Preoccupations

Celebrating Colin St John Wilson, architect of the British Library

Quoted by Fiona MacCarthy:

A great library is like a coral reef whose exquisite structure as it grows proliferates a living network of connectedness, and its ramification is all of a piece, like knowledge itself — the knowledge that bridges the endless curiosity of the human mind, from the first pictogram to the latest microchip.

(That coral reef thing again.) (Libraries and conversation! Michael Oakeshott!)

Technorati tags: British Library, Colin St John Wilson, libraries, knowledge, conversation, Michael Oakeshott

Comics are in everything

Welcoming Jack Schulze to St Paul's a week ago was the realisation of a long-held wish: it is, of course, an understatement to say that Jack and Matt continually surprise and delight, prompting and pushing us on to think about, to see things in new ways.

At Interesting2007 (start at the bottom of that page, with a possible date for your diary), Jack gave a fantastic (and warmly received) talk on comics. (I blogged about Interesting here.) When we cooked up the idea of Jack coming in to talk to some of our students, I really wanted comics in the frame. Anyone who knows Jack knows how comics — their design, their playfulness — inform his work as designer.

Jack's and Matt's design work is a challenge in a number of ways. For UK schools (perhaps for a long time — but certainly now) there's far too little in the curriculum that prepares you for how they think and work. I can imagine how even the diverse influences that inform their work might seem at first bewildering, even unassimilable. Since Jack spoke here, what's struck me is how all who heard him seem to have got hold of something (and haven't readily let go) and, in some cases, seem to have understood him whole and from the start — great for any speaker/teacher to feel this quick rush of comprehension at an intuitive (I'm-on-this-wavelength) level.

Some of our students may find it helpful if I pull together some links here for the different parts of Jack's talk. In order of appearance, then: 

1) Lab-Grown Meat, 2005:

 

While at the RCA, Jack took part in a brief run by Tony Dunne on the industrial future of food and lab-grown meat (a staple of the newspaper columns in 2005). This presentation comes from a two week exploration that also involved the making of replica origami food, as shown in the slides.

From Dunne’s original brief: Scientists are developing methods of growing meat in labs using animal cells. This area of research, called In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production raises all sorts of complex issues about the meaning of food, our relationship to animals (and nature), human values and behaviours, and even taboos. [...] The purpose of the project is to explore how design can be used as a medium to draw attention to the social, cultural and ethical implications of ‘cultured meat’.

2) Metal phone (Nokia Personalisation), 2005. This link takes you to all the postings about the project; you can start with Overview:

We’re working with practitioners of a number of different crafts to explore how their materials affect the mobile phone. We’re experimenting with the short-run manufacturing techniques available in small workshops and on desktops to look at, for example, the impact of Rapid Form Prototyping on phone housing.

3) Olinda, 2007:

For the past month we’ve been working on the feasibility of Olinda, a DAB digital radio prototype for the BBC (for non-UK readers: DAB is the local digital radio standard, getting traction globally). That stage is almost over now - oh and yes, it’s feasible - so now’s a good time to talk. 

Olinda puts three ideas into practice: 

• Radios can look better than the regular ‘kitchen radio’ devices. Radios can have novel interfaces that make the whole life-cycle of listening easier. At short runs, wood is more economic as plastic, so we’re using a strong bamboo ply. And forget preset buttons: Olinda monitors your listening habits so switching between two stations is the simplest possible action, with no configuration step. 
• This can be radio for the Facebook generation. Built-in wifi connects to the internet and uses a social ‘now listening’ site the BBC already have built. Now a small number of your friends are represented on the device: A light comes on, your friend is listening; press a button and you tune in to listen to the same programme. 
• If an API works to make websites adaptive, participative with the developer community, and have more appropriate interfaces, a hardware API should work just as well. Modular hardware is achievable, so the friends functionality will be its own component operating through a documented, open, hardware API running over serial.

What Olinda isn’t is a far-future concept piece or a smoke-and-mirrors prototype. There’s no hidden Mac Mini–it’s a standalone, fully operational, social, digital radio.

The hardware API link above is well worth following. I'd also recommend Jack's three posts: Drawing Olinda, Olinda interface drawings, Olinda connections. 

4) Comics

Jack blogged his Interesting talk here — and lists the comics and authors he admires most. The slides of his talk are here. The wonderful Will Burtin image (drawn from a rifle manual) can be found in Burtin vs. Ellis/Williams, where Jack discusses it in relation to one of my all-time favourite images — page 5 of Desolation Jones #1 by Warren Ellis and J H Williams III. Warren Ellis has written about this image on his blog, quoting from the original script:

Pic 1: Surreal moment: Jones looks out the passenger-side window and there’s a thick RED LINE taking the place of the road, running alongside them – a massively magnified version of the kind of line that describes roads on maps.

