Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Denise RQ
Frankly speaking, I would prefer to talk about cats,
but I didn't know there is such an option,
so I'm afraid I'll tell you about something else,
something that I have thought about.
And I would like to start with a quotation
from an advertisement I saw once in the London Underground,
and it said, "Philosophers needed!"
Of course, you can understand that it was meant to be surprising,
probably ironic,
because philosophers are not usually those
who are particularly sought after by employers.
Actually, recently,
a friend of mine and a colleague told me that she had looked
at one of the internet websites
where job ads are placed,
and the only thing she could find under the section of culture
was female escorts.
Again, I'm sure that at least somebody in this room believes
that humanities and philosophy are not really useful,
but I would say they are.
Rather, the problem I see is that there is a certain kind of contradiction
between what students, employers,
different kind of authorities demand,
- basically, they demand
very straight forward and applicable skills -
and on the other hand, what humanities are willing to provide.
Humanities are more interested in influencing society and individuals
in an indirect, sort of long-term way.
Unfortunately,
quite often people from humanities react to this accusation of being useless
by sort of trying to imagine,
or sort of scare people
with doomsday visions of what the world will be like
without philosophy, history, and literature,
and I would say this is a rather impractical strategy,
because, I mean, if people are not really seriously scared
about the possibility of the destruction of the planet Earth,
it's very unlikely they will be scared about the collapse of philosophy.
So I would say that the only way how humanities can survive
is by trying to combine these two things:
ideals of humanities and practical aspects of humanities.
And there are practical aspects, of course, there are.
They are considered secondary,
but, I think, in this situation and the society that we live in,
there is no other way to focus on and develop those aspects
that I would consider practical.
One of these aspects is content design.
I missed one slide - so this is the main question that I wanted to ask,
but so I missed it, but it doesn't matter,
because the next important thing is this content design,
and I wanted to illustrate what I mean by content design with one example.
Just recently, I looked in one of the news portals,
and there was a list -
a list of talented children who have died young.
On this list, there was a Mexican singer Ritchie Valens
who died in an airplane crash,
and there was an extraordinary child artist Nadezhda,
- Nadezhda with some last name -
who died at the age of 17
from a stroke;
then there was the famous diarist of the Second World War
who, as you know, died in the concentration camp.
This list was placed in the section "Entertainment",
which was sort of surprising
because, I mean, there was nothing really entertaining about this list.
So I asked myself why the list is there.
In fact, it was very simple: the section "Entertainment"
had a subsection that was called "Celebrities",
and, of course, in some sense, these children were celebrities,
but it was obvious in some way that it was the wrong place for them.
Actually, some time ago, in the same section of entertainment,
there was an article about the death of an ex-president's dog,
which also, I would say, is sort of less entertaining for me
than maybe for the editors of this news portal.
What one must keep in mind
is that these people have a difficult problem
that they have to solve every day;
namely, they have huge amounts of information
that they somehow have to present,
and one of the basic ways how to present it
is by ordering, organizing it
according to certain kind of categories.
That is, I would say, one way how content design works.
The basic idea of content design, what I call content design,
is, I would say, very simple: it's organizing complex content.
Well, I came up with a more elaborate definition,
but the basic idea remains,
and notice, the word, the idea
in a way is nothing new.
I mean, first of all, content design is a notion that is used by programmers
to describe a certain kind of processes they do when they develop software.
But I would like to use it in a wider sense,
and in this sense, editors, creative producers, curators
are also content designers
because they have to organize a certain kind of content.
In a way, of course, we could say: "Well, why do we need such a new word
and a fancy kind of concept?"
But from my experience, there is such a necessity.
The experience I would like to refer to is
my work in a team
that developed a museum in Qobustan, in Azerbaijan.
The basic idea was that this is a museum of prehistoric rock art
that is discovered in this area which is now UNESCO World Heritage site.
The Azerbaijani government decided
to replace the old museum with something newer,
and so I was part of this Latvian team that worked on it.
That was great experience.
I mean, I'm a philosopher, so I work mostly on my own,
but here I had this teamwork experience;
that was very interesting and exciting for me.
But there is one problem that I noticed:
nobody really understood who I am in this team,
so what my function is and what the name is for describing it.
Because I was not really creating content, but arranging it,
I was formulating what will be in each room,
what kind of objects there will be,
what will be written in the information stands,
I had to decide what species of stuffed animals we will have.
That was the moment when came to this notion of content design,
and frankly speaking, nobody really took it seriously.
Their reaction was something like:
"Well, OK, content design, I mean, we'll think about it."
But actually I think that's the right word,
the right notion to describe
a certain kind of function that is very important
and is becoming more and more important in the world that we live in.
There are several reasons
why this content design is important.
I won't dwell on all three aspects of it.
Basically, one is that we have huge amounts of information,
that we don't have capacity and time to grasp,
so there must be some organization of this content of this information.
Second thing is that, of course, multimedia has destroyed
borders between different kinds of --
not multimedia, but electronic technologies
have destroyed this border between different kinds of media,
and really you can combine very freely and easily
sound, and pictures, and moving pictures, and objects, and whatever you like.
And again, this interaction between these different media
is important to manage,
but I would like to dwell a bit on this collaboration aspect,
again which is very important,
and we know that nowadays content
is produced not by one person, but many,
often is produced by many people together.
There are some great opportunities in it, but also some difficulties.
And one of the difficulties is
what I called the Prostokvashino effect, or the Buttermilk effect.
This is a reference to a cartoon,
an animated film from the Soviet times in 1970s
about the boy called Uncle Fyodor, and his cat, and a dog,
so after all, I had a cat in my presentation.
So a cat and a dog, and there was one scene
where this boy is writing a letter to his parents.
Something distracts him, and he leaves the letter unfinished on the table.
Then the dog comes and notices the letter,
and writes something down, and then leaves.
And then the cat comes, and again, adds some more lines,
and then the parents get the letter, read it
and simply can't understand what is going on.
I mean, I think some hair was falling out,
so they were really worried about what is happening with their boy.
Unfortunately, that is often how collaboration works.
I mean, that is often how content is produced,
especially, if we are talking about a longer period of time
when people are replaced,
and so they continue the work of the previous content creator.
The result is often very, I don't know,
contradictory,
sort of irrational--
I don't know, web pages, texts,
and eclectic exhibitions.
And I would say that here we can see
how content design could help to do this.
And notice, these are things
that people in humanities are very good at:
they know how to analyze concepts,
they know how to recognize the structure of the text,
they know how to create a coherent story.
Of course, one thing that scares many people from humanities
is that by becoming practical
they will make humanities
something like a tool for manipulation with people,
and I agree
that there is a certain kind of possibility of this,
but still, I would say that content design
is not just about making some content easy for consumption;
it's more about
not being lost in the information,
more about getting what you want, what you need,
more about making informed decisions,
and in a way, it's about the art of doing.
Thank you.
(Applause)