I will be off in a few days to go to Costa Rica, for RISD–EARTH Univeristy mashup. Three glorious weeks in a wonderful place, learning new things and making cool stuff! And to inspire you while I am gone, this glimpse of Burning Man through Dr Suess:
Ah, the holidays! After two years I finally get to be home for Christmas (and, incidentally, New Year’s). That’s right: two years away from home, which is an awfully long time. I even started missing the grey and the drizzle.
The first days home were just packed: the evening I arrived, vegan dinner at Plum with cousin and fashion-blogger Dana and her husband Don, both foodies with the sort of young-professional lifestyle people dream about. Family Christmas party the next afternoon, preceded by a tour of the secret hobbit house (intricately and faithfully reproduced, yet so lonely without hordes of fans to fawn over and admire it… lonely or safe, anyway). The next morning, a super awesome interview with GGN, a landscape architecture firm run by three fabulous women with a design philosophy completely in line with my own — if only they could short-cut their internship hiring process just for me! I met with Jennifer Guthrie, one of the partners and friends with Uncle Kim, who complimented some of my work. You could see my ego grow three sizes that day. This heady experience was followed immediately by lunch with Mickey, my classmate, and Laura and Tom from Haddad-Drugan, who taught wintersession last year, plus a tour of their office — custom solar cells imbedded in skylights in a pixelated pattern have me dreaming, let me tell you. And lunch was at a great vegetarian dive-bar in Georgetown whose sandwiches bore such names as “Tycho”, “Picard”, and the “Darth Reuben”. I know, you want to eat there too, now. Don’t fill up, though, because on my itinerary there’s a Theo chocolate factory tour in the afternoon. So. Many. Samples.
The next few days were spent alternately relaxing and cooking up a storm. My mom discovered Spork-Fed and we quickly set about organizing menus for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. For the Eve, we brought some pineapple and red pepper pizza, a lentil-pecan pate with crudites, a tofu satay, and various cookies and sweets to Grammy’s place to enjoy while watching The Muppet Christmas Carol. Beforehand Sandy likes to watch the football game, so my dad and I split and went walking around the lake instead. What a crisp and beautiful day!
Christmas morning Grammy and Sandy came over to our place instead, and we had squash-leek soup, fig-pear puff pastry tarts with garlic aioli (these win best in show), and more cookies to accompany our gift-opening. Supposedly we were just doing stocking stuffers, but some of these were too big to fit in the actual stockings, so they got wrapped and put under the tree like regular ol’ presents. I guess what makes them stocking stuffers is the fact that they were procured from Goodwill, and so didn’t break anybody’s bank. My loot was lots of chocolate from Theo!
And for my part, I donated to various non-profits in people’s names as part of my 10% tithing endeavor, since I actually earned some money this year as TA extraordinaire and summer database developer. Penny-pincher and minimalist that I am, I find money to be stressful thing to possess, a reminder of my own privilege yet needing to be invested wisely to actually help me out in my imagined future. Building my own house will not be cheap. But being able to pick out organizations to give money to makes me feel generous and happy, and setting aside some of my income for this purpose allows me to spend it without feeling guilty. Also, giving in people’s names makes an excellent gift that won’t get returned or fill up closet space! That, and I can devote my time to making a holiday smorgasbord that spreads the vegan cheer. Win-win-win.
Most of my time at home was spent being cold, drinking copious amounts of tea, playing sudoku or video games (oh man am I late to game on the joy of video games), dancing around the house, going to coffee shops with my parents, watching movies and Star Trek episodes in the evenings, and going through my life as it has been stuffed into the boxes in the closet. I got another internship interview at Berger Partnership, fell in love with Luna sandals at the barefoot store (and man am I jealous that my dad got to take a running class from Barefoot Ted), visited Grandmom (where I got a glimpse of cousin Emily) and Jim and Parker Shipton, and I sewed a tiny giraffe.