Pic 3: AERIAL SHOT: The car is small in this shot, and it’s driving down a red line that describes a road, and now the rest of the map, of greater LA, is visible all around it…

Jack:

Look at the way the red line connects the sequence. The line morphs between road markings, Indiana Jones style aerial map views and back to the light trails from the vehicle. Williams guides your eye through the page, setting the page’s pace and rhythm. Optically it is very clever, it deals with how your eye scans at speed and also stitches the cue into the content of the panels. …

Burtin and Williams both use letters and images, in a sequence, on the page, and expect them to be read in two different ways: First in overview and then in detail. They deal with arrangement, pace and rhythm with the same sensitivity and same language. 

Comics are in everything.

Finally, Jack spoke about the work of Shintaro Kago …

Mr. Kago is what you’d call an ero-guro artist — that is, he specializes in bizarre and oftentimes disturbing manga with a hefty amount of blood, nudity, gore and violence. Don’t let this discourage you: I think what I find most interesting is the way he challenges paneling conventions. The idea of paneling in comics is to find the most ideal way to lead the eye of the reader in order to communicate a story. Mr. Kago pushes this to the limit. In his work “Abstraction”, Mr. Kago even goes a step further by integrating his experimentation with panels into the story in itself by making it a part of the plot. Read Or Die Weblog

  ***** 

My thanks to Jack for a wonderful talk. Here are a couple of bonus leads for all who came to hear him:

Warren Ellis » A Useful Quote:

“Science fiction is a way of thinking about things.” – Frederik Pohl 

Which may seem like a small notion. But it’s possibly the best working definition of sf I’ve yet come across, insofar as it does the crucial business of inviting the body in front of you to consider sf as a tool with which to understand the contemporary world.

The Pinocchio Theory » Sex + Love With Robots:

More precisely, SF (and nonfiction futuristic speculation as well) is a tool with which to understand those aspects of the contemporary world that are unfinished, still in process, and therefore (as it were) redolent of futurity. SF and futurism are vital and necessary, because they make us stop and look at the changes going on all around us, breaking with the “rear-view-mirrorism” (as Marshall McLuhan called it) that otherwise characterizes the way we tend to look at the world. That’s why I find it indispensable to read people like Bruce Sterling, Jamais Cascio, Charles Stross, Warren Ellis, and so on. The line between science fiction and futurist speculation is an extremely thin one (and some of the people on my list, most notably Sterling, explicitly do both). Extrapolating the future is necessarily a fiction-making activity; but we can’t understand the present, or be ready for the future, unless we go beyond empirical fact and turn to fiction.

Technorati tags: Jack Schulze, Schulze & Webb, social hardware, hardware APIs, Interesting2007, Olinda, comics

Adactio hits St Paul's

It was such a pleasure to welcome Jeremy Keith to SPS last Tuesday, to talk about 'Designing for the Social Web'. As expected, it was a tour de force — but one which artfully concealed its learning and expertise so that everything was at once informed and accessible to the interested but not geekily literate.

Jeremy blogged the talk and visit here: I like his succinct overview of his talk as being about 'small world networks, the strength of weak ties, portable social networks and, inevitably, microformats'. Adam blogged it here; Alex, here. Jeremy's slides are available on Slideshare.

Adam's blog post captures very well much of what the talk was about. Part of his overview runs:

He began by outlining a brief history of the internet working his way from mailing lists and BBS to the modern social web, comparing and contrasting how they functioned and detailing the pitfalls of each. He gave specific weight to problems such as trolling and flaming, catalyzed by communities (usually over the dunbar limit) which lack a central aim and the methods by which these problems could be minimized, including keeping the community focused around groups. He named a few websites which managed this issue well (last.fm, delicious) as well as lambasting digg for failing on this front.

*****

A word about Web 2.0. Now over two years "old" — two years, that is, since Tim O'Reilly's classic paper, What Is Web 2.0; (see, also, his 2006 posting, Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again) — Web 2.0 means all things to all men: rounded corners and drop shadows; tagging; business models; leveraging collective intelligence … I hope the link to Tim O'Reilly's paper may be useful to some who attended Jeremy's talk, but this was not a talk that put this buzzword at the centre.

*****

Networks can scale very well but people don't. This is the challenge for social software design. Jeremy singled out four things to focus on and I've found myself digging back into these in the days since he spoke:

1) Social objects (eg, events — Upcoming; photos — Flickr; bands/albums/songs — Last.fm). This made me go back to Jyri's classic blog post, Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality (2005). (And see, too, his 2007 blog posting, What makes a good social object.) I recall, also, Stewart Butterfield talking about Flickr in these terms — something I blogged about here.

2) Community guidelines: 'be civil' (Jeremy's Irish music site, The Session); 'be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members' (Flickr); 'use common sense while posting' (Last.fm). As a school, when we go to set up a site (on Flickr, on Last.fm), guidelines are what we we soon start to think about. The advice here is sane, straightforward — and necessary.

3) Phatic communication. We miss this online. We long ago adopted emoticons, and some emergent social software just is phatic: eg, Twitter. (Facebook does phatic well.) Jeremy mentioned Leisa Reichelt's work on ambient intimacy (March, 2007) and Twitter:

I’ve been using a term to describe my experience of Twitter (and also Flickr and reading blog posts and Upcoming). I call it Ambient Intimacy. Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. … There are a lot of us … who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy. (It also saves a lot of time when you finally do get to catchup with these people in real life!) It’s not so much about meaning, it’s just about being in touch.

