosophy of Heidegger using Mondrian’s art. I’d never experienced anything like it in school.
And the way he taught made me feel as though I could accidentally, at any moment, say something profound — I might. Profundity in this class wasn’t reserved for the
young Bob Dylan look alike with his tortured hair, his chewed up pen, and his brow stuck in perpetual wonder…
As you can probably tell, the social, the context mattered a lot to me. Who was brilliant? Who was garnering particular favour? Who was being judged. Who had cool
hair…

7. So, this is the pineapple map of New Orleans (from 1770)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:New_orleans_1770_Pittman_map.jpg
Adrien de Pauger, a French engineer and cartographer, made some sketches of the city plan in 1721
As one author says, “What this map did not show was the smattering of huts, sheds, gardens, and paths paying no heed to de Pauger’s orderly vision. Worse yet,
villagers continued building willy-nilly as they had since 1718 and reacted indignantly when the lordly newcomer told them otherwise.”
The engineer later nearly suffered blows from an enraged housewife—and narrowly escaped a duel with her husband—when de Pauger’s straight streets intersected her
crooked garden.
New Orleans was a monarchical and totalitarian society. Urban planning decisions, like all other expressions of power, flowed from the top-down with little regard for the
concerns of citizens—let alone the lives of indigenous peoples, whose displacement went hand in glove with imperialism, nor of the lives of the slaves, upon which the
entire colonial project rested.
Uptown, the Garden District and beyond was parcelled out in what was called the “long lot”. The unit used to survey long lots was the arpent de Paris, measuring 180
French feet or 192 English feet. I've no idea why French feet are a different size from English feet! But that size reflected the amount of land one farmer can till in one day.
https://www.nola.com/300/article_2c881707-dd01-500f-9a30-10937760aabb.html

8. So, Wednesday nights… Schufreider, Heidegger, Mondrian.
Two worlds collided into one (art and philosophy) (undergrad and grad) (LSU and Tulane) (Baton Rouge and New Orleans) — and dare I say the spiritual and the rational
culminating in the sublime (and queasy).
All this within the context of the question: what is being? What does it mean to be?
One thing that stuck from that course was Heidegger’s notion of DASEIN, a kind of coming forth, revealing of being, a presencing. Mondrian’s work helped visualize that
in a way. My mind was revelling in now being tickled in two ways: through the written and through the visual.
You see, in Mondrian’s work here, the black, the grid is sometimes on top and sometimes underneath — there is a dimensionality to it — he’s capturing depth AND grid…
coming forth, presencing, revealing. The black lines are the flattest part of the painting, the colour blocks are thick and created using brush strokes in one direction. The
white is actually thick, layer upon layer of white paint. So, imagine that and you can get even further dimensionality and a clearer sense of the revealing, coming forth of
the colours.
It was sensory overload. And it was in this cacophony of modes that my mind expanded.
https://www.learnodo-newtonic.com/piet-mondrian-famous-paintings

9. Now Heidegger would write these seemingly tautologous statements like
“Being is always the Being of an entity.” And I would squint and look at the Mondrian paintings. See that red line, sometimes over the yellow, sometimes under.
Hmmmmm, I thought…
But I could feel something — not truly understand or grasp what he was saying, but understand that he was trying to get at something in the MIDDLE. Instead of falling in
line and accepting Western metaphysics from Plato through to “I think therefore I am” — he was trying to take a step farther back — what is being at all? Thinking comes
after being.
And this question of being was asked within the confines (of course) of the historical situation he was a part of. And the historical situation was one of transcendence.
This is transcendental philosophy.

10. And in this context, Heidegger's mind wandered in and out, intertwined with the grid, but moving more toward emergence… and abstraction. He was somewhere
BETWEEN the word and the image. Somewhere between.
The human is unique because we can be concerned with, question, and be open to the notion of our own being. But we can also turn away from being, forget our true
selves, and in doing so deprive ourselves of our humanity. Heidegger believed we had replaced authentic questioning about our existence with ready-made answers
served up by ideologies, the mass media, and overwhelming technology. We took the easy path and that wasn’t good.
We happily and simply exalted reason as an absolute value which, through education, brings about a gradual transformation of all spheres of human life — the RIGOUR
of it all. But for Heidegger, he didn’t think that we needed more calculative thinking, but instead we need more openness toward and more reflection on being.”
We have Mondrian’s broadway boogie woogie here — And I would listen to Schufrieder explain these complex notions of being that transcended Descarte, departed
from Aristotle and Plato, wove in Eastern influences and considered other starting points — and I would revel in the looseness of it all.
What if the Western tradition of metaphysics had gotten it wrong? What is being at its most fundamental level?!
WE DON’T KNOW!!
We should KNOW!
And everyone else seemed happy to plod along in the Cartesian assumptions we’d all been given as exact, clear, known, complete. Perhaps it was the LSD they were

