Design Engaged 2004

Twenty-odd designers, researchers and writers sat around a long table in Amsterdam over a weekend in November 2004, taking turns to present. These are my notes, session-by-session, as written at the time.

Design Engaged 2004 was an invitation-only gathering organised by Andrew Otwell. A small, intense weekend of conversation that turned out to be one of the generative moments of the design-web at that period. The FAQ has the full list of attendees. There are also lots of photos on Flickr.

Ben Cerveny

  • The growth of the soil
  • How do we comprehend complexity
  • How do we build structures around complex information
  • Accreting meta-data: GPS data, descriptive information

Decomposition

  • Break down of material as it hits the soil
  • Soup, tags, condensed and distilled meta objects

Self-organisation

  • Sorting mechanisms, affinity browsers, related, filtering, emergent relationships, interrelationships
  • How do we conceive a metaphor for building these processes? A structure that is meaningful for the users.
  • Application design: movement through states of application to tending a flow of processes
  • Tending to meta-data is a growth process
  • DLA: diffusion-limited aggregation, a natural process model
  • The relationships between metadata can be visualised as this. Should model metadata using plant models: plant models have existed for eons, basic structures for material.

Rules for expression

  • L-systems growth, mimics biological rulesets
  • Map rule-sets in metadata onto L-systems, affinity rules
  • Branching tree structures could be used to make metadata more useful

Roots and feeds

  • RSS feeds, a root system, aggregator has roots, to the surface of a newsreader

Structural information

  • After applying rules of expression (algorithms, L-systems) we could see differences in the way the plant has evolved
  • A ‘botany’ of these different structures: smaller, larger clusters, structures

Cultivation as culture

  • From a user perspective the idea of cultivation: users can actually affect change, breed their own searches, using searches generationally, using their own adapted metaphors for new contexts
  • Mix and match mechanisms or instruments (specific rule-sets); move expressions and apply them to different rule-sets
  • Don’t have to understand genetics, but we have found use for plants for generations
  • User doesn’t need to know mechanisms, just the ability to make changes and view outcomes

Tending the garden

  • Incredible complexity, incredible diversity
  • Not intimidated by the complexity of the garden
  • Present similar tools to tend to data

Discussion

  • Casey Reas: organic information design
  • Thinkmap, physical simulation systems
  • Mitchel Resnick: Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams
  • Matt Jones: does it rely on visual metaphors? How do we get people to cultivate rather than consume?

Thomas Vander Wal

  • Synching feeling

Everything fit in our brain

  • Then libraries
  • Then digital bits
  • Then putting everything in one place
  • Our information on our PDAs, cellphones, somewhere
  • The dream is that we have accurate information at our disposal when we need it
  • Personal info-cloud
  • Local info-cloud: should it be located?
  • External info-cloud: things you don’t know about
  • How do users use information?
  • Device versus network?
  • Our networked space, that exists out in space
  • Usable: syncing between two devices, calendar, address book, to-do list
  • Dodgy: documents, media maps, web-based info, multiple devices
  • Personal version control: different devices have different versions
  • Personal categorisation

Standard metadata for personal info-cloud

  • Content description
  • Creator
  • Privacy
  • Context
  • Use type
  • Instruction: destroy, revise in 6 months
  • Object type
  • Categories: not a structured system, but hackable flat data

Actual solutions

  • Spotlight (Apple Tiger)
  • MIT Project Oxygen

Possible/partial solutions

  • Script aggregation by metadata tag
  • Publish to private/public location in RSS
  • Rsync and CVS
  • Groove (Windows)
  • Quicksilver (Mac)

Adam Greenfield

  • “All watched over by machines of loving grace”
  • Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous computing environments
  • Ubicomp is coming: IPv6 has 6.5 × 10²³ addresses for every square metre on the planet
  • Moving from describing to prescribing
  • Technological artefacts are too dismissive of people
  • “Someone to watch over me”: attractive as well as scary

Default to harmlessness

  • Must ensure user’s physical, psychic and financial safety
  • Must go well beyond graceful degradation
  • Faults must result in safety

Be self-disclosing

  • Contain provisions for immediate, transparent querying of ownership, use, capabilities
  • Seamlessness is optional
  • Analogue of broadcast station identification or military IFF
  • Web-derived model for user consent: cannot carry over to ubicomp, would be too intrusive to have to approve each and every disclosure of information in four-space

Be conservative of face

  • Ubiquitous systems are always already social systems: they must not unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame
  • Goes beyond formal information-privacy concerns
  • Prospect of being nakedly accountable to an unseen omnipresent network