I remember, too, Ian Curry's Twitter: The Missing Messenger (February, 2007):

It’s basically blogging reduced to what the Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin referred to as “the phatic function. (see note below)” Like saying “what’s up?” as you pass someone in the hall when you have no intention of finding out what is actually up, the phatic function is communication simply to indicate that communication can occur. It made me think of the light, low-content text message circles Mizuko Ito described existing among Japanese teens - it’s not so important what gets said as that it’s nice to stay in contact with people. These light exchanges typify the kind of communication that arises among people who are saturated with other forms of communication.

This brought us on to the network effect of weak ties, which made me think of Joi Ito writing (in 2003) about Granovetter's classic 1973 paper, The Strength of Weak Ties:

Strong ties are your family, friends and other people you have strong bonds to. Weak ties are relationships that transcend local relationship boundaries both socially and geographically. He writes about the importance of weak ties in the flow of information and does a study of job hunting and shows that jobs are more often found through weak ties than through strong ties. This obviously overlaps with the whole 6 degrees thing. … What I can see emerging is a way to amplify the strength of weak ties.

And here's Grant McCracken, How social networks work: the puzzle of exhaust data (July, 2007):

Naturally, networks, especially really distributed, anti-hierarchical ones of the kind we like, are profoundly reciprocal enterprises.  So it is especially true here that, as George Herbert Mead observed, our knowledge of ourselves depends upon what (and that) others know about us.  Or, to put this another way, we we find ourselves when others find us. … I'm ok and you're ok.  This means the channel must be ok, and this means that the network must exist, and this means that the network is ok, and this means that the network is active, and this means the network is flowing.  There is a "superorganic" concept of the network at work here, according to which every small moment of phatic communications so reverberates that we are briefly and tinyily reminded of our larger network and social connections.

This has all left me thinking I want to revisit network theory and weak ties.

4) Open Data: we make these sites (an old argument, as we all know). APIs, RSS, microformats all enable us to get away from the idea of a web site as a place and enable us to extract and redeploy our and others' data. We have mashups (photos+events; maps+photos …), lifestreams. (The time stamp is key.) Jeremy has written about lifestreams here and his own is online here. (See, also, Thomas Vander Wal, Life Data Stream :: Personal InfoCloud. And, on Jaiku as lifestream, Are You Paying Attention?: Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Loopnote.) 

Questions about privacy follow, inevitably. As Jeremy suggests (following Jeff Veen), there may be a generational difference here, younger people tending to think "my data is public except where I say it is private". I was glad Jeremy found time to talk about his experience with the Flickr API, Lock up your data: 'I don’t know the answers but I’m fairly certain that we’re not dealing with a technological issue here; this is a cultural matter'.

*****

One thing even the successful social software sites don't share well so far is our social groups — which brought us swiftly to the idea of portable social networks. Here are a few touchstone reference points I've collected recently:

"If you add content to a site, then you should be able to take that content with you. You should also be able to take all associated tags and metadata. You should be able to move your content from one site to another." MoveMyData.org

"… you should be able to import or preferably subscribe to your profile information [and] your social network from any existing profile of yours. In addition it would be nice if preferences around notifications [and] privacy also transferred between profiles" Social Network Portability

"it seems like a no-brainer to design systems that allow for simple import/export of your social network. ... Today I want to walk through the mechanics of how Dopplr is working on helping you migrate your social network." LikeItMatters

"Great experiences & trust are going to be key differentiators. ... We’ve seen this movie before and walled gardens eventually get about as interesting as Biosphere 2. ... make your networking data open ... it’s the smart play given how the Web works" LikeItMatters

A lot of the data that's needed to make social networks portable is out there in the URLs, the microformats (XFN, hCards ...). Provided we accept a Pareto-like solution (over the semantic web — which works well in places with very structured data such as museums and universities), we can get to a very good end-result of portability.

*****

Finally, two things I read last night that I think are wise about how we should proceed with social software and networking. The first is a blog posting, the second a comment on the same. (Adam's argument is that 'the whole milieu in which these concerns of openness and portability are contained is broken - and not just a little broken, but badly so'. His argument challenges, as he says, a hugely popular approach to social networking online. For my part, I think Mike's comment is dead right.)

Adam Greenfield: 

For all of these reasons, I believe that technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with.

I understand that this is very much a minority opinion, and one which will not carry the day. But neither is it simply the knee-jerk, reactionary rejection of technology; I see it as a demand, rather, that we use information technology for the things it’s good at, and keep it far, far from the things it damages at first touch. I feel far too strongly about my friends and about the experiences we’ve shared, and which I cherish, to submit any of them to the idiot regime of social networking as it is currently understood.

Mike Migurski: 

The only sane social network relationships I’ve seen are modeled in terms of the objects featured on that network: who gets to “see your trips” or “view your photos” is a superior description of a relationship than “friend”.

