Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
You talk about "addressing the challenges of ubiquitous information
technology in public space the way [Jane Jacobs] might have" - perhaps that's 
a place to start. Can you imagine how she would have approached the subject?
  

    
I can't imagine but that Jane would have started from a healthy
appreciation of the things we already have, the things that aren't
broken and don't require fixing. This was certainly her point of
departure in "Death and Life of the Great American Cities," and I'd
want it to be mine in any consideration of everyware in urban space.

I'd want to take a careful look at the great urban places of Earth,
and ask myself how the flow of information helps them become what they
are, consider the dynamics of their structuration.

I'd want to get out some of the urbanist classics of the 60s and 70s,
Jacobs' work and "A Pattern Language" and Kevin Lynch and so on, and
ask how their conclusions and recommendations might differ under the
condition of ambient informatics. (William Mitchell does some of this
in his recent collection of essays, "Placing Words," by the way, but
I'd want to go deeper.)

And given the widespread fondness for the Situationist moment (which I
share), I'd also want to wrestle with the inescapable fact that the
Situationist program for the city has in a sense triumphed, and been
inverted in its victory. The Situationist "unitary urbanism" aimed to
collapse binary oppositions like "work/leisure" and "public/private,"
and I'd argue that this is in fact what has come to pass with things
like the mobile phone and the Blackberry, but in a way that would
depress the hell out of the people who advanced these ideas to begin
with.

These are ideas I would have loved to get deeper into in "Everyware,"
but it wasn't the time or the proper venue, really.
  

    
Interesting parallel there - Situationists saw art as something that
would blend into everyday life, and everyware is about technology
blending into everyday life. In a way art/technology disappear, but
only because they've been assimilated as part of the environment.

You mention _A Pattern Language_ - have you looked at any of the work
on design patterns for ubiquitous computing?
  

    
I was just reading about the humanoid robot, Repliee. In the videos
and photos
<http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0610_050610_robot.html>
she seems quite authentic, but her sensorium and computing is
distributed around the room where she is operating. They can't fit
inside her body.

This is interesting. Her senses and "brain" occupy the space around
her body and surround the human observer interacting with the robot as
tho Repliee actually existed in that body. We are easily misdirected, I
think.
  

    
Jon, I haven't, no. Whose work are you thinking of, in particular?
  

    
James Landay at UC Berkeley and Gaetano Borriello of the University of
Washington - see
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/landay/pubs/ieee-computer-ubicomp-design-pa
tterns-final.pdf

There's also some work here:
http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/patterns/
  

    
Adam, I'd be curious about your take on something I just put up today:

http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/04/everyware_blogjects_and_the_pa.html

(Thanks for the footnote shout-out to WC in Everyware, btw.)
  

    
Two quick takes, 'cause I'm here at USC's Networked Publics
conference, and it was a huge data dump and I was jetlagged to begin
with. ; . )

Jon, you're right, I had seen those papers before, and I guess I had
sort of shunted them to the sidings in my mind. The reason stems from
the major distinction between the ubicomp patterns they advance, and
the patterns Chris Alexander proposes in "A Pattern Language": the
former strikes me as being in a proscriptive, and the latter in a
descriptive mode.

When Alexander says, for example, if you build your balconies less
than six feet deep, the likelihood is that they won't get used...well,
this is something that he generalized from his and his students'
observations of the way people arranged human space across cultures and
epochs. Each of the patterns is a gestalt that emerges from an
empirical consideration of long-term, "naive," vernacular practice, out
in the wild.

By contrast, the ubicomp patterns strike me as anticipatory
projections, projections of the way we might like things to work. And,
as a matter of fact, in my view they have the most in common with those
parts of the Alexander work that are the weakest and the hardest to
defend empirically (if the closest to my own sentimental-anarchist
heart), which are the patterns that call for autonomous regions and
city-country fingers and so on.

Until we have some good solid data that emerges from the long-term
study of reasonably well-assimilated everyware, I'm not sure it makes
sense to talk about pattern languages for it. I admire the intention,
but I think it misses the entire point of what Alexander, at least, was
trying to convey.