I’m about done with the grey, drizzly days for now. It’s been only two weeks, but it feels like a month — mostly in a good way, though! For my next adventure, I’m off to Costa Rica for wintersession. Going back to school is a lot more pleasant when it means temperatures in the 80′s for three weeks. But I know I’m going to spend all of them with my fingers crossed about getting a summer internship in Seattle. Wish me luck!
It’s funny that the last thing I posted was about still being alive… because then I didn’t post anything for months. In all that time, I had maybe half a day off every week, on average. Partially this was my fault, for insisting on getting back home by seven every night, and spending any free time getting a head start on semester-long projects like my New England in Autumn plant key and my Theory paper on imaginary landscapes. Surprisingly, Studio was not the time sink this semester: it was Tech and Materials, which required almost as much work as Studio but with half the credit value. We got to build a bench and we had a cool design details project, but mostly it entailed hours of perfecting my grading and AutoCAD skills. Which is honestly pretty boring compared to the exciting design work for my Studio project that had to be put on the back burner most of the time.
Studio also suffered because our class had 13 people and only one teacher, leaving us with only twenty-minute desk crits. It’s hard to cover all the aspects of a large project in such a short period of time, and I often found myself adrift, without a clear idea of how to proceed. I’ve found that I have difficulty seeing the holes and inconsistencies in my own work, so I rely on the fresh pairs of eyes provided by classmates and teachers and the guest critics in pin-ups and reviews to push my designs forward. Most of the time simply having to explain my ideas out loud to someone else is enough to spot the weaknesses and missed opportunities. I think I could have benefited from another iteration or two, but in the end I’m proud of my concept, and especially proud of the high-quality, well-made models I hunkered down to make for the final review. I even won the approval of some of the best model-makers in the class!
The best part about Studio this semester, though, was our site: the parking lots behind Central Square’s YMCA, in Cambridge. That meant class site visits could be extended to include hanging out at the Dorr household with Rachael, Thomas, Henry, Kyle, and all the other wonderful Cambridge folks! Especially nice considering how rainy the weather ended up being for those visits — I could hunker down with some tea and company before marching back to my monk-like existence in Providence. My plants and tech classes also had field trips, though the weather was often better for those. I’m really learning to appreciate the intricacies of planting and construction details, so when an old building on my street got demolished and slowly transformed into a little park, I eagerly watched the concrete getting poured and the bricks being set as I walked to studio each day. On the down side, this means more details to complain about when they’re badly done…
I did manage to fit some other downtime in there, too. I’ve been avidly watching Supernatural, a show that I would never guessed I would like due to its horror-movie aesthetic. But like The Dunwich Horror, the fact that the evil things get it in the end keeps me from being scared of the dark. Plus the two demon-hunting brothers, Sam and Dean, have such a great dynamic going, and they manage to infuse humor into some of the darkest situations.
Nothing beats telling your own story, though, and as nerdy as it is, live-action role-playing has been my social activity of choice for the past year and a half. Two or three games a semester, and now only two left — stuff, ahem, is about to hit the fan. My character, Dalal, has become something of a hard-boiled detective, seeking out the truth about the mysterious Nulls and getting stuck in the middle of a dangerous political conspiracy. Last session, she almost got assassinated, and her best friend and fool-hardy partner-in-crime, Hiro, managed to get himself blown to smithereens in his own investigations. Don’t worry! He got put back together by one of the many gods running around. Wacky you say? Well, another god has been sleeping for hundreds of years in a closet at the local inn, the Berserk Unicorn. It’s no wonder Dalal prefers not to speculate about the ultimate meaning of the cosmos.
I will leave you now with some pretty pictures from my Studio project, and return shortly with a report of my holiday adventures!
Hey, everybody! Guess what? I’m a quarter of a century old! Can you believe it? No? Well… no one else does either. Yet I am still in grad school. Poo poo, you doubters, I will probably still look 15 when I am 30! My secret to looking young: act like a kid. Someone recently said I take after my dad, meaning apparently that he also looks like a younger man, and I think the giant grins we both carry around all the time help everyone take us seriously.