11. doing…
But Heidegger left me feeling unsettled, inexact, incomplete, not-quite-articulated, fuzzy — and that felt like a real place to be.
If none of this makes sense to you, fret not: as Schufrieder says himself, “It is no secret that, in light of the original question of the meaning of Being, Heidegger’s answer
fails. What he leaves us with though is that it isn’t clear. It isn’t exact. It is something else.
A gut sense — a queasiness.
Something isn’t quite clear, something knowable but not articulate-able… Something IN BETWEEN the knowing and the being.
http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Journal%20of%20Planning%20History_Straight%20Streets%20in%20a%20Curvaceous%20Crescent_Campanella.pdf
http://braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/philosophers/heidegger-made-simple/
Art and the Problem of Truth - Schufreider

12. know thyself
be thyself
So, on Wednesday nights…
I wanted to understand when in someone’s life does this kind of thinking happen — who was this Heidegger guy?
And I don’t know if you’re like me, but whenever I go to someone’s Wikipedia page, I scroll down immediately to the Personal section — I want to know who this person
sleeps with — who gets them.
Heidegger slept with Hannah Arendt. So I began consuming books of their letters to each other, of analyses of how a “sort of Nazi” could be in a relationship with a Jew. I
speculated about their arguments, I read INTO their theories. I wondered how they influenced each other. I made them into a soap opera… Of course I told no one I did
this -- this wasn’t rigorous philosophy… but I was curious.
And in the midst of that curiosity, there was another coming forth — this time of my being.
I had a predisposition for being overly tuned into the social, but also a lack of clarity of how I fit into it. How do we reconcile the grid, the haves and the have nots with our
ethics? The good city block from the bad? With our policing, with our profiling, with our decisions about who has access to clean drinking water, to an education, to
where I would go next, to who gets a breakfast, to affordable learning materials, to graduate level courses, to the right to own property on a floodplane.
Who was I? And how did I fit into the world? My place, my privilege, my birthright — and what would I make my own — how would I find my voice?
This is my existential journey. Which brings me back here. To the context I was in and its history…

13. Back to the original land of the Choctaw and the Chitimacha (a matrilineal society)…
The history in this land, it is soaked in history! It defies binaries. It is Atchafalaya. It is brackish in all ways…
it is:
Flooding
Corruption
Celebration
Debauchery
Uniqueness
Crooked Gardens
And a sense of not fitting into a grid.
And what compromises have been made in that history? Who has been deemed the HAVES and who the HAVE NOTS?
What did we lose when we chose to align the city as much as possible in a grid, a pattern so familiar to us, but one that precludes all other patterns… a colleague of
mine in Toronto calls this epistemicide — the eradication of a way of knowing in favour of one way.
To indigenous groups (as well as others), the circle is paramount — what is the impact of imposing the grid onto the land, the places, and the people. That is my land
acknowledgement today. I am thankful to be here. Let’s talk about all of this a bit more now…
If you follow the grid farther back, you see its focus on a point, characterizing the late medieval Christian world… “the point when it all starts — creation”

14. Then we have the Renaissance and the Cartesian grid — a move from sacred to secular — that grid embodies more of a field where points or axes are marked by
quantitative value. The scatterplot!
This grid is used in global exploration and discovery. It makes neat little boxes. Those boxes demarcate specific spaces, locations. Take a look at the states in the upper
midwest — they were parcelled out in squares — the map tells that history. The highways (either E-W or N-S, but rarely diagonal).
And with Descartes the grid makes an important leap:
From not only the neat little boxes of locations, but also to problem solving and decision-making in later twentieth-century design.
The grid comes to represent not only the structural laws and principles behind physical appearance, but the process of rational thinking and decision-making itself.
This can be seen, manifest, in the great French Geometric Gardens — literally the application of the Cartesian grid to the exterior landscape. And our fondness and
arguable over-reliance on data (that is all around us today).
Stop for a moment and consider all the grids in your life — all the grids all around you that structure your life. What impact do they have on you? On your actions? On
your decisions? On the haves and the have nots?
What if instead it was something in-the-middle? Something between? What if the edges were looser, the rules more flexible, the gut more listened to, the gut more
reliable?
https://www-jstor-org.ocadu.idm.oclc.org/stable/pdf/1511481.pdf?
ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_SYC-4653%2Fcontrol&refreqid=search%3A479adf56d2a7e6e16ecb0cc35ab5b0a3s
http://richcampanella.com/assets/pdf/Journal%20of%20Planning%20History_Straight%20Streets%20in%20a%20Curvaceous%20Crescent_Campanella.pdf

