Two short questions

I’ve been thinking again. Well, actually, I’m a PhD student, I’m always thinking. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about personal digital archives again. And I have two questions:

What does the archive gain in the transition from physical to digital?

And, (perhaps more importantly):

What does the archive lose?

No coherent answers yet, but I thought I better note the questions down. All part of the messiness of my PhD.

Thoughtful Interaction Design

Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology

Jonas Löwgren and Erik Stolterman, MIT Press, 2004

Now here is a book that:

• a) I wish that I’d read many years ago
• b) I wish was required reading for every designer, programmer, and manager working in the interaction design industry today

This wonderful little book lays out, with great coherence, what interaction design is, and why we (as interaction designers, or practitioners working with designers) should care about how design is practiced and care about reflecting on our design work.

It seemed to coalesce the thoughts and feelings dissatisfaction that I’d been feeling with interaction design (as exists in the “design industry”) perfectly. We, as designers, need to be thoughtful, because what we design is used, what we design has implications for society.

I also recently got around to reading McLuhan’s seminal essay, The Medium is the Message. It’s arguments have become so ingrained, so pervasive, that it reads today like a series of empty platitudes. But what McLuhan actually says—that we are affected by the technology that we make—is somehow more relevant now (or at very least, not any less relevant). Here is Löwgren and Stolterman in 2004:

…it is not a feasible position to view technological development as independent from society or as a driving force in societal development. Neither is the naïve opposing position tenable: Technology is not merely a neutral instrument of our wills and desires. We understand the situation as one of mutual influence: We shape technology, and technology shapes us.

Compare to McLuhan, 50 years(!) earlier:

The personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology

The thought I kept having reading Thoughtful Interaction Design: “yes, of course, we know that”, combined with “why don’t we practice that?” Over and over again.

I’m not going to go over all of the arguments here—just trust me, read it, it’s a short book.

Video as performance prototype

There is quite an established community and commercial practice of using video as a prototyping method, especially in software design. I made video prototypes the central artefact of my App a Week project, and in my prototyping work with Jeremy we used video to test interactions before building working iOS prototypes.

Why does video work so well for exploration in interaction design? Interactions happen in sequence and over time – it is can be hard to properly understand interactions when seen as discrete elements, it is better to experience them as they will behave over time – video simulations allow you to play with sequence and timing easily. Video is cheap and quick to produce – programming a complex interaction can be time consuming and often exceedingly difficult – it’s much easier to knock-up a quick video that simulates the process rather than building it only to find it doesn’t work as expected, or needs to happen in a different order or though a different process.

You know what else happens over time, involves discrete steps to form a coherent sequence, and is time consuming and often exceedingly difficult to produce and test? Physical performance.

Because the act of performance is frequently very physically demanding, experimenting with repertoire is both time consuming and exhausting. Repeating an act in a different order is very hard and sometimes dangerous, cutting a video in to a new order is fast and cheap.

This seems to be the overriding attitude of Mike Finch, Circus Oz’s artistic director. When working through the development of an act he will shoot multiple rough performances, cut them up in to sequences and sets of skills, edit them rapid-fire (with the performers watching), try new sequences, new music – mostly using a Flip camera and iMovie, but sometimes just with whatever he can get his hands on. I’ve been called upon several times to shoot video – any free hands in the room at the time get co-opted in to the process.

To me, this process seems somewhat like creating a sketch or an animatic (I have heard Mike call the process “sketching” in fact) – it is not the performance, but it is a way to test the performance, quickly and cheaply. A prototype of performance, from the perspective of the audience.

There is some difficulty getting performers to understand and engage with this. I watched time and time again as Mike would shoot an act and set about experimenting with sequence using iMovie, while talking the performer though the changes. Meanwhile the performer would attempt to ignore the video and try something on the stage instead, while Mike focussed on the screen. So what exactly is going on here?

David Carlin says this is part of the “don’t look at the screen, look at me” – the narcissism of the performer. I think it is more than that – I’m guessing that circus performers engage with their performance on a physical and performative level (which makes logical sense), so the act of watching themselves on a small screen actively disembodies themselves from their understanding of what they are trying to do.

I think that the video process is too abstract and intellectual for a lot of performers. To the performer, their understanding isn’t in “seeing” their performance – their knowledge is the knowledge of the act itself – physical knowledge, doing knowledge, being knowledge.