I love that my parents are both huge geeks. They met in the Society for Creative Anachronism, and now they’re getting into that again. Frederick the Red and Delane the Forgotten, Back in… Wool! I also want to thank my parents for raising me without benefit of patriarchal sky gods or even a stray horoscope reading. All my values were instilled in me by Star Trek (The Next Generation, you guys, don’t worry!) and not by church sermons. Honestly, the only thing I regret is that they never took me to a sci-fi convention! I got my nerdery from them, and also my design sense. I miss taking long walks critiquing every house on the street and stealing the good ideas for our own future (and often imaginary) dwellings. It’s like an inverse fashion runway, where the models stand very still. And have very wide shoulders.
Alas, I am trapped on the East Coast for many more months due to grad school. Classes have begun again, and we finally get to learn about plants! I also got a sweet teaching assistantship working for Nick DePace teaching all four (four?!) members of the new Landscape Architecture class how to draw perspectives. I already have this feeling like, “You guys have it so easy! Back in our day, we had to draw twice that much in half the time!” (Which is basically true.)
So yeah. I’m hard-core and super-cool.
There are so many classics that have reputations as profound Great Works that, when you finally read them, turn out to be just hilarious. Voltaire’s Candide, Hesiod’s Works and Days, Herodotus, Lysistrata… okay, so mostly I’ve read the Ancient Greeks. But then I read Moby-Dick!
I was so struck by some of the passages that I had to read them out loud to my friends. Their response? “That’s so gay.” Because… it is: “Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.” Ishmael, the narrator, meets Queequeg the tattooed cannibal at the Spouter Inn, and they proceed to have a romance of sorts. Initial misunderstandings give way to cuddling in bed and Queequeg pronouncing them married. “Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg — a cosy, loving pair.”
Once on the Pequod, however, their relationship is hardly mentioned. But there’s another quote that also shows Ishmael’s sensual feelings for men:
“Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally.”
It is surprising to read such unabashedly intimate relationships between men, but this is probably not homosexuality in the way we think of it today. I suspect in the mid-19th century homosexuality was more about specific acts then about a mode of being, allowing men to express affection for one another without the threat of being perceived as gay. This was certainly true of women, who were very romantic in their expressions of friendship. The fact that men tended to associate exclusively with other men, especially when they’re trapped on a whaling vessel for years at a time, meant that men were their only source of close friendships. Yet, even if all these homoromantic relationships were between exclusively straight men, the sexual frustration they likely experienced on such voyages could very well lend to them some erotic and sensual undertones. And it certainly is fun to imagine Ishmael and Queequeg as a couple!
The story is not all about touchy-feely stuff, however. There is a whole lot of bad-assery going on, of the sort normally found in comic books. The Pequod is decked out in the bones of slain whales, Captain Ahab forges a harpoon with lightning, Fedallah is a smuggled-aboard Persian fire-worshipper who doesn’t sleep or cast a shadow, Queequeg shaves with his harpoon and weaves with his sword, and the White Whale goes around with old harpoons and even the bodies of old harpooners attached to his back. Half the crew is made up of “savages,” but Melville depicts them as competent and talented — they aren’t half as excitable or superstitious as the captain and his mates. I’d say this is a little of the Noble Savage trope at work, but it’s put in there to critique ideas of civilization and Christianity.
There are other reasons I think Moby-Dicks should be read humorously. Ahab keeps making awkward attempts to joke with his crew, and everyone stares at him blankly. There are those ridiculous whale-info passages wherein Melville declares whales to be fish. And there’s crazy Father Mapple who gives his sermon from a pulpit shaped like a ship’s prow: “The architect… finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea… Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. ‘Starboard gangway, there! side away to larboard — larboard gangway to startboard! Midships! Midships!’” Monomaniacal Ahab is not the only character in the book who is completely nuts!