15. By
Isomorphism300
0 - Own work,
CC BY-SA 3.0,
These are our cities
Notice the variations on a grid theme
By Isomorphism3000 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23516392

16. These are our conferences, spaces where we share.
Notice the exactness of the chairs all lined up in a pleasing symmetry

17. These are our offices, spaces where we work.
Notice the little boxes of sameness: computer, check; chair, check, 3 walls in a cube, check

18. Photo by Ciprian Boiciuc on Unsplash
This is where we put knowledge, information — this is where we encourage exploration, discovery, epiphany, wonder. Notice the boxes, the grid in this library.
We devised a system to put ‘nothing before something’ and organize our knowledge
Photo by Ciprian Boiciuc on Unsplash

19. And digitally, this is the space where education happens. Notice the two courses — music theory and the history of music — never the two shall meet… they shall never
overlap, interrupt, connect, interrelate.
https://it.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2018/10/canvas-lms.png

20. And this is the space where we collaborate. We build ourselves into little boxes, mute our voices, disengage our gaze… physically and digitally.
This is a Google image search for zoom meeting

21. And, perhaps most dangerously, we put people into boxes and categories too. We pathologize and attempt to enumerate just about everything.
Here we have 4 boxes for sorting people with disabilities. What do you think happens when you sort people into boxes?

22. By Nyttend - Own work, Public Domain
We know that these taxonomies, this act of sorting that we all do to make sense of the world fails…
But when the grid fails us, we’ll just create a new category — this is street 13 and 1/2. It’ll be a little messy, not as pretty as we hoped, but it will still work!
And if you’ve ever been in the position of sorting or creating a taxonomy or, god help you creating a metadata standard, then you know what a fools project that can be…
As soon as you have a neat taxonomy, something comes along that doesn’t fit and you’re in the position to decide what to do with it. Will you toe the line and defer to the
disembodied rules of the framework? Or will you create a new category and explain the variance?
And much harm has been carried out historically, in the name of taxonomic exactness…
Taxonomies seem neutral, but inevitably reflect hierarchic structures. Take a look at MITs list of objects in order of concern for autonomous vehicles from the Moral
Machine experiment…who gets run over first.
When taxonomies legitimize and naturalize our patterns of thinking and sorting, they perpetuate social biases like marginalization, discrimination, and lack of
representation. And worse, it becomes harder to dislodge them once they are codified in this structure… see metadata standard debates for proof.
Incidentally, there’s a great article from the Smithsonian about Taxonomic vandals… “those who name lots of new taxa without presenting sufficient evidence for their
findings. Sort of like science plagiarizers. These are self-publishing, un-peer-reviewed bandits of the Internet age… and a lack of oversight, combined with a discipline
that has been split between lumpers and splitters…has created this.

23. But wait a minute, you might say, science KNOWS TRUTHS. SCIENCE IS RELIABLE, FUNDAMENTAL TRUTH. These philosophers might not know what they’re doing
but scientists KNOW (all caps).
https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199372362.001.0001/acprof-9780199372362-chapter-9
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-big-ugly-problem-heart-of-taxonomy-180964629/#R3YgpS6yCiTEjIzx.99
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/taxonomic-vandalism-and-hoser/
By Nyttend - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3637430

24. Scientism
And I want to suggest, I think, that we’ve misunderstood or at least misrepresented what science is —
We reduce many things to science and describe it as THE way to describe all reality and knowledge, and the nature of things. Yep, being-ness too! It must be
measurable, verifiable, reproducible, quantitative. It must be logical, rational, validated, and exact.
And we treat data like pure, untouched mountain streams.

25. But Richard Feynman, this theoretical physicist, quantum mechanics genius says, “it is our responsibility as scientists… to teach how doubt is not to be feared but
welcomed and discussed.”
What’s this? A hard core scientist saying that uncertainty, doubt are useful?

26. Rhett Allain from Southeastern Louisiana University has written this pithy, but enormously powerful post on Wired about science. It's called Science Isn’t About ‘the Truth’
-- it’s about building models.
Allain explains,
“These are still just models. They aren't The Truth. In fact, the only way to know if a model is absolutely true would be to test every possible case that applies to the
model. This means testing every situation IN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE—oh, and for all time beginning with the Big Bang until the end. You can't do that.
Don't worry. All is not unknown. Even though we don't know the truth, we still have great models. For instance, we still don't completely understand the gravitational
interaction, but our models are good enough to design that airplane that gets you across the country safely. Oh, and we still have models that are good enough to know
that there is indeed climate change and it is caused by humans.”
We are flying spacecraft around our solar system — based on models. We can have models that are not “correct" or absolutely true, and we can still function,
do things, make decisions, and move forward. And if we fail, we can adapt and try again. And we can discover new things because we are open to them. Open
and somewhere in the middle…
If scientists can't get to truth what do they start with?? And if they are just models, what are they telling us?
https://www.wired.com/story/science-isnt-about-the-truth-its-about-building-models/