Technorati tags: social networking, web, friendship, friending, semantic web, portable social networks, lifestreams, social objects, phatic communication, ambient intimacy, weak ties, microformats, open data

Snap

I've always loathed Snap previews, but this has been going around — Anil Dash, commenting on Something Snap.com this way comes:

so, I really don't know the details of any business relationship we have with Snap, and I have to confess the previews bug the crap out of me, too.

But here's the thing: Regular people on the web *love* Snap previews. I know you don't believe it -- I didn't want to believe it. But it's completely true. In the testing and feedback I've seen, it's some emotional pull about the fact that links "do something" now, instead of just being on the page. I know we all feel these people are idiots, but it's our own geek cultural imperialism that makes us think we know better than non-techy folks.

I can't claim to really understand why this is the case, but I know far better than to question people's emotions about such things. :) My first reaction was "ew, omg, opt-in only, please!", but you will be totally shocked how many people will delight in having them. And yep, you can block 'em completely for yourself.

Snap.com came to LiveJournal, then, in September, following Vox.

Technorati tags: Snap.com, LiveJournal, Anil Dash, user experience

Evocative Objects

From Stephen Fry's new, weekly Guardian technology column:

Apple gets plenty of small things wrong, but one big thing it gets right: when you use a device every day, you cannot help, as a human being, but have an emotional relationship with it. It's true of cars and cookers, and it's true of computers. It's true of office blocks and houses, and it's true of mobiles and satnavs. A grey box is not good enough, clunky and ugly is not good enough. Sick building syndrome exists, and so does sick hand-held device syndrome. Fiddly buttons, blocky icons, sickeningly stupid nested menus - these are the enemy. They waste time, militate against function and lower the spirits. They make the user feel frustrated and (quite wrongly) dense. Mechanisms so devilishly, stunningly, jaw-dropping clever as the kind our world can now furnish us with are No Good Whatsoever if they don't also bring a smile to our face, if they don't make us want to stroke, touch, fondle, fiddle, gurgle, purr and coo. Interacting with a digital device should be like interacting with a baby.

Made me think of Sherry Turkle — see previous post — and Evocative Objects:

For Sherry Turkle, "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with." In Evocative Objects, Turkle collects writings by scientists, humanists, artists, and designers that trace the power of everyday things. These essays reveal objects as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships, and provoke new ideas.

(I can't resist quoting Fry's last paragraph: "If I had a grain of rice for every minute I have spent watching a progress bar over the years, I would be able to make you all a bowl of kedgeree. As it is, I shall cook you all up a weekly article instead. I do hope you'll be able to join me. See you next Saturday.")

Technorati tags: Stephen Fry, Sherry Turkle, evocative objects, style

Dymaxion cubicle

A week ago today, I was in the Design Museum (enjoying the Zaha Hadid exhibition — a few photos here, though sadly I couldn't do her wonderful project paintings justice). A surprise to me was the Buckminster Fuller cubicle door drawing — in the Gents. I seemed to have the room to myself, so I took a couple of photos of the door (wondering what I'd say if someone came in or, worse by far, if the cubicle turned out not to be empty after all).

So that was that, and then Stowe noticed that Dopplr had used Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map in their Dopplr 100 launch. From Wikipedia:

The Dymaxion map of the Earth is a projection of a global map onto the surface of a polyhedron, which can then be unfolded to a net in many different ways and flattened to form a two-dimensional map which retains most of the relative proportional integrity of the globe map. It was created by Buckminster Fuller, and patented by him in 1946, the patent application showing a projection onto a cuboctahedron. The 1954 version published by Fuller under the title The AirOcean World Map used a slightly modified but mostly regular icosahedron as the base for the projection, and this is the version most commonly referred to today. The name Dymaxion was applied by Fuller to several of his inventions.

Unlike most other projections, the Dymaxion is intended purely for representations of the entire globe. Each face of the polyhedron is a gnomonic projection, so zooming in on one such face renders the Dymaxion equivalent to such a projection.

Dymaxion map folded into an icosahedron

Fuller claimed his map had several advantages over other projections for world maps. It has less distortion of relative size of areas, most notably when compared to the Mercator projection; and less distortion of shapes of areas, notably when compared to the Gall-Peters projection. Other compromise projections attempt a similar trade-off.

More unusually, the Dymaxion map has no 'right way up'. Fuller frequently argued that in the universe there is no 'up' and 'down', or 'north' and 'south': only 'in' and 'out'. Gravitational forces of the stars and planets created 'in', meaning 'towards the gravitational center', and 'out', meaning 'away from the gravitational center'. He linked the north-up-superior/south-down-inferior presentation of most other world maps to cultural bias. Note that there are some other maps without north at the top.

There is no one 'correct' view of the Dymaxion map. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth's continents - not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.

Which set me thinking: that Buckminster Fuller is someone we ought to be teaching in schools, of course (and I can see how we might start doing that easily enough — and soon), and about Dopplr and good design. For another very cool Dopplr ... er ... effect, if you've not seen their sparkline stack and read Matt's post about it, you really should.