Jamais, I saw that this afternoon, maybe 15 minutes after you posted
it. I haven't absorbed it yet and wouldn't want to nail myself to any
of this, but my first impressions are that your framework is sound (and
could be important), but that I disagree with where you place
everyware in the grid. To me, everyware is *both* intimate and
"extimate," even occasionally both simultaneously. It's both nestled up
close to us physically, that is, and outward-facing, in the broadest
possible sense.

But, like I say, I'm going to want to come back to this tomorrow,
after I've had a nice long sleep. Is it a deal?
  

    
Deal.
  

    
These new technologies will bring up a myriad of privacy issues-and as
we've been pretty starkly reminded these past few years, not only can
we not always rely on the government to watch out for us, they're all
too often what needs the watching.

Should the focus be on forming new organizations as privacy watchdogs,
or to rely on established organizations such as ACLU and EFF? Or
something else entirely?
  

    
(Ahh, a little smoke from the tires and we're down. I'm two cups of
coffee away from getting over my jetlag and getting back into the swing
of things.)
  

    
OK, now I'm able to mount a coherent response to those last few
questions.

Let's see here. Jamais, I wouldn't want this to be interpreted as a
land grab on behalf of a word I coined ; . ) but even after some
reflection I really do think that everyware, at least as I think of it,
squats sprawling over all four sectors of your grid.

That is to say, I think it's fruitful to understand the wearable body
monitor (intimate and inwardly-focused), the parka that changes its
loft according to the outside temperature (intimate and
outwardly-focused), conditioned architectural space (out in the world
and focused on us) and conditioned public space (out in the world and
focused on large-scale flows) as aspects or epiphenomena of the same
underlying cause. The situations certainly differ, and I'd want to be
among the very first to argue that the differences matter intensely in
terms of understanding these technologies and deciding which ones we're
OK with...but I also don't think we can fully understand any one of
your four sectors without wrapping our heads around how information
generated in each flows into and informs the others.

I'd love to see you develop the grid a little further, and begin
(*begin*) to characterize each sector in terms of what its likely
impact on the world will be, socially/psychologically/politically. And
that's obviously a conversation I'd like to be a part of.

Todd, yours is an excellent question too. My gut response is to say
that the specific issue of privacy is probably pretty well covered by
the organizations you namecheck - each of whom would need, at most,
expert counsel about the specific nuances of the everyware case, but
who otherwise have a hard-won understanding of the terrain and the
players. But that's just privacy.

Where I think there is a legitimate need for new organizations is in
crystallizing a community of competent practice in what is obviously a
very thorny and complicated space. I've had daydream notions of
starting a Center for the Ethical Development of Everyware, for
example, and I do think there will eventually need to be some standards
or certification body that can credibly distinguish between systems
that have been designed with the human user in mind and those to be
wary of. This is something that I'm willing to bet we'll be seeing the
emergence of, alongside the technical stratum, in the next few years.
  

    
Given the hypothetical, tentative character with which you express things in
the recent posts above, why did you choose to write the book in the form of
a series of theses? Or is that making too much of it?
  

    
Yeah, that apparent tentativity is probably an artifact of my
"speaking" voice here. 

That said, I do view each of Everyware's 81 theses as provisional, to
a varying degree. The reality they're describing is too new and as-yet
inchoate to set them in quick-drying concrete.
  

    
Adam, I understand why you see everyware as covering all four quadrants,
and I'm actually pretty amenable to the argument. The focus of _Everyware_
the book, however, seems to be on those systems which are "out in the
world and focused on us," which is why I put it in the single box. (FWIW,
I found the term "extimate" -- as opposite to "intimate" -- in use in
academic philosophy and rhetoric, so I appropriated it for my uses.)

You're spot on, of course, when you call out the need for a better 
understanding of what it's like to live in a world with this kind of 
technology. The ethical question is primary: all technology is biased by 
the assumptions of its designers, so how can we encourage designers to 
build ethical behavior in from the beginning? Is it another manifestation 
of the UI problem (that is, user interfaces bolted on to a system at the 
end are invariably lousy, while UI designs included from the beginning are 
very often functionally elegant)? Does a social technology require social 
rules?