27. Good Science is Good
Discovery & Innovation come from
• failure
• questioning
• curiosity
• speculating and then trying to disprove — a
hypothesis
They start with
Failure
Questioning
Curiosity
And speculating and trying to disprove themselves — lest they have a conflict of interest or are invested in the outcome, the proving of the undoing is a nice ethical side
dish…
And they’re trying their best to eradicate scientism…

28. More than 800 scientists have called for an end to statistical significance. They show that 51% of the time it is interpreted incorrectly.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9

29. And they explain that
The trouble is human and cognitive more than it is statistical: bucketing results into “significantly significant” and “statistically non-significant” makes people think that
the items assigned in that way are categorically different. The same problems are likely to arise under any proposed statistical alternative that involves dichotomization,
whether frequentist, Bayesian or otherwise.”
WE MUST STOP THIS DICHOTOMANIA — this by the way, those 51% of the studies — that’s the data we’re making our data-driven decision upon.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00857-9

30. This hasn't thrown scientists down the slippery slope to relativism! They are comfy knowing and not knowing. In fact, they probably feel MORE secure when they don't
know — it means there is no finish line… We have to always explore and explore some more!
David Attenborough said, roughly, to great scientists, truth is understood to be truth-right-now — until another ‘truth’ is ‘discovered.’ — this smells to me like humility,
exploration, and a lack of completeness that allows us to wonder.
Let go, be open, settle somewhere in the middle.

31. And then here we have Leslie Chan from the University of Toronto saying, “when we think about OpenScience, we have to be careful about whether we’re thinking of a
monolithic concept. There should be many Open Sciences. Excluding other ways of knowing is to our detriment.” This is that epistemicide.
People, we have some work to do!

32. Nothing is
neutral
You see, nothing we do or say is neutral. It is embedded in our experiences, in our context, and in the historical assumptions we adopt.
We make choices (and I’ll call them design choices) all the time. And those choices are made in a context at a time and with particular thoughts and expectations, biases
too.

33. This community is well-aware of this lack of neutrality. This was a tag that Erin Leach brought to the American Library Association meeting a few years ago.
It says Cataloging is not a neutral act…
https://twitter.com/erinaleach/status/961644975124570115
Erin Leach

34. Do you make
decisions?
You’re a designer
Yes
Ok folks, let’s be clear: if you are making decisions, then you are a designer. And your designs have an impact on others…
You are declaring *this* and not anything else. You might have reasons (they might range from ‘that’s the way we always do it’ to ‘because I said so’ to ‘because research
shows it’s good for the majority’ etc)
If you make decisions that affect another, then you are designing. You are a designer…

35. Do we know how
to do this Inclusively?
We get stuck almost as soon as we dig in…

36. Inclusion
Questioning, reflecting, disrupting
How can we do this Inclusion thing then? I think that we need to build skills around three things:
Questioning why are things the way they are? What is the history? Where did this come from? Like we did earlier with the GRID.
Reflecting on the fairness of that? The justice? The ethics… which we spent a tiny bit of time on with the GRID
And disrupting to make changes in the ruts of the ways we do things… Imagine how we might disrupt the grid in our physical and digital spaces.
Curiosity is one of the core ingredients to this Inclusion soup. It is the roux that can make or break this gumbo.
We’re often encouraged to build “empathy.” I find that building empathy is sometimes too big an ask. It still leaves questions — ok, I’ll build empathy, how do I do that?!
I maintain, it all starts with curiosity. And so that doesn’t leave you out in the middle of the ocean of uncertainty, I’m going to talk to you about at least 3 ways to be
curious…
As an aside, I have to admit I have a fondness for things in 3s: yes, no, maybe; black, white, grey. And so you might find it curious that all of my lists are in 3s… I fully
acknowledge there could be some number > 3 but I am fond AND happy with 3s.