Technorati tags: Buckminster Fuller, dymaxion, dymaxion map, maps, mapping, Dopplr

FOWA

I didn't go to this latest get-together (I did make the March 07 meet: see here), but we sprung five final year students from school for the day ... and I think they had a ball.

Alex's FOWA photoset is here — and Michael's, here, was picked up on (quite independently) by Marc Eisenstadt, here.

Chatting with Marc by email, he commented on what great role models FOWA gives up-and-coming teenagers. Tom Coates said the same thing to me about Kevin Rose (when we met last month at a dinner held for Howard Rheingold). I think that's all spot on.

Alex has a preliminary write-up here, Michael has posted twice — Future of Web Apps, The Future of Web Apps, and Diggnation: A Round-up, and (update!, 7/10) Adam has just posted an excellent piece on his blog, Future Of Web Apps & Diggnation.

Technorati tags: FOWA, Future of WebApps, conferences, Kevin Rose

Forgetting, again

A post by Abe Burmeister set me thinking, again, about forgetting.

A friend said yesterday, 'After all, when we were young, at some point, we all did something, whatever it was — ran naked down some street, something …'. A photo taken then meant that we were caught forever, always running naked down that street, but it might have disappeared for much of its life, gathering dust in some drawer. Now that photo makes it (straight) to the web and to a kind of permanence and presence (even ubiquity) never before possible. The years pass, but the (by now distributed) photo doesn't.

Back in 2003, Fabio Sergio wrote about how,

… with everyone apparently fascinated with ways to remember I find myself toying with the idea of "technologies for forgetting" … All in all we are facing a future strung tight between the ideal, pacific world of the Memex, where man will be given "access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages", and one where Lenny Nero will feel at home, characterized by our collective inability to let go of our past.

I keep hoping (and working) for the first scenario to become our future, but recognize it will require active involvement from everyone, driven by ample awareness of what's at stake.

Over at Abstract Dynamics yesterday, Abe was saying something similar (in a piece about Gmail and Google's goal of "organizing all the world's information"):

Some information is meant to disappear, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Google it seems is not willing to make that distinction, although ironically they more than any other entity have the power to make things disappear. …

'Some information is meant to disappear', or be mediated. The memory of that time when as a kid you ran naked down some street can linger on in the telling, to be recalled years later, embellished and without its sting, a source of amusement, leg-pulling and amicable, entertaining embarrassment — your children delighted both at your discomfort and at discovering that once you were just like them. But a stark photo on the web, that's copied and posted again and again, sent to the senior partner of your new firm the day you're about to start working there, published in a newspaper years later …

Fabio imagines an angry argument between Mr A and Mr B, and imagines it twice — unfilmed and filmed. In the first case,

After a few days they hook up again, matters having cooled off and all, and they talk about the incident, re-living the discussion while trying to clear things up.The inherent fuzziness of their recollection helps in dumbing sharp edges down, as we have been proven to remember positive things better and negative things less clearly, and in the end they agree on a common explanation of the argument, thus creating the possibility for their relationship to evolve around the event. What is important here, though, is that what actually happened matters as much as what they mutually agreed happened. The final experience, mediated through their second conversation, has the opportunity to change from negative to positive, leaving clarification in place of contrast. All's well that ends well, right?

With filmed evidence of what actually happened,

… there will be simply less room to maneuver for both of them, less room to mediate experience into memory. Due to the timelessness quality of the digitally-produced artifacts, which potentially shine as new forever after they've been first created, Mr. A's descendants will still be able to hear (and judge) Mr. B's words and attitude. Take this one social magnitude level higher and what you get is a society unable to let go of its past's tiniest details.

Forgetting strikes me as something we need to pay a lot more attention to as we go forward with digital technology. It crops up in surprisingly different contexts (IT departments should check out danah boyd's post about teenagers and passwords — 'Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting').

And now I remember it, Anne Galloway wrote back in 2003 about forgetting:

We need to forget certain things to survive and stay together. What will happen if everything is tracked and recorded. How will we be able to forget? Will the owners and administrators of the data allow us to forget? For example, we have social and cultural practices (expectations and norms) in place that accommodate comments MADE IN PASSING ... what if certain comments are not allowed to pass?

And also this from 2004, on the Forgetting Machine:

So I was reminded of my Forgetting Machine. And that I am trying to build something that reminds us that not all things can or should be remembered. A tricky task, for sure! Part of this involves the creative corruption of information - along the lines of bricolage or remixing - as well as the selective and wholesale deletion of information.

Anne's paper (2006, I think), 'Collective remembering and the importance of forgetting: a critical design challenge', is available here (pdf). From the Abstract:

Memories are understood as relations of power through which we, as individuals and groups, actively negotiate and decide what can be recollected and what can be forgotten. And without being able to decide what we can remember and forget, we are effectively left without hope of becoming different people or creating different worlds.

That's absolutely my concern for the teenagers posting photos and stories about themselves and each other. I want for them (as I want for my own children) the possibility of their becoming different people, to have the chance to let experience grow into memory and to be allowed to let go, to forget.