The depictions of hunting and slaughtering whales are disturbing, perhaps especially because Ishmael often seems sympathetic to their plight. Yet the world ran on whale oil (and other whale parts) before we ever dug up petroleum: it fueled and greased the early factories of the industrial revolution. Melville talks about whales more often than it talks about the Pequod crew, and towards the end Starbuck, the first mate, points out that Moby-Dick is not actually obsessed with Ahab. The infamous White Whale doesn’t have personal vendetta against just one man. Perhaps Moby-Dick is so angry because all humans are killing all whales, everywhere, all the time. And he’s out to kick butt and take names! Where all the other whales run away in fear, Moby-Dick fights back.
What’s that on the horizon?
It’s a duck!
It’s a ship!
It’s Moby-Dick!
I suppose I should summarize my adventures at First Hand Projects, that is, the teen design-build summer program that one of my RISD professors, Daniel Hewett, roped me into. I was ostensibly going to be doing mostly organizational work, setting up FHP’s curriculum so that it could expand and not rely entirely on Daniel’s expertise. That may be tricky considering it was Daniel’s perseverance and improvisation that allowed this year’s two three-week sessions to appear as a coherent project, tying in his ad-hoc solutions along to way so that it all seemed planned and coordinated. Let me explain.
Every year the kids have a particular project, and this year’s (the third in FHP’s young history) was to create infrastructure that would tie Boston food trucks into the neighborhoods they visit in a less transient way. Boston is just introducing food trucks to their streets, and they have thirty trial sites in different communities. The idea was that we would have one of these sites as our main one, where we would install a prototype that could then be adapted to other sites if the city liked it. Unfortunately, the people from the city kept giving us sites without contacting those locally in charge, who were usually still trying to figure out if they liked the whole idea of food trucks in the first place. Daniel spent many hours on the phone trying to get us a site, using his charisma and negotiating skills to the hilt, to no avail… until we actually got a real live site, a mere week before the end of the program, at which point we had moved on to working with food trucks directly to develop a portable prototype that they could set up anywhere. Guerilla style.
We used digital fabrication technologies like the laser cutter for models and the CNC router for the full-scale mockups. We were partnered with MIT’s Larry Sacks, who specializes in this sort of thing, so we got study space in the heart of campus. Being able to go to work at MIT and spend time in the shop right next door to the Solar Electric Car group is pretty close to fulfilling my childhood dream of meeting Alan Alda at the Media Lab.
However, since the machines did all the work, we ended up with a lot of teenagers with only abstract design tasks instead of hammers and nails. At the end of the first session, they did get to build things with their own hands, and that was when the smart phones and summer reading were nowhere in sight!
One thing Daniel has down pat is the Socratic method. He can ask just the right questions to lead you to the answer he has already thought of. It’s almost like he’s implanting his ideas in your brain… except you learn a lot in the process because you work through the logic yourself. And ultimately it pushes your design much farther, if it is truly just your design at the end. The method is not perfect, though — the questioner can become impatient and pushy. That’s when the kids push back by producing bland designs that no longer interest them because “Daniel told us to do it this way.” “No,” I’d say to them, “you should only take advice you think it makes your project better.” This is a hard lesson to learn: even ponies get it wrong sometimes. Aaron, my co-worker, seemed to be getting the hang of it by the end, while I floundered to suppress saying my ideas out loud. My main method of getting the kids to work with me was by distracting them with improv games. Waa!
In the end, what I did was to keep the Facebook page up-to-date with photos and videos, take notes like an anthropologist on a strange island of immature designers, and whip together presentations. The kids, meanwhile, had the epic feat of creating two awesome modular systems: one hooks onto fences and telephone poles with two pieces to create a place for condiments, eating, and trash, and the other is a free-standing system for seating and signage. Clover, the most wonderful vegetarian food truck and restaurant in Cambridge, loved them (I’m sure it had nothing to do with the custom modules we made with their logo on them), and tomorrow we’re to have a small reunion to present them to City of Boston. Then I expect there is all sorts of messy wrap-up work to be done… and far from ruining the taste of hard-won victory, that’s where I my skills can be put to good use — far from shepherding teens*!