Practice

I thought I had a really good idea about where I wanted to go with my PhD research. I’ve been interested in memory and nostalgia for a really long time, especially when it comes to the storage and retrieval of memories, the emotional attachments that we form with physical objects, and the way that we respond to digital objects as opposed to physical ones. “Great” I thought, “I’m getting somewhere with this”. I did some reading, some planning, I’ve read papers and books in fields like memory studies, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, media studies, anthropology. And I wrote a draft research proposal, an idea for a research question, on design for nostalgia and serendipity in archive software. “Not too shabby” I thought, “for someone who is new to this whole academic research gig.”

But then something went wrong.

For the last few days I’ve been hanging out in the rehearsal space with the lovely ensemble at Circus Oz as they prepare for their upcoming show in Melbourne, and as we (RMIT that is) ramp-up our research practice where the Living Archive project is concerned. It was a great experience (and one I hope to continue) – I’ve been “playing anthropologist” – hanging out in the corner with my notebook, observing people, conversations, physical and technological practices. Watching how a group like this puts together a coherent and complex circus show is absolutely fascinating.

Problem is, this tiny bit of actual, on-the-ground, in-the-thick-of-it research has changed my mind completely about what it is that I want to do with my PhD. I keep saying that I want to produce “useful, simple software”, and from my observations so far, what would be useful to Circus Oz isn’t some kind of archive that facilitates nostalgic engagement and tries to transfer characteristics and practices from “real world” archives in to “digital” archives blah blah blah… What they want is something they can use, on-the-ground, in-the-thick-of-it, as they work and develop and produce and perform. And there is something in that thought – a research question that addresses a real, useful, practical application: video archives as an augment to an existing physical development practice, or practical applications for video in performing arts repertoire development, or….?

So I’m a little stuck now. I need to turn around and re-write my research proposal form an entirely different perspective (which involves a whole new path of background-reading), and I’m under time pressure: I want to get a new draft to my supervisor this weekend, I’m off to WWDC next week, and I’m supposed to present my research proposal to a panel as soon as I get back.

I’m just guessing here, but I get the feeling that this is just how PhDs go. Everything you read and do sends you off on a new tangent – you follow a path for a while and get sidetracked, or hit a dead-end and have to turn around. I’m chalking this one up to experience – if I’m going to spend all this time watching circus performers practice their backflips, I might as well start practicing mine.

Book Review – You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

I’ve been trying to read recently on topics directly related to technology, technological development, and how technology affects our lives. I think that there is a tendency in the technology and interaction design industry to (consciously or unconsciously) avoid thinking about the philosophical implications of what we make.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier is a compelling argument against a certain kind of “technological idealism” that pervades silicon valley culture – one that treats computers as if they are perfect (or at least capable of – very soon – achieving perfection) and humans as if they are reducible to algorithms – process that leads to the design of systems based on speculative computational theory and elevating computer “intelligence” at the expense of humanity.

One of Lanier’s many claims to fame is that he was the technological pioneer who coined the term “virtual reality” and was instrumental in developing the first VR technology (including the first “avatars”) – it’s hard to argue with his credentials in terms of technological innovation. His book is fascinating and detailed argument about way that the design of technology has a profound influence of the way that we use it, the way that technology directly influences the way that we think about ourselves and hence society, and the way that current trends in technology are at odds with humanist principles.

“People, not machines, made the renaissance.”

Lanier argues that by idealising computer interactions and using the computer as a metaphor for human experience we in turn make ourselves more and more stupid: Google only “knows” what we want because we ignore the times that it gets things wrong, and we learn to construct logical queries that work for Google. We are all too willing to bend over backwards to accommodate technology designed as if humans are machines, rather than designing technology that treats humans as people.

Lanier is worried about the focus on the “crowd” as a reliable and accurate source of information – its not that the crowd is wrong (it can be right in certain circumstances and for certain kinds of questions), but that the crowd isn’t good at producing new ideas – it just congregates around existing ones. On Clay Shirky’s argument that if we spent just 1% of the time we spend watching television “producing and sharing … that amounts to 98 wikipedia projects”, he shoots back: “So how many seconds of erstwhile television time would need to be harnessed to replicate the achievements of, say, Albert Einstein?”