Be conservative of time

  • Must not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations
  • Adult, competent users understand adequately what they want, shouldn’t introduce barriers
  • Potential conflict with principle 1

Be deniable

  • Should be able to opt out, anytime, anywhere, any process
  • Critically: the ability to say no, without sacrificing anything but the ability to use whatever usage
  • The ‘safe word’ concept may find an application here

Discussion

  • Fabio Sergio: what about gossip?
  • Chris Heathcote: surely there’s human responsibility
  • Tom Coates: social control includes humiliation and embarrassment
  • Molly Wright Steenson: systems for shaming can be institutionalised and applied in problem places; there’s a difference between smart and smartass. Haven’t got good enough at modelling situations in order to get this right.

Stefan Smagula

  • Teaching and writing about interaction design

Mike Kuniavsky

  • Writing about ubicomp, society and the social
  • Material products are a form from social values
  • Products affect how we think
  • The pattern is “a recognition of the complexity, unpredictability, confusion of the world”
  • The framework of thought of the last 600 years is coming to an end
  • “By dividing the world into smaller pieces, ways can be found to explain it”: this method is waning
  • Communication and transportation have been the key drivers of this change
  • Shown people (designers?) how complex life is
  • Most people don’t know what to do about this complexity
  • At the end of the prescriptive rationalist vision of the world
  • It is our job as designers to recognise these ideas: “design is a projection of people’s ideals onto product”
  • Past the confusion of postmodernism: the complexity hasn’t been branded yet, hasn’t been given a core set of ideas
  • Book: Human Built World
  • The complexity of the world is an uncomfortably bright light; people turn away. Designers can make it manageable.
  • Go to the light of complexity

Discussion

  • Adam Greenfield: are we up against biological limits? Are we wired to deal with things in a linear way? Yes, physiological limits, 7 ±2.
  • Ben Cerveny: we conceive as a subtractive process, a mental scene out of an excess of input. We have a body of linear tools to process. There is a realisation that we are non-linear systems: technology is becoming us, and the other way around.
  • Matt Jones: we can learn complexity way more than we realise. Tests show that we subconsciously learn complexity beyond language and rational thought.
  • Magical thinking is not wrong; all our models are wrong
  • Tom Coates: looking at people as shearing layers of perception and cognition

Remon Tijssen

  • Behaviours, tactility and graphics
  • Tension-field between playfulness and functionality

David Erwin

  • The funnel
  • Serial, parallel and optional interfaces

Peter Boersma

  • Transactional interfaces
  • ezGov uses IBM’s RUP
  • RUP is weak in user-experience
  • Added StUX, definitions of deliverables for user experience

Dan Hill

  • Self-centred design
  • Not selfish design
  • Background: adaptive design, design as social process, inspiration from vernacular architecture, hackability, allowing and encouraging people to make technology what they want it to be
  • Inspiration from trip to US
  • Assumption that UCD is generally a good thing
  • The focus on usability has distracted people: it has become an end in itself
  • UCD manifests itself in usability, at the expense of usefulness
  • Cultural and social products: massive variation of use across the globe
  • Products most innovative at BBC/music: Audioscrobbler/Last.fm, intense meaning in the patterns it generates. More innovative than the iTunes music store. Steam: setting reminders for radio stations, hacked third-party product, BBC is trying to support this innovation.
  • This innovation is coming from non-designers
  • Veen: amateurised design, the most interesting design on the web. Shirky: situated software.
  • “Always consider a thing in its next larger context”. Eliel Saarinen. Useful piece of design process. Chair, room, house, city.
  • A lot of information about the self is coming out of these systems
  • Audioscrobbler: looking at one’s music, bookmarks, photos, lunches, weblog posts, GPS coordinates, how does this affect habits?
  • Pace of development: what can be done on the web
  • Self-knowledge and enlightenment: how does it affect one’s life?
  • The practice and focus of design is moving towards behaviour

Limitations

  • This is early-adopter activity. It’s geeky, with a high barrier to entry. It requires code to make these things. It’s self-limiting: only certain kinds of people can make these products.
  • Scalability problems: resilience, lack of reliability of iterative development, when will we be at the stage when we can rely on things working?
  • BBC, radio broadcasting needs to be resilient: public service
  • Database design and scalability: Flickr doesn’t need to be normalised
  • Common appeal of these things is self-limiting: too much systems-level thinking
  • Moving into a space where products are social, and can have social meaning, and thus be socially harmful
  • People’s assumptions and experiences are based on context
  • Need to be more rigorous about understanding social patterns
  • Audioscrobbler is not good at classical music
  • Designers and researchers need better understanding of each other
  • Designers are at their most useful when they are enabling adaptive design
  • Using ethnography within a design process. Look at long-term ethnographic process, hooking it into the rapid prototyping of the adaptive-design world.
  • There is the value of sociology here. Ethnomethodology, Heidegger.
  • Book: Where the Action Is, Paul Dourish
  • Social systems work well when there is accountability
  • Building things where this also builds an account of the building
  • Place and space: place being about social structures
  • Embodiment: appropriating products, building social meanings into products
  • Accountability: part of the action is a documentation of the action (Dourish). Is ‘view source’ accountability?
  • Book: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman

