In the United Kingdom, as is the case in the US, Canada, and the OECD, a preferred way of knowing about policy projects is through a lens of Costs and Benefits – where numbering practices take the form of valuing the inputs of a project and calculating its “value for money” by dividing that value by the project’s perceived outcomes. The production of this sort of representation is usually represented as a technical procedure-like activity aimed at supporting policy decisions and which involves a straightforward movement from Costs, through Benefits, to public worth.
Project Spaces attempts a ludic exploration of this ‘straight-forwardness’ of movement invovled in how numbers in government are done. It draws from ethnographic fieldwork with policy analysts working in the context of municipal governance in neoliberal Britain.
When studying the figuration of economic evidence within a public management consultancy in North England, it became apparent to the ethnographer that this knowledge work – while presented and talked about as a straightforward affair – is driven towards, directed at, and provoked by a plurality of concerns. From certain angles, the entities involved in this work (numbers, ratios, tables, policy analysts, the futures of a project being evaluated, etc.) come together through analysts’ concern with representation and the truth of numbers. From others, analysts’ efforts enact not accuracy, but adherence to standards, stretching numbers and imagined challenges along the lines of method and rules. Yet from another, it is effectivity, or organisational impact that seems to be at stake with numbers. Consequently, and as these spaces of relating are not necessarily commensurable, at their time of fabrication economic numbers are encountered as an ossiliation, a problem of attachment. Rather than an image of clear-and-distinct objects that are the inputs and outputs of technical tools, this alternative image puts in abeyance accounts of numberical work which renders them mechanical, gearbox-like procedures.
Project Spaces invovles a ludic environment expressing this difference. Utilizing game development principles and using Unreal Engine 4.0, a popular game engine, the project consists the development of a short interactive experience that relates to the description of the knowledge work above.
Spaces Projects also has methodological ambitions. Research work done in the domain of Science Studies has demonstrated the poverty of reflection that exists within the social sciences in regards their own knowledge-making practices. By studying the knowledge-making practices of policy analysts, Spaces Projects also seeks to explore social science’s own practices of producing and achieving knowledge. Traditionally, social science research is done in ways which draw on 2D imagry in order to visualise assumed relations between theoretical concepts, empirical phenomena, or both. These might take the form of flowcharts, diagrams, charts, graphs, or in the case of more qualitative oriented research perhaps photographs and illustrations. Instead of supporting textual argumentation with a visual, imagery-based artifact, Project Spaces experiments with a different kind of argumentation support – the registration of differences through digital ludic expression.
Importantly, the interest of the project is not in the creation of simulations of reality (= asking how to create gameworlds that mimic field encounters?). Instead, the focus is on the potential of using ludic manipulation of 3D interactive space in theoretical interrogation (= asking what does it mean and what can it do to inscribe theoretical positions in interactable 3D space instead of on a mute two-dimensional graph?). It is interested in understanding the affordances of this dynamic environment for research, how it differs from traditional 2D-based depictions, how it might change our conclusions, and how it might contribute to practitioners.
Project Spaces 