37. Form Function
Inclusion
Questioning, reflecting, disrupting
so, I want to lead us through some practice of this questioning, reflecting, and disrupting in the three areas I think have a significant impact on teaching learning and
education.
The form impacts the function in these three areas

38. Form Function
Architectural
Experiential
Interactional
Education, teaching and learning are situated in a space. It is an experience, and it is an interaction among people.
These things make up the context — they are where learning and teaching is situated.
The architectural
The Experiential
The Interactional

39. Form Function
Architectural
Let’s start here. Ready?

40. How can we QUESTION this?
Can we say, is this a desirable learning environment? For whom? And why?
Then REFLECT and ask:
Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?
https://unsplash.com/photos/zFSo6bnZJTw
Kids in chair, teacher in the front
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

41. And then DISRUPT and suggest that this too is a learning environment…
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/08/11/13/37/skate-park-2630925_960_720.jpg

42. How can we QUESTION this?
Can we say, is this a desirable studying environment? For whom? And why?
Then REFLECT and ask:
Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?
https://unsplash.com/photos/yLpbSjxMpCU
Man sitting with books all around
Photo by Elijah Hail on Unsplash

43. And then DISRUPT and suggest that this too is a studying environment…
Woman on bench
Photo by Alex Blăjan on Unsplash
https://unsplash.com/photos/KARheprvOUc

44. How can we QUESTION this?
Can we say, is this a desirable sharing and learning environment? For whom? And why?
Then REFLECT and ask:
Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?

45. And then DISRUPT and suggest that this too is a sharing and learning environment…
And we can ask in each of these cases of disruption how the change in form effects the outcomes
Indigenous Sharing + Story Telling Circles of the Indigenous Advisory Group At the Thunder Bay Public Library in Thunder Bay Ontario
http://www.tbpl.ca/upload/images/4th-storytelling-circle1-feb-22.jpg
http://www.tbpl.ca/iac

46. What spaces have
shaped you?
We’ve tried out this questioning, reflecting and disrupting in the architectural space in the last few slides. Now, take a moment to reflect yourself on the spaces that have
shaped you.

47. Form Function
Experiential
Now let’s give this a whirl with the experiential
And don’t forget, form influences function and outcomes…

48. An interesting thing happened during a co-design workshop I facilitated. We were brainstorming the information architecture for a new website. It was a messy activity, so
as a group we decided to each individually sketch out the relationships before coming together to work on refining it…
One participant had a notebook like this one and she started the activity and then got frustrated. She said the notebook was too small and it was making it hard for her to
capture all the inter-connectedness. She asked if she could use the board instead. A couple of interesting things happened…
http://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/supplyimages/614647_1000_1_800.jpg

49. As soon as she went to the board what happened?
Everyone else put down their pens and looked at what she was doing. In taxonomies of importance in a classroom or workshop setting, the board takes first prize. It was
ok, because the others had at least begun some of their sketching individually.
So, her writing is in white. Then we grabbed different colours to fold in others’ ideas.
We created in an open, exploratory, intersectional, messy, collaborative, creative way to interrelate the information. Then, the next day there was a meeting with the
stakeholders to present our ideas to them…

50. a. Definitions (C. Blake / CCDI)
i. Defining Diversity
ii. Defining Inclusion
iii. Defining Equity vs. Equality
iv. …
b. What is the Business Case for Diversity and Inclusion? (C. Blake / CCDI)
c. Guiding Principles (C. Blake)
i. How to Engage Collaboratively / Respectful Relationships
ii. Accountability
iii. Shared Authority
iv. Making Time for Mindful Reflection
d. Self-Assessments (C. Blake / R. Myers / CCDI)
a. Core Questions (C. Blake)
i. What are my lenses?
ii. Am I just confirming my assumptions, or am I challenging them?
iii. What details here are unfair? Unverified? Unused?
iv. What’s here that I designed for me? What’s here that I designed for other
people?
v. Who might be impact by what I’m developing?
vi. Is my audience open to change?
vii. What am I challenging as I create this?
viii. Whose voice is here? Whose voice is missing?
b. Case Studies (Catalyst / Advocate Teams) – as museums use the guide, opportunities to
add case studies / stories to site
i. *see Toronto Ward Museum mock-up for example
(R. Myers / T. Pinkofsky)
a. General Resources
b. Training
c. Consultants
d. Community Organizations
e. Employer Tools
a. Blog / Forum
i. Ask Questions
ii. Create space for reflection and discussion
iii. Address failures and access support
(R. Myers)
a. Webinars
We flattened those ideas, formalized them, and were seeking validation! This is what was presented as the outcome from the collaborative info architecture session.
We dressed up that creativity, combed its hair, gave it a starched button up, and some serious shoes. And put it into outline form.
And in doing that we lost all the great work we had done. The people who weren’t at the design session began questioning the taxonomy of what we’d done and got
bogged down in form and function we’d created.
We all do this…

51. And so much was lost. Our lens matters. We all were doing this activity on a piece of paper… and the paper, the space, the way we had to send it to a group who would
then have a meeting over the phone… that was our context. Those were our constraints.