Anne has a fine phrase in her paper, 'ubiquitous machines of merciless memory' — 'there is such a thing as too much memory … we need to forget in order to live'. Fabio Sergio asks: 'Are we heading towards an über-politically correct world, where we'll be forced to always ponder all of our words for fear of getting quoted 20 years from now … a future devoid of the room for doubt?'

This, then, is something we also need to be talking about in ICT: forgetting and remembering. I commend Anne's paper very warmly. It asks wise questions — 'What does it really mean if the memories held by our machines never change or get forgotten?' — and remembers that forgetting can be 'a kind of affirmation rather than … a denial. … the value of forgetting is its ability to interrupt time or escape temporal continuity, and thus (re)imagine human experience'. Her paper challenges designers to remember all this, too, and to design accordingly and wisely.

Technorati tags: memory, remembering, forgetting, Fabio Sergio, Anne Galloway, ICT, IT

East and West

Reading Don Norman's post, The geography of thought, which I think went up earlier this month, made me recall a couple of posts in the same vein. Don Norman wrote briefly about The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why, Richard Nisbett's book:

… people from China, Japan, and South Korea show important differences in the way they perceive, classify, and judge objects and events from people in the United States and Western Europe. Westerners believe in the primacy of objects and logic, that is, logic as defined by early Greek scholars. Thus, if there are two contradictory statements, one must be wrong, the other right. Westerners tend to see objects and when learning a language, to learn nouns before verbs. East Asians believe in relationships and context. When there are contradictory statements, they try to understand the context and find a resolution that accepts both — think Yin and Yang. East Asians tend to see contexts and place as much importance on the background as the foreground. In learning a language they learn relationships first, which means verbs rather than nouns.

The posts I was reminded of are both by Kathy Sierra and date from April/May 2005: Difference between Japan and US and Context matters. (I see I've linked to these before. They must matter to me.) In the latter, she, too, talks about The Geography of Thought:

American design is actually Design (capital "D"), done by Designers (and done well). In Japan, design is a stronger part of the culture whether its a tiny patch of grass an old woman crafts into a beautiful garden, or a city manhole cover, or a box lunch. It infuses everything. It's studied and practiced in a hundred different ways by a much greater range of the population than occurs here. Here, in the US, Design is practiced by Designers. There, in Japan (and many other countries as well... Sweden comes to mind), design is practiced by both Designers and... designers. Regular people conducting their work or personal lives with an appreciation that most of us did not get (unless we either pursued studies of Design/Art, or were, say, raised by a designer or architect).

She links to Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind, and quotes this from it:

Japan, which rose from the ashes of World War II thanks to its intense emphasis on L-Directed [left-brain directed] Thinking, is now reconsidering the source of its national strength. Although Japanese students lead the world in math and science scores, many in Japan suspect that the nation's unrelenting focus on schoolbook academics might be an outdated approach. So the country is remaking its vaunted education system to foster greater creativity, artistry, and play. Little wonder. Japan's most lucrative export these days isn't autos or electronics. It's pop culture. Meanwhile, in response to the mind-melting academic pressures on Japanese youth, the Education Ministry has been pushing students to reflect on the meaning and mission of their lives, encouraging what it calls, "education of the heart."

She ends:

… be sure to read Dan's book and if you're interested in the Asian vs. Western thinking research (the studies are really fascinating!), check out The Geography of Thought. And meanwhile, I'm searching for ideas on how I can improve my own skills in Thinking In Context. I always fancied myself pretty good at that, but the fact that it took sheer force of will on the part of the Japanese Sun folks before I understood why the context questions belonged on the exam makes me question that ...

You have to read more of her post to understand the reference to the Japanese Sun folk, but I think the point is clear — as she says in summarising ('To greatly oversimplify') The Geography of Thought, 'Context plays a more fundamental role for Asians than for westerners. Asians have a more difficult time thinking of an object as completely separate from its background'.

I think I'm beginning to understand why design has come to interest me so much. When I talk about design with people, I sometimes half-sense, perhaps half-imagine, a puzzlement on their part at my interest in it. (Not so when I talk to the designers I know!) But really, design tells us so much about thinking and living — how we think and live, the contexts in which we think and live. (Design, context … consilience. Consilient thought, Wilson's 'fluency across the boundaries', and its signal role in design, in both understanding and foreseeing rich contexts of affordance and usage … Something to be thinking about.)

From Kathy Sierra's April post:

Really, we're all designers -- at least with a lowercase "d". We're all trying to create solutions. But we should all--ALL OF US--be adding design to the list of "must learn" …

 

Technorati tags: Don Norman, Kathy Sierra, Dan Pink, Asia, Japan, Westerners, consilience

Getting it together

Christian Lindholm on the N95, Nokia's new N-series star:

The N95 is a major upgrade compared even to the N73 launch last summer.  For anyone who makes phones, the N95 must be a source of stress. The sheer level of complexity to engineer this device would make most engineers have sweat pearls in the forehead. This is the most sophisticated gizmo at 120g ever engineered. Congrats guys, my hat off. My very rough guess is that more than a thousand engineers worked directly full-time on the device around the world and across the ecosystem, most of them have worked very long hours. I am also sure that in the labs there are engineers and designers who already are bored stiff with it, busy making the successors, and like this they will blow your socks off when public. As an outsider I am constantly surprised by the seemingly acceleration of utility in some many domains. When I put the N95 next to my wife’s 6682, they seem to be from a different decade, and it is only two years ago. The N95 to me is yet again proof that we are living a mobile revolution that is about to transform society in a profound way. All that said would I recommend the N95 to friends and family the answer is yes.