For Lanier, innovative technological advances are (in nearly all cases) the products of individuals or small closed groups, not of crowds. Perhaps true innovation can’t happen in large groups due to our tendency toward mob mentality. Perhaps the ideology of openness in fact leads to large scale, boring, unambitious projects: How about a new version of UNIX? Or an encyclopaedia!

So You Are Not a Gadget in turn rejects the pervading ideology of “open culture” (a rhetoric that Lanier himself was instrumental in conceiving and has now turned against) as a culture that discounts individual achievement and pushes us toward averageness and mediocrity. Lanier argues instead for a move toward a new model designed around what he instead calls “punctuated openness” – anyone is always free to share, but the system is designed so that everything isn’t necessarily free and equal, mixing together all the time into a “giant mush”.

Something I hadn’t really considered (other than in vague feelings) is something else that Lanier discusses in great detail: The danger that technological lock-in, and fundamental design decisions made when building technology, can have flow-on effects for society. When you assign your “relationship status” on Facebook (a list, he suggests, borne out of an expedient database design rather than any particular insight into human relationships) you are allowing yourself (and everyone who has access) to think of you and your interactions with others within this set of predefined categories – a directly dehumanising act – reducing you to “bits” that can be stored in a particular kind of system rather than part of a continuum of human experience.

I found this argument very persuasive – the fact that designs conceived to erase the boundaries between people (Web 2.0) break down the concept of individual authorship. Wikipedia is designed  to seem oracle like rather than like a collection of individuals (which of course is what Wikipedia actually is).  Or the design of the internet itself (arbitrary multiple copies of data, dispersed and difficult to trace networks) while useful in some ways, makes it difficult to build an economic model for data sharing that benefits the individual producers rather than large content aggregators and gatekeepers (Google, Amazon) or walled gardens (Apple, XBox).

In the way of solutions to these (and other) problems Lanier presents some new (and some old) virtual, physical and economic models for the way that we produce, share and distribute information online (which I won’t go in to here for want of simply copying large passages from the book – suffice to say they are quite compelling).

I highly recommend You Are Not a Gadget to anyone working in any technology related field if for no other reason than to read a different point of view to the “open” advocates that make up most of the technology related media.

Unlike many technologists, Lanier is humble and well aware that he may be wrong. Despite his concerns about the current direction of  technology, Lanier is still extremely optimistic about our future with technology. What Lanier hopes for is that we take care: care with our metaphors (just because we can use computationalism as a metaphor for human experience doesn’t mean that it is right) and care with our designs – because what we create directly affects us and our conception of ourselves. For Lanier, the way to write decent software is to assume that people can’t be reduced to an algorithm – we are much, much more than that – we should be trying to design technology in a way that respects individuals and and treats them with dignity.

For anyone that is interested in any of this I strongly suggest listening to this podcast of a talk he gave on the event of the book’s release. There is plenty more about the book and Jaron’s philosophy at his website.

App a Week #2 – Historical Narratives

I remember a conversation with Chris shortly before I got interested in iPhone development where he was talking about the idea of the “layers” of geoplaced information that are available floating around us. Whenever a person with an enabled device sends a tweet, or updates their Facebook page, or uploads a photo to Flickr, attached to the data is a location coordinate – the data belongs to the user, but also to the place. Matthew Kwan at RMIT is even working on a geo-location standard for SMS.

Chris’ idea was that one day soon it will be possible to stand in a particular location and using your mobile device, track the data history of a place – an augmented reality layer that we have (perhaps accidentally) added to the world.

Information is being attached to places, and that information combined with place is a public historical narrative that we are adding to all the time.

So for this week’s App a Week project I’m interested in building a simple iPad app that explores the idea of historical narratives, using Flickr’s geo-search API.

Visually I’m using two primary sources of inspiration.The first is Eric Fischer’s “Locals and Tourists” analysis of flickr users based on an interesting concept – he analysed geo location data for photos in a series of cities and using a time-based algorithm divided them in to “tourists” and “locals” – with fascinating results:

The other is Isao Hashimoto’s artwork “1945-1988”, an animation tracking the history of nuclear explosions around the world – a really effective way to present some rather shocking historical data:

My app idea is still a little vague at the moment, but it will become much more concrete soon – I need to start programming if I’m going get something finished by Friday…