52. Edward Tufte calls this the problem of the flatlands and it motivated him to create his own press so he could publish his books the way he wanted: with spans across
pages, with marginalia, with 3D design, with popups, with designs for information that challenged the straightjacket or “flatlands” of the ‘typical’ published page — the
grid, if you will…

53. The world is complex, dynamic,
multidimensional; the paper is
static, flat. How are we to represent
the rich visual world of experience
and measurement on mere flatland?
- Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information
Tufte says, “The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on
mere flatland?”
- Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information

54. Binaries
But we get stuck with the experiential… it’s complicated space.
We often oversimplify to binaries.

55. We are in Conflict
Safe space Out of comfort zone
Mono Culture Diverse + Inclusive
Stable / standardized Adaptive
Be the best / compete Collaborative
Win Cooperative
Us Them
Positive Negative
And we are a bit in conflict.
We want to create safe spaces, but we also know we want to push ourselves and others out of our comfort zones — how do we reconcile this?
We know culture fit isn't often diverse or inclusive, but we hire for fit and sit comfortably in that space, creating mono-cultures
We like stability, but we know to innovate, to grow, we need to change.
We want to be the best, but we also speak about the value of collaboration.
We want to win, but we also want to cooperate.
We create an ‘us’ to build a community, but our community also defines a ‘them’ in the negative space.
We want to be positive, inspirational, exciting, but we know that so many of us learn more from the negative experiences if we allow ourselves to have them.
How do we reconcile these? There are no black or white answers here and these binaries are false… we need both, and. I think that’s how we get inclusion —
remember? QUESTION, REFLECT, DISRUPT — evermore, not just once.
Each of these binaries could be an entire debate.

56. Numbers or People
Numbers Centered Human Centered
Statistical RESULTS Inspirational STORIES
Limited to a set of
questions
Freedom to explore
through dialogue
Reported life Real life
Out of CONTEXT As part of CONTEXT
Hear about issues Experience issues
Validate Explore
In our methods too!
We know now, I hope, that we need BOTH AND and we’re no longer at a place where we can either hide behind data or just tell stories.
Quantitative, qualitative, and anecdotal.
That queasy feeling we had from Heidegger earlier — make a place for that AND the data you’ve collected in a well-meaning survey that might be embedded with bias
and leading questions and false positives and and and. Embrace uncertainty, incompletion, and not knowing.
We do damage when we succumb to, without questioning, the naturalized and adopted methods.

57. Good or Bad
Thinking or Feeling
Pragmatist or Principled
Scale or One-off
Pros or Cons
Enemy or Friend
True or Fake
And we hamstring ourselves by thinking that it can be this overly simple.
You do not have to choose — find spaces that understand both
Look at scale and one-off here…
Much damage has been done in education in the spirit of scaling an approach, a standard, a framework. Scale to me is code for do the same thing cheaply for MANY
more people — it is an economic decision. It is ALSO though an ethical decision. It is an ethical decision to say that one-offs aren’t worth it. Ask again, for whom? Why?
What history got us there?
We think we know what is good and what is bad…
And then we are confronted by something that is both…

58. Study for the grade
Valuing assessments, not learning
All interactions are amazing
All meetings are great
Failure is bad
Exploration, discovery, epiphany — because
we can’t measure them or “VALIDATE”
them, are too costly, risky, flimsy
We should focus on measurable, rigorous,
data-driven
We’ve questioned — now let’s take a moment to reflect.
Anyone have experience with these phenomena?
Study for the grade
Valuing assessments, not learning
All interactions are amazing
All meetings are great
Failure is bad
Exploration, discovery, epiphany — because we can’t measure them or “VALIDATE” them, are too costly, risky, flimsy
We should focus on measurable, rigorous, data-driven
What experiences have shaped you?
<READ + then PAUSE>
So, how do we end up in this conflict? How do we let spaces shape us in ways that we know don’t work? Why do we perpetuate experiences that we know oppress and
limit? Why??

59. I think it has something to do with this.
Listen, I have empathy for us — our goals are laudable. We want to
- know with certainty and therefore be able to reliably predict.
- so we make only data-driven decisions because they are validated.
- and we make rules that have edges that are clear and delineated for certainty.
- and in doing so we appeal to exactness in an effort to achieve “fairness”.
We like structure, certainty, completeness, simplicity, we like knowing. We approach the world with a transactional check-book accounting expectation – if we document
our inputs and outputs, it should all reconcile neatly in the end.
And as a result, we adapt our institutions, experiences, and interactions to contend with this fundamentally flawed, oversimplified causal thinking. For example, medicine
contends with a patient that thinks a visit to the doctor should result in a tangible something, a new prescription, a referral, a plan; and education contends with a student
who thinks that if she does everything the syllabus says, then she deserves an A (she’s done her part of the contract (that’s the syllabus), she has learned).
And in the process, we wind up right back here…

60. At street 13.5
And we have cycles of exclusion and marginalization that do not get questioned or disrupted ever.
We have kids who do not get an education
We have communities that do not have access to resources
We have mass incarcerations Louisiana
We have police profiling
We have black boys in hoodies shot for walking while black
Statistically significant OR NOT