And meanwhile, Google is sliding things together so they fit … more snugly:

Gmail started to show more links to Google Docs, Google Book Search displays maps for books that talk about many locations, while Personalized Homepage shows (buggy) feed snippets.

(Pity about the continuing hiccoughs.)

So good when technology works.

Technorati tags: Christian Lindholm, N95, Google

Eugh ...

Crazy fortnight of the usual end of term stuff … the kind of weeks a lot of teachers go through round about now, their schools entering states of extravagant levels of activity: invigilating, marking coursework, marking exams, writing reports. (Come back Andrew Pinder, all's forgiven - this is a very inefficient "industry".) 

Then, moving. Surreal sense of time blurred all together, days melding into nights into days. So when a friend emails me with this from our leader: 

Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don't come here.

… I find I'm coming to, like the morning after, my head aching with the realisation that this is yet another example of a politician out-satirising satirists. Then John Naughton posts: 

Sometimes, one has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. Yesterday, a Labour Prime Minister was interviewed by detectives investigating a corruption scandal engulfing his administration — and it was judged a triumph by his staff that he wasn’t cautioned. This meant he was ‘just’ a witness, and not a suspect in the inquiry. And at the same time, his government’s chief law officer halts an inquiry that was on the brink of revealing illegal payments of perhaps £1 billion to a posse of Saudi princelings and their hangers-on because they were (as the BBC’s Security correspondent intimated this morning) livid at the prospect of having their ‘privacy’ invaded.

Eugh indeed. Inglorious times.

Somewhere in this gap of time, I spent about a week saying 'plutonium' when I meant 'polonium'. (In David Weinberger's great phrase, 'I have become all cracks, no flooring'.) Bless the internet for underscoring so readily why it's important to tell the difference.

And then, the afternoon of my move out of Radley and back to Marlborough (prelude to a move to London in the new year), my laptop's fan, origin of strange noises for a while now, packed up and the machine became, of course, unbootable: 'Fan Error'. You bet. The next day was spent lost in Reading's seemingly all-look-alike roads: Lenovo has this relationship with TNT and Reading's my nearest, relevant TNT drop-off point. Sheesh.

I get by at times like these by borrowing family machines. My wife's laptop will go back to her with various bells and whistles installed. (That's my bargaining ploy for the extensive use of her machine.) Thomas' woes are of another order, though:

I am currently limping along on an external hard drive for my laptop with the last good back up from two months ago. I am missing notes from the last few conferences and my kGTD, which I just got running well.

I do sympathise. What do we need so as to make all this business of machine-hopping and machine-breakdown bearable or better? Thomas again:

Many people are trying to sync and back-up their lives on a regular basis, but the technology is still faulty. So many people have faulty syncing, no matter what technologies they are using. Most people have more than two devices in their life (work and home computer, smart phone, PDA, mobile phone with syncable address book and calendar, iPod, and other assorted options) and the syncing still works best (often passably) between two devices. Now when we start including web services things get really messy as people try to work on-line and off-line across their devices. The technology has not caught up as most devices are marketed and built to solve a problem between two devices and area of information need. The solutions are short sighted. …

Having trusted devices working together helps heal the fractures in our data losses, while keeping it safe from those we do not wish to have access. The secure transmission of our data between our trusted devices and securely shared with those we trust is quickly arriving.

I am hoping the next time I have a fatal hard drive crash it is not noticeable and the data loss is self-healed by pulling things back together from resources I have trust (well placed trust that is verifiable - hopefully). This is the Personal InfoCloud and its dealing with a Local InfoCloud all securely built with trusted components.

*** 

Having said which, and bearing in mind that, unlike Thomas, I'm not running my own business or attending multiple conferences, etc, etc, what has struck me this year, whenever I've lived temporarily without my own machine, is how well I can now get along. As Robert said just recently:

Google is delivering the Web goods and is taking over more and more of my life …

Hook another machine up to the web, and it's almost business as usual, plus or minus some favourite desktop shortcuts or bits of software.

And for me, it's also turning out that there are unexpected benefits to be had from these little hiatuses. (ThinkPads are supposed to be utterly reliable. No thing is utterly reliable. In nearly two years of owning it, this one's been back to Lenovo three times — once for a new motherboard.) To draw from Eng Lit a moment, Coleridge has this notebook entry:

The extenders of consciousness — Sorrow, Sickness, Poetry, Religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just where we are not forced to go on.

