Country

It seems as I plow through hundreds of hours transcribing these conversations with research Participants that as the Researcher the more I listen and reflect on what they are emphasizing in conversation, the more I better understand what is missing from their conversations.

Things that start and end back at the same beginning or a derivative of that beginning in a changed state seems to drive the whole prototyping, testing, development, marketing, aggregation, and normalising of wearable computing technologies and yet … absolute silence except for a very few participants as to what the essence of ‘place’ is for them and how this differs from how wearable computing technologies ‘locate’ them in their personal and professional lifeworld.

Loops maybe are the essence of things that bring about change or retard a ‘state’ enough for it to return or go back further than its present state, which may mean whole nations equipping law enforcement with BWC claiming this as ‘beneficial’ research participants equally consider this as evidence of potential ‘detriment’, the results of which are yet to be observed.

In a technological context this could mean that what humanity thought BWC is as a point of difference or progress is in fact little more than a loop, incremental perhaps or not at all, which means we need a new frame in which to consider how BWC contributes to the lived state of humanity.

There are so many loop examples that it seems possible that perhaps everything is in a perpetual state of returns and that what we define as progress is in fact a loop - a non or hardly discernible changed state. In a cultural context, this could be attributed to much of what we experience in community but there are exceptions, mutations, and derivatives, and the most important loop changer beyond a consumer-fed digital location, is for those the Researcher has connected with, the lived ’sense of place’.

Country, at the epicenter of all learning.

Nyikina Women, Development & Agency

Malkay My Name