* They are all great kids, really! Well-behaved, highly skilled, and decent human beings. I just fail to exude that aura of authority or effortless camaraderie that inspire them to follow instructions.
I feel so much more grown up right now. Is it having a job? A summer romance? Yet all this growing up just makes me homesick. I recall bittersweetly those moments that seem to make up childhood: they seem to repeat themselves, become habitual in your memory, and it’s so confusing when someone else points out that it was much shorter and more infrequent in reality.
There was that one weekend at Salanna when we all made little cities out of beach things, each one a unique culture, and they formed elaborate trade relations and traditions.
When I was very small and I had a clearing in the woods behind the house that was full of fairies.
Singing and laughing on the bus with middle school friends in Costa Rica, where one of the tour guides called me “Anita Bonita” and the other told us tall tales to make us wear shoes.
Lying on the hammock with my dad, staring at the clouds while he read aloud to me and brother.
Walking into my room with a warm afternoon light shining through the curtains and dappling over the LEGO robotics on the floor.
Mostly the present doesn’t work like that. You have to tend your experience so that you end up with those kinds of expansive memories later on, and live in them all you want. I can tell when I’m going to have those kinds of memories because everything feels sort of slowed down, sleepy and golden, like I just picked up some key item in a video game.
But then, the last days of summer always feel like that. When the exciting prospect of change and future just don’t quite measure up to the fleeting bliss of a sunny afternoon and a lazy weekend. When it feels like the eye of a storm and you cannot quite imagine what adulthood or cruelty or suffering really look like… So maybe it’s not grown-up that I feel. It’s just contentment with who I am and who I may be and who I was before.
It feels uncomfortable to make judgements about how people choose to live their lives when their lifestyle decisions, though damaging to the environment, animals, or other people, are nonetheless unconscious or driven by non-hateful desires. I’ve realized it takes real conviction and not a small amount of energy to go against the status quo, especially when you don’t have the support of family and friends. My own transition to veganism was easy because I was not overly enamored of steak or cheese to begin with, my mom always referred to milk as “cow puss” as I was growing up, and the questions of animal intelligence and animal rights caught my interest to the point that they featured heavily in my Reed thesis about the semiotics (or meaning-making) of institutions. But then I would talk to other people, and they were thinking about the same issues I was addressing by being vegan. They just didn’t address them in the same way. Many praised my veganism but admitted not having the time or the motivation to change their own habits.
Is this truly a moral failing? In isolation perhaps, but doing the right thing is not clear cut in our globally intertwined society. If you want to avoid sweatshop-produced clothing, you face American Apparel’s appalling sexism. Tom’s of Maine and Anthropologie are owned by conservative republicans, so can you buy their products without considering what political agenda your money is ultimately supporting? Should I really get angry at my friend for buying coffee or chocolate that isn’t fairly traded?
The answer is no! Life is supremely complicated, and no one can devote infinite attention to all its minutia. There are too many connections, and no promise that your “good” choices will truly enact a larger change for the better. It would be better to devote energy and attention to what we love, and figure out how that can make a positive impact on the world, than to try always to be politically correct (no plastic! no carbon footprint!). Truly, I desire to be pure, monk-like, unsullied by the evils of this world, and sometimes I am willing to suffer to stick to my principles. But judging others harshly is unfair. They are likely making those choices out of a sense of joy and beauty — soul-soothing chocolate! a shirt that looks fabulous! — and compassion and kindness are nothing without those. In fact my own sense of duty may need be tempered a bit.