Matt Webb

  • Neuroscience and interaction design
  • This is really mostly psychology
  • Game: remembering animals
  • Light comes from top-left
  • Easier to react in the direction that things approach you from
  • Dialogue boxes: work with natural directions
  • We follow human eye direction, not robot eye direction. Pulling a lever is faster when eyes point in that direction.
  • We respond the same to arrows as we do to gaze
  • All that neuroscience has done is to confirm what we know from psychology
  • Three types of object: animate, inanimate, tool
  • Three zones: graspable, peripersonal. The schema of the body is extended by the held tools.
  • Our body space is quite mutable: space on a screen becomes the space represented by the body; anything which moves as part of your hand becomes part of your grasp. There’s an amount of time it takes to understand this, a learning process and experience.
  • Grasping has as much primacy as a cup itself: “sit down” or “chair” are equivalent in the brain
  • If we see or say grasping, or looking at a coffee cup: the same neural activity shows
  • “What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time”
  • Mapping observed phenomena to the science of jetstreams: the same thing will happen to neuroscience

John Poisson

  • The stretch-time conundrum
  • Sony is a huge force, vaunted to vilified in three short decades
  • Loss of brand value: products are not meeting user expectations
  • Sony founders have changed, directions have changed
  • One of the problems is in the fact that it’s Japanese: basic simple cultural processes
  • Hikaru dorodango: process refinement as creative expression, successively sculpting and crafting mud balls into spheres
  • Three interconnected languages are undocumentably mixed
  • Languages are connected to neurological development: learning Japanese at an early age increases the threshold of tolerance of the pain of complexity. Kanji pain begets user pain.
  • At first I thought that it was a problem of language, but then realised this increased tolerance of complexity pain
  • Sony ‘iPod killer’ is a user-experience nightmare, but for Japanese it’s not too complex
  • There’s an overall acceptance of complexity in Japan
  • Pattern-based learning: origami, 48 steps of process, more complex than interfaces
  • Stretch time: at 3pm on the Sony campus everyone stops, music plays, and everyone is encouraged to stretch
  • Process is good: start with rice cookers and end up with transistors. Releasing lots of stuff and then seeing what works. But there are a lot more misses than hits at the moment.

Sanjay Khanna

  • Kurt Vonnegut in ‘Cold Turkey’
  • Mike Kuniavsky: intended effects are insignificant compared with the emergent effects, just noise compared to the overall outcomes

Niels Wolf

  • Intro to JXTA
  • Works on every network device
  • Allows control over your data, sharing, peer-to-peer backup
  • Implemented in many languages, including Python
  • Assigned a unique number, which works across IP, Bluetooth, mobile, rendezvous, etc.
  • Everybody becomes a server if no other can be found

Molly Wright Steenson

  • “All hail the vast comforting suburb of the soul”
  • Lots of research into garden cities
  • Worried that the future is going to be boring
  • Closing off some avenues for development by focusing on urban environments
  • What are the constraints that define a suburb?

Jack Schulze

  • Mapping and looking
  • Lots of cool stuff. No notes.

Matthew Ward

  • Questioning the commodification of space
  • We are social, spatial, temporal beings

What were the conditions for the rise of these spatial technologies?

  • 2001 descrambling of GPS
  • FCC policy to make sure 911 callers can be located
  • Ubiquity of mobile phones
  • If we don’t move away from the “where’s my nearest pizza” we are going to get really bored really soon
  • Differential space: socio-spatial differences are emphasised and celebrated
  • Iain Borden: skateboarding
  • “Social space is a social product. Our task now is to construct everyday life, to produce it, consciously to create it. Boredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated desires.” Lefebvre

Chris Heathcote

  • Nuts and bolts, how to use location
  • Location is coordinates
  • Location is names and titles
  • Location is also ‘near Matt Webb’, or ‘near my iBook’: relative position might be more useful way of thinking
  • Physical augmentation: using, abusing, changing where they live
  • Visual design: buddy finder on mobile phones, spatially false, chart junk
  • Context awareness is really hard
  • What happens when you get rid of the maps?
  • Lots more cool stuff that I didn’t take notes on