I'm also curious about the "theses" approach, btw.
  

    
the man himself slipped
  

    
Haw.

"Does a social technology require social rules?"

I don't know. I *do* know that getting everyware right more often than
not is going to require a wholesale reconsideration of just how it is
that enterprise goes about developing complex informatic systems.
Because you're absolutely right: as a few folks point out a ways
upstream, when good UI work is among the last things attended to in the
design of a system, it's too late.

My frustration is how rarely this seems to be a disincentive. My
current case in point is Motorola's RAZR phone, simultaneously one of
the runaway successes of the last few years as digital gadgetry goes,
and the possessor of what is widely acknowledged to be an awful,
user-hostile, thoroughly outmoded interface.

How do we incentivize companies like Motorola to devote the same care
and consideration to the flow of user interactions that they have to
engineering the (lovely) physical form of these last few designs? If we
can't solve this problem even at the mobile level, I tremble at what's
going to happen when the UI is all that's left of a product or
service...
  

    
Doesn't that have to be market-driven? Design will improve if improved design 
is a market advantage? And I mean "market" in a broader, not necessarily 
commercial, sense.
  

    
So what constitutes the broader "market"?

As of the moment, I see a lot of advantages accruing to first movers,
a lot of advantages accruing to those who are willing to cut corners
and push UX concerns to the back bunrer (or off the stovetop entirely),
but no visible mechanism for closing the feedback loop.

A big part of the problem in IT at present is of course that the
purchaser of technology is very often someone other than the end user.
I hold a _little_ more hope for producers coming out of the consumer
electronics mindset, where there does tend to be some relationship
between good design and mass uptake. But even here we see examples
galore like the RAZR. 

I think part of the answer to your question has to be that the market
can function the way it's supposed to, if it's been provided with
clear, high-visibility indicators of a given system's adhesion (or lack
of adhesion) to guidelines for ethical development. This would include
third-party certification of same.

I've got a question, one that I'm always particularly alert to: any
guesses as to why more women haven't participated in this discussion? I
find it worrisome to have conversations like this when only 49% of the
target audience is represented in any way...
  

    
I was using the word market in terms of adoption/selection rather than
sales... making room for Open Source, for instance.

Good question about women. You attended some conferences on this
subject; were there many women in attendance? 
  

    
Hi!  Can't speak for anybody else, but I have enjoyed reading, and have just
been a little overcomitted to get in and post. I know this conversation
wraps up tomorrow, but that's kind of hard to believe.  It's moved along
with so many interesting tacks along the way.

One recent question that's interesting was  "Does a social technology
require social rules?"

I think codes of behavior are implicit in software code, even in single-user
applications, but much more so in group toolsets, where some of the codes of
behavior are explicitly made part of the interface.  (Can somebody delete
the words of another? Are you permitted to create private spaces?  Is the
founder given some kind of moderator/host powers? All of that is laid out
in the code.  In fact, that's why they call it code.  We're swimming in 
a river of rules.)  

I'm also interested in what for me would be the next round of 
questions, getting into the practical:  How can social technologies be
designed to accomodate ongoing evolution of rules and community roles?

I have an odd perspective.  I'm on the the staff at The WELL, where 
technical change has been excrutiatingly slow in many ways. It's
hard to not be able to move on doing requested improvements, yet nobody 
can be sure that is (or isn't) what gives our online home town its 
best characteristics.

I'd also throw in one random thought that came to me in reading the topic.
When I bought my first modem in 1991, and became obsessed, it was very
tough for me to sit through a plane ride or a basball game -- I was
compsing emails in my head the whole time. I was  jonesing to get back 
to my keyboard and my friends again.  The worst thing was drafting a reply
to a post in my head  *while skydiving.*  I kid you not.

Fifteen years later I like being unplugged. I just got a regular mobile 
phone and not a treo or blackberry. The ubiquity I craved
when first in this environment has become less attractive to me over time.
I know most of the implications will not sink in until a generation or so
lives this way.  Our software evolves a lot faster than our brains and our
familial social structures.

So here's an important trend, you're posted eloquently, and I'm finding
myself at least as interested in the opposite direction, in preserving 
the right to unplug.  Does ubiquity have to be 24.7 ?  Will we be able 
to opt out for a day and not be connected?
 