Institutions are more to blame than people in many situations. The obesity epidemic, for example, has led to a horrible trend of fat-shaming. But most people are not fat because they want to be bad: they are fat because they enjoy food, or because they have more pressing interests than seeking out healthier options, or because their bodies just work best that way, or because they feel most comfortable where they’re at. Many people are horribly unhealthy, but then, you often have to go out of your way to eat well and exercise regularly in modern human habitats. In the past people weren’t thinner because they were better people, but because their environment was better for them (in some ways at least). Instead of blaming individuals, we should blame the system, and seek a system that works better for the way humans actually function.
This is what the whole Patriarchy thing (and more generally, the Kierarchy) is about, too: it’s not about individuals randomly oppressing each other, but about how our culture perpetuates sexist (and homophobic and racist and ableist) behaviors and ideas. Such a system harms everyone because opportunities open up like doors only according to how well we fit the available elite stereotypes. White male privilege, for example, is like having a skeleton key to American institutions — and by the way, you have that privilege whether you use it or not — but the doors begin to close if your skin is darker, your pockets emptier, your body less abled, your lovers same-sex, your gender more queer. Institutions perpetuate themselves by insinuating themselves into our thought patterns and our unreflected actions. Not to mention the historical and economic pressures that institutions bring to bear.
I believe all people are good at the core. We try to do right by ourselves. And in the framework of things we truly care about and really think about, we will go out of our way to do the best that we can. Of course we should call people out when they’re being callous and hateful, and otherwise raise awareness of the issues that exist in this tangled net of social reality. But right now we’re mired in fighting each other instead of building a better world. We should make the default behaviors in our society humanist and environmentalist ones! The convenient choices should be the healthy ones! The problems exist between people not within particular persons. Even the purest monk still lives in a problematic society; escape does not afford change. Living vibrantly, though, and not accepting the status quo — that might inspire others to break out of the mold and forge some new patterns.
The Stata center is leaking. Or falling apart. Or something… there are cones and construction equipment around, and I hear rumors that someone’s getting sued. Gehry designs sculptures, not buildings: not human-habitable, human-maintainable buildings. You could also point the finger at the builders. But let’s be generous and not blame anyone in particular: this is a larger problem with architecture. Architects are encouraged to design objects that bear little relation to urban, historical, or social context, or their role as habitat. In the afternoons I’m working in I M Pei’s CGIS building, which has beautiful daylit offices all around the outside… and windowless fluorescent offices in the middle. With too few electrical outlets, no less.
I’ve been working through a book called How Buildings Learn by the guy who did the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand. It examines how buildings adapt to their inhabitants’ needs over time and thus stay useful, and how to design them to be easily maintainable and customizable in the first place. And a whole lot of how not to design buildings. The key is to start simple: don’t over-specify spaces and leave plenty of room to grow as needed, either by adding on or by changing the interior. Make it easy to repair and upgrade services and other high-turnaround parts, and design them so that maintenance needs are obvious rather than hidden. In addition to “High Road” buildings that are fancy-pants and built to be loved and meticulously cared for, Brand advocates for “Low Road” buildings, like warehouses, that are so crappy, there’s no cost to messing around. It reminded me of my senior year dorms at Reed, which were so fancy we weren’t allowed to muck around and customize the spaces for our college-kid needs… no glasses on the custom-made hardwood tables, please! Meanwhile the “temporary” cross-canyon dorms that were built in the 60′s were full of spiders and drafts, but the students who lived there totally owned the place. I never fully realized how much both High Road and Low Road buildings are needed… or how important the consideration of time is for architecture.
Trying out new materials, theories, and methodologies is great and all, but architects are not gallery artists. They are constrained not just by their own internal design logic or the current movements in the field, but by the realities of weather, technology, society, and biology. Buildings need people around who know how to repair them. They need to be upgraded gracefully when new innovations come along (like electricity! and wi-fi! and who knows what!) and eventually entirely new uses. They need to facilitate the people who have to live and work in them, adapting to human beings instead of forcing human beings to adapt to the architecture with frustration and headaches. We can’t just throw a bunch of money and material onto a site and have the whole thing be demolished in a decade or two because it doesn’t work. It’s like every company wanting their own style of glass bottle: suddenly you can’t reuse them as easily and they just contribute to throw-away culture. And buildings are awfully big things to throw away.