61. Form Function
Interactional
Ok one more to go — the Interactional

62. I was looking online for an image that would capture the moment — the touching moment, where something happens to you that changes you. As you can imagine, finding an image of that
moment is difficult. Many of the images involve animals as does this one — Here Jane Goodall reaches out as does a chimp to touch. In moments like these, both beings change — they
both are impacted by this touching interaction.
And we all had that one person — we remember their name, the moment — when they reached out to us. They changed us forever in that moment. They believed in us, the encouraged
our love of reading, they said they liked the way we thought about things, they said they believed in us. Schufreider did that for me.
Those moments don’t scale. Those moments aren’t scripted. They are authentic human (and animal) connections.
And no wonder these moments are hard to find online…
How do you capture this in metadata?

63. Interactions…
What do we do when no one is watching? Someone snapped this man giving his shoes to a homeless man and then walking off barefoot down the sidewalk.
We see plenty of examples of this — people who have an impact on another — people who touch someone else.
The Toronto Public Library has a program where you can check out a person — literally, you can check out a person and hear their stories. Imagine spending the day with
an elder who can give you lived-experience of history? That program understands the power of interactions…
https://metro.co.uk/2019/08/19/jogger-gives-shoes-homeless-man-walks-off-barefoot-10593185/

64. And those interactions that live with us, historically aren’t always good ones. Here on the left we have Emmett Till - in aug 28, 1955 lynched for apparently whistling at a
white woman in her family’s store in Mississippi.
And on the right we have Devin Myers August 14, 2019 in Royal Oak, Michigan — a white woman called the cops because Myers “looked at her “suspiciously”"
Interactions like love patches or painful scars live in us for a long, long time.
If you need proof of this look no farther than where we are. 1927 the Great Flood, and the dynamiting in Plaquemines Parish. Then Katrina, the fear that they’d dynamited
again. Those patches and scars stay with us.
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3981740
https://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2019/08/14/royal-oak-police-stop-black-man-for-looking-suspiciously-at-white-woman

65. Love patches
+
Painful scars
Spend just a moment thinking about interactions that have shaped you — positive and negative alike, those love patches or painful scars

66. What does it look like
to be
off the Grid
What does this middle look like practically?

67. Resist the
urge to
generalize
What happens when we resist the urge to generalize
And instead understand the individual in her context, with the tools available to her to achieve the goals she has — that is all we are. And we can either experience match
or mismatch in this scenario.
Mismatch is disability, it is design solvable.

68. Resist the urge to design for
An assumption we make:
We can engineer a fix—technology can solve it all and we are smart people who know what is best
Remember: Engineers are not the only ones building—we all adapt and grow design; we’re all designers
A good portion of Pinterest is dedicated to the thoughtful design of everyday things in innovative and surprising ways. We learn from how someone else imagined using
something and we riff off of it.
children’s rain boots nailed to a fence and used as flower pots
a basic lamp that someone builds a lego structure around with holes to let the light through and shine colours

69. Resist the urge to predict + speculate
• require ongoing
transparent communication
+ recalibration
• complex projects cannot
be predicted
• emergent, complex
systems cannot be
*known* — they evolve
• “Success” continues to
evolve and change
Assumptions Reality
What happens if we let go a little of the urge to predict and speculate?
hammer with a wood screw in front of it

70. Resist the urge to know an individual
• one-size-fits-one
• empower users!
agency!
• Be curious!
And what happens if we acknowledge we don’t know?
white table with brightly coloured stick figures sitting around it

71. We need to shift our focus to the 20% and the 80 will solve for itself.
The 80 is easy.
Innovation hides in the 20% — the edge cases — look for failures, not success. And ask why?
Who decided? What is the history of this? How did we get here?

72. how we design matters;
and every decision is a
design decision
For change to happen within any institution, the thing you want to change has to be a value; something you practice and continue to challenge and nurture. Inclusion is
not a checklist item. It’s like breathing and bathing — you got to keep at it evermore.

73. Nothing is
neutral
we are all designers
we are all part of the revolution
…or else the status quo
Nothing is neutral.
every decision is a design decision that either contributes to or challenges existing structures of privilege, power, and presence. Each decision is an opportunity and a
responsibility we have as leaders in these public spaces
And here is our call to action -- we are all designers; we are all part of the revolution… or else the status quo.