Or is that model in jeopardy?
  

    
That's actually at the center of the things I want to preserve, Gail.
One of the five guidelines I offer for the ethical development of
everyware is precisely the right to opt out always and at any time.

This prerogative is important to me for a variety of reasons -
political and social and so on - but above all because I have a strong
belief in the value of silence and emptiness. And those are things
which are obviously close to unsustainable in a world of totalizing
everyware. (Some of the things I wish to preserve are enumerated here:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/everyware2/)

I will say this, too: it's precisely the people I know who are
furthest along the curve of considering it (and in some cases actually
living it) who are least enthusiastic about the prospect of always-on,
real-time, anywhere connectivity. I think there's an important clue
there for anyone willing to consider it - as well as a potential red
flag for anyone whose business model is predicated on an audience's
desire to be always-on.

I'd like to spend the rest of the time we have together here
considering the various facets of opting out, of preserving moments of
disconnection and autonomy, if nobody minds?
  

    
I'm certainly interested in your take on that.
  

    
That would be great, Adam.  Reading your last post, I was thinking how
psychologically difficult it can be for many to disengage.  Remember
the "rape" in Lambda MOO? For those who aren't familiar, a MOO
(Multiuser Object-Oriented environment) is a text-based virtual reality
where people hang out in an online world of objects and actions
described via text. Some were more powerful because they were "wizards"
who knew enough code and had the right permissions to manipulate the
environment. When the virtual rape occurred, it evidently never
occurred to the 'victims' to simply shut down and walk away. (Juian
Dibbel wrote of this incident:
http://loki.stockton.edu/~kinsellt/stuff/dibbelrapeincyberspace.html).

If the reality of a virtual world can be so compelling that you can't
disconnect from an abuse that depends on what William Gibson called,
describing cyberspace, a "consensual hallucination," how can we
disengage from blended virtual and real environments?
  

    
I think that's an excellent point, Jon. My favorite quote from
Marshall McLuhan reminds us that "every extension is also an
amputation," and I find that this is still true as regards our
experience with ambient informatics.

I feel _lessened_ to some extent when my exoskeleton of informational
affordances is removed. I'm already having trouble simply sitting in
the garden on a gorgeous sunny day reading a book, because I viscerally
want (and expect to be able) to Google or Wikipedia every proper noun
or unfamiliar word I stumble across. And I'm wary of this, very wary.

A large part of the wariness has to do with something I noticed on my
honeymoon, during which I spent ten glorious days away from
connectivity of any meaningful sort. After I got over what we might
call the initial "withdrawal" symptoms - the twitchy, phantom desire to
log in somewhere just for the sake of connectedness - I blissed out. I
started to feel fully engaged in the present and the local again.

Now, it's true that that particular present and local were fairly
ambrosial. But I noticed that something happened to my mood, my
equanimity, with each increment of time away from the always-on,
endlessly extended sensorium I had been occupying for the last few
years: I felt better about myself, more interested in the
world...happier.

And then history began again and all the things I had been able to
hold at bay crashed back in on me. And I felt not as if I was regaining
something, but as if I was losing something precious.

And that's just email, really, and Web access. As you suggest, I can
barely imagine how compelling and how organically a part of myself my
augmented reality will feel in just a few years...as skeptical and
distanced as I am now, will I really _want_ to go without it? Would any
of us, in our right minds?

And then I remember the beach, and the swaying palm fronds, and the
dolphins, and the feel of my wife's hand in mine as we strolled down a
path under a hundred billion stars...

I recently got into a lot of trouble at a conference I was attending,
for expressing the very unpopular viewpoint that the real is privileged
over the virtual. But guess what? Even aside from the fact that only
one of those places is still accessible to us when the power runs out,
I do feel there's something special about the actual. I can barely
express why I think this is so without wandering into Buddhist
metaphysics, but I do. This is where we evolved, this is where we grew
up.

And so I think it's crucial that we design _ways out_ into the
ubiquitous informatic systems we bring into being. For our privacy, for
our liberty, and above all for our sanity.