I’ve met one person who switched from architecture to building historian, and the architecture students who took my landscape studio last semester really wanted to switch majors. Apparently something wonky is going on, and it’s been going on for a while: Falling Water is falling. A Bauhaus architect tore down his client’s curtains to maintain his design’s simplicity. Modernism promised to bring about a more human-centric architecture without shallow nods to historical styles, but since so few Modernist buildings have succeeded in being humane, it seems that the loss of historical forms (which contained centuries of building experience embedded within them) was a net loss. I don’t want to push landscape architecture or interior architecture (aka adaptive reuse) as the solution, but a more systems-conscious approach is called for. Buildings don’t need to be noticed in the same way as art: the best designs are sometimes the most unnoticed because they do their job. MIT’s main building recently had its dome refurbished, but the thing people were excited about? The elevator button light got fixed! The big stuff fades away from people’s attention, so that a building is ultimately judges on how successfully or unsuccessfully it integrates itself into everyday life.
Why is it that I am fascinated by non-human intelligence and non-human language? I guess I don’t want our species to be alone in the universe with no one to talk to except ourselves. So a couple recent discoveries have gotten me really excited about the possibilities of sharing our linguistic capacity with other beings.
The first of these beings: prairie dogs! Con Slobodchikoff has found that praire dogs not only have calls to distinguish different predators, but they can identify specific shapes and colors. And they can combine adjectives to describe approaching animals, human researchers, and even abstract cardboard cutouts (take that, Paul Hovda). Slobodchikoff says that “essentially they were saying, ‘Here comes the tall human in the blue,’ versus, ‘Here comes the short human in the yellow.’” The experiments have been repeated among different groups of pairie dogs, but even so some folks are skeptical that it means anything interesting is going on in their heads… I wonder if they wonder the same thing about us.
But never fear! If anything can defend our ineffable brainiac abilities, it’s our ability to create robots. Robots that can communicate… and develop their own language. It’s almost like an experiment to test the theory put forth in Berger & Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, wherein they posit two pre-linguistic people who, through habitual cohabitation, develop a shared language. Ruth Schulz and her colleagues created little wheeled red robots called Lingodroids who can navigate their environment and assign phoneme combos to different locations. They then share these names and play games to reinforce their shared concept of what they mean. One might call out “reya!” and all the robots race to where they think “reya” is, and when they get there they can ask about where the other ones came from. They build up a vocabulary of direction and distance, too. The amazing thing is that all of this actually works: there was no guarantee that this “point and name” technique would result in a shared namespace, yet Schulz has some cool graphs of the Lingodroids’ brains that literally map their conceptual categories. Words for these bots do not stand for highly defined entities, but rather fuzzy, overlapping boundaries of the noosphere (the space of all ideas) that are unique to each individual. Locations that are farther from individuals’ direct, shared experience end up being divided up and named quite differently between robots, sort of like how we only have a vague idea what jargon outside our field means.
The Lingodroids can teach us a lot about language, socialization, and play. But perhaps even more amazing is that Schulz has succeeded in creating a sophisticated model of language in the first place. I mean, don’t we need some brilliant AI before we can teach it symbolic communication? Perhaps language is much more heuristic than it appears (or than we’d like to think). After all, simple-minded ELIZA and her descendants are halfway decent at carrying on a conversation as long as you stick to small-talk. Williams syndrome produces humans who are severely mentally handicapped yet have strong social and linguistic skills. Perhaps one doesn’t need an amazing brain to have amazing linguistic capabilities. After all, the world is an amazing and complex place even for the simplest of creatures — should it really come as such a surprise that more than one species has something to say about it?