74. Let go…
What happens if we let go of certainty, neatness, completion, absolute, fixed, inflexible… just a little?

75. Do more…
And instead do more to question, critique, be curious, be open.

76. beware the taxonomy
beware the binary
beware certainty
beware of completion
so, what happens when we use these warnings as our foundation? What if we remind ourselves of this?
Beware the taxonomy
Beware the binary
Beware certainty
Beware completion

77. Inclusion
Questioning, reflecting, disrupting
architectural, experiential, interactional
This is our map for moving forward.
So, guess where is a great place to do this…

78. Libraries are:
• physical building / digital space
• space for learning, serenity, collaboration
• radical spaces that push boundaries while
maintaining them
• sanctuaries with bathrooms, Internet, and
furniture
Libraries are
A physical building
A space for learning, serenity, quiet, collaboration
Libraries are
Radical spaces that push boundaries while maintaining them and serving all.
Libraries are
Sanctuaries with bathrooms and internet access and comfortable furniture
These are all spaces for considering the in-between — the middle. For questioning, reflecting and disrupting.

79. Libraries can:
• revolutionize publishing — who gets to
publish? Who decides?
• transform institutional procurement —
a11y
• Break down disciplinary boundaries
• Revolutionize blended pedagogy
Libraries can
Revolutionize publishing (academic) — who gets to publish? Who decides? This can erode some of the more odious aspects of demanding rigour (read: excluding the marginalized) in
higher ed
Libraries can draw an ethical line in the sand in institutional procurement. — are we buying tools that work for everyone? Who is being excluded?
Libraries can break down disciplinary boundaries and show the magic in the in-between
Libraries can revolutionize the way we teach remotely and in the classroom.

80. Librarians Are
The question is not what y’all will do; the question is, can the rest of us keep up?
https://149349728.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1_FQ2Rtnp6ctwW2P7cqFqfvg.png

81. Because above all else, librarians teach us to question everything.
https://flic.kr/p/iVLZt
Photo by @Dunk

82. Diffraction
I still fret about the grid. I worry about the impact it has on us. The thoughtlessness it encourages. The illusion of easy among the complex. I worry about what is lost
because of the grid.
And so I’m really excited by works like this — from Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born artist, who grew up in East Lansing Michigan. Mehretu’s work continues to add to
the history of the grid to problematize it.
Mehretu rethinks and reshapes the grid that has encased us for so long. The one that Heidegger wanted to critique, that Mondrian tried to break open, and so many
others work to topple.
Mehretu explodes the grid by making it layered, including other perspectives, narratives, stories. She makes it intersectional, global, feminist. And you know what she
begins with? Her first layer is made up of images of city grids — then the complexity, the layering begins…
This is her piece “Diffraction,” a landscape that was created a few weeks after Katrina.
https://crownpoint.com/app/uploads/MEHRETU_Diffraction.jpg

83. Structured Structure-less-ness
And this piece, entitled Entropia, shows the chaos on top of the city grid.
This is what I unhelpfully call the structured structurelessness — the IN BETWEEN, THE MIDDLE
There is pattern, there is symmetry, there are grids in our world. and…
https://6.api.artsmia.org/800/95241.jpg

84. How things really are: unpredictable,
dynamic, emerging, adapting
And this is what we know is actually the context we live, work, grow, and learn in.
Things are unpredictable, dynamic, emerging, and adapting -- evermore.
When we let go of our notion of clarity, we see differently.
Logos, resistance, commonality
********
Mehretu said the following: “There’s this idea that happens in cultures and through time that if we try to understand the cosmos there’s this place above that is a point of
destination, a point of beginning. . . . I think of it in terms of an hourglass shape. . . . There’s a space in the center where there’s really nothing going on, [and yet there is].
I feel that there’s a force extending from the top to the bottom, all this activity goes around just beyond it. To me that’s a point of potential, a point of departure. The
beginning."
Might we call this Dasein? The in-between, the open, the coming forth or revealing?
The space of both self-determination, logos and resistance.
********
https://alums.vassar.edu/homepage-highlights/2012/2012-04-09/images/excavations_the_prints_of_julie_mehretu.pdf

85. How things really are: embedded,
contextualized
And finally, lest we worry that we are occupying space that is not our reality — cerebral space that isn’t grounded… Look at this. I see this as Mehretu’s act of resistance
to the grid, her coming forth. It is DEEPLY embedded in our context, in our reality.
Here is her mural on the wall at the entrance to the Goldman Sachs building. She juxtaposes her abstract work in the centre of Capitalism, within the belly of the beast.
Because that is our grid and this is resistance on top of that grid. And this piece not only is the in-between, but it lives in between, physically.
So, I ask you — how can you, in your context further engage the middle, the in-between, the coming forth, change, flexibility, emergence, unpredictability? How can you
make the world more inclusive?
https://www.flickr.com/photos/benzadrine/8690500009

86. @jesshmitchell
I hope some of this made sense. Thank you so much for going on this journey with me.

87. Your 2 Things
Let’s talk about them...