Habit holds us back, holds us in — so much — in both big things and small, even in the lesser matters of software choice. I couldn't figure out how to get FeedDemon running from off of my own laptop's hard drive (running this as an external drive, talking to my wife's laptop's hard drive), so I switched to Google Reader using a not-very-recently-backed-up OPML file. And guess what? Google Reader is not only as great as people have said it is, I'm reading stuff faster in it than in FeedDemon because there are fewer options, fewer possible enrichments … fewer distractions. (Joel Spolsky: 'People, for the most part, are not playing with their software because they want to. They’re using the software as a tool to accomplish something else that they would like to do'. Good software should … disappear. I was so delighted to find an easy way to get Live Writer to run, on my borrowed laptop's drive but using my bank of draft posts from off of my own hard drive. Live Writer's a dream blogging tool: it disappears and lets you get on and do what you want to do.) I've been wanting for some time now to speed up my reading of feeds without (I hope) losing too much, so as to get back to reading more books alongside my online reading. This unlooked for nudge has broken me out of one habit and started me off on another which may give me some more time for offline reading. 

So Gmail, Google Apps, Google Calendar, YouTube, Google Video … and del.icio.us, Last.fm, Flickr …  (Not quite a Google flush — not by some way, in fact). And there's something magical about finding that all those settings that seemed like they were part of your desktop are, as you always knew they were but had ceased to experience them as being, out there — waiting for you to pick up and carry on as if nothing much had happened after all.

Technorati tags: Google, web apps, InfoCloud

Ubiquitous computing and designerly agency

This came to me via Timo's del.icio.us links, and to him via Matt. The original is here and should be read in full. It's by Rob van Kranenburg. These passages struck me:

… ubiquitous computing will enable something fundamentally new, and the main question is : to what extent does it have designerly agency? In places where computational processes have disappeared into the background, into everyday objects - both the real and the subject become contested in concrete daily situations and activities. The environment becomes the interface.  What is the role and place of design in these information spaces that are mediated with computational processes that generate not data (linked to other data) – the kind of communicative process that we are familiar with - but information (linked to other information)? The main challenge in design education lies in confronting this move from interaction as a key term to resonance.  That refers most aptly to the way we relate to things, people, ideas in a connected environment. Interaction presupposes an ideal setting, agency and response. But mediation (the core business of interaction) is no longer a relationship. It has become the default position. …

This then is the fundamental change and challenge that we are facing in ubicomp; the deliberate attempt of a technology to disappear as technology. …

The main question from a design educational point of view concerns the kind of skills and kind of literacies that a designer needs to function. And these turn out to be those that are most foreign to an educational practice today, as this new situation needs designers that can assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance – not interaction – as the key producer of causalities.  For such a designer the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’. …

The working notion of research, however in current academies is deeply infested with a sterile theory-practice dichotomy that functioned in a mechanistic worldview, but is hardly productive in a ubicomp world. We face the challenge of rethinking research as a performative practice based on creating applications for societal benefit. There are very few ubicomp applications at the moment that do not focus on control or surveillance issues. That there is a great need for applications that empower users in dealing with uncertain situations …

The educational design challenge in implementing digital connectivity in an analogue environment lies in creating a working concept of corporal literacy that will inform a design for all the senses. There is more information available at our fingertips during a walk in the woods, says Mark Weiser, than in any computer system, “yet people find a walk among trees relaxing and computers frustrating. Machines that fit the human environment, instead of forcing humans to enter theirs, will make using a computer as refreshing as taking a walk in the woods.”

… we must not aim to define, alter or transform practices, processes, places or people. The aim should be to define a vision. A vision that should be able to inspire and empower designers in their concrete experience of agency in this seemingly undesignerly new world, towards a humanistic and optimistic positive attitude in the role, function and leadership of the designer in his and her capability to make sense, to work within an uncertain framework of unforeseen consequences, unintended uses, and procedural breakdown.

Three basic ideas underlie this vision: a concept of life and living as slow becoming, as in Eugène Minkowsky’s idea that the essence of life is not “ a feeling of being, of existence, but a feeling of participation in a flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time, and secondarily expressed in terms of space.” … a concept of slow money, to focus on the design process and sustainability of design products, and a working concept of our notion of control, as slow resonance.

I've quoted Claus Dahl's comment before:

Maybe it would be less taxing on the human biology if we didn't have so many tools we had to know how to use but just better surroundings. This involves turning information into a living thing embodied in the spime around us and simply stop thinking of all this data as something we have to know. We can just live in it. I think this idea fits very nicely into the ideas about which of our senses actually afford which abilities. Culturally produced information is just too constrained to live in our focal view all the time, whereas we're effortlessly consuming naturally produced information in much greater quantities through the use of the rest of our senses.

I read Sterling's Shaping Things a couple of months back: many resonances here.

And a challenge for schools: 'assess emergent literacies, unforeseen uses, unintended use, and resonance … the default position is one of uncertainty, of being able to cope with a continuous delaying of the act of closure, of an ‘end’'.

Technorati tags: ubiquitous computing, ubicomp, education