Matt Jones

  • Nokia: insight and foresight
  • A hard problem: “Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high.” Gene Becker, Fredshouse.net
  • Next-gen mobile: big screens, more whizzy features, but we still have the same old messy world
  • A modest start: being in the world instead of in front of the screen
  • Nokia 3220, 5140: power-up covers with new capabilities
  • Nokia 3220: LED displays with accelerometers and thus motion capture
  • “Where the action is”: this ignores 99% of our daily lives
  • Dance Dance Revolution and EyeToy: new world
  • Nokia 5140: first RFID reader phone
  • New ways of using mobiles with touch-based tech
  • Easy and concrete access to services and repeat functions
  • Transfer of digital items between devices as simple as a gesture of giving
  • In the future also fast and convenient local payment and ticketing: fast, easy way of getting settings and services
  • When you count all the steps to make simple actions, they are about 100 actions: to find settings, set up the human-modem thing
  • Touch actions are potentially two orders of complexity less: into one action
  • Launched active cover with NFC (Near Field Communication): Philips, Sony, Visa, Samsung, nfcforum.org
  • Pairing things up, putting things together (how is this different from BT? Passive chips)
  • Prototype things!
  • NFC is a touch-based RFID technology
  • Putting the information into the tag: can contain more than an ID
  • Close mapping to physical objects: Dourish
  • NFC active objects will have mixed spirit world of objects having magic behind them: permitted moves for games, origins of objects, spime-like stuff
  • One-to-one mapping: multiple digital meanings on objects
  • It’s not a one-way world: these things are rewriteable. Secular isn’t the dominant way of thinking.
  • Now that we can give objects spirit world, semiotic, actions
  • Into fetish objects: auspicious computing, unique wooden balls (Minority Report)
  • Friendster: a game of how many connections. Turning into an info-fetish physical game.
  • Phones are precious, tags are not
  • Throwaway, data detritus, spime spume
  • Programmatic product life-cycle
  • Audit trails for trash
  • Automation of recycling
  • Techno-optimism
  • WWF: sustainability at the speed of light

Long Now (Stewart Brand)

  • Fashion
  • Commerce
  • Infrastructure
  • Governance
  • Culture
  • Nature
  • Sometimes technology can disrupt these layers

Fabio Sergio

  • From collision to convergence
  • How I learned to stop worrying and watch TV on my mobile phone
  • 2001: who the hell would want to watch TV on a mobile?
  • 2003: using mobile to watch Big Brother from the car
  • Consultants: timeliness, context sensitivity, self-expression, immediacy, relevance
  • People rely on their connected devices to fill-in interstitial time slots
  • Armed with this notion, outlets acquired content and chopped it into 3–5 minute videos
  • The end result is too much navigation and not enough content; it undermines the concept of ‘snacking’. The navigation has become the experience.
  • Navigation is not bad per se; the web is arguably built on it
  • Flow: where the consumer is completely engaged with interaction
  • Mobile content experiences happen in contexts that basically negate the ability to focus
  • How do you access video? At the moment through a browser
  • Big Brother: lessons learnt
  • Always-on-ness: there is always something new happening. Marshall McLuhan meets Orwell.
  • Something might happen at any time
  • Action can be just a video call away
  • Easy to get into the flow of what’s happening
  • Cut to measure: as little or as long as you want
  • Conversation-based: you can keep hearing when you can’t watch. Don’t need to look at the screen.
  • Why should the browser and media player be two different applications? Should probably be one.
  • People need context, medium, content, probably in this order
  • The handset should be a remote control: as much as possible make navigation resident on the device
  • Content should be snackish: but should be grouped
  • The experience should be around the on/off switch

Timo Arnall

Sunday discussion

  • Brief: design a ticket machine that also allows city navigation and takes care of tourists and busy commuters equally, that doesn’t have a screen
  • Alternative brief: a permanent tag large enough to contain digital info, that could be unobtrusively attached to anything in public space
  • Mechanisms for friendly denial

I’m lost: design a physical pathway which

  • Includes the idea of signs to explain features of the environment to the unmediated
  • Could serve as a compensation or apology for people denied in the ubiquitous sense
  • Was distinctively local and Amsterdam-ish
  • Includes infrastructure
  • Poetics and emotional enhancements required

Overheard somewhere at the bar: “anthropology/ethnography is this year’s library science”, another new/old juxtaposition. Not that I agree.