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November 24, 2002
Doors Day 1 Notes
Notes on Day 1 of the Doors of Perception conference.
Day 1
Thackara
“service and flow economy won’t design itself” despite the glamour of self-organization theories
“The design of systems is to show the consequences and responsibilities of participating in flows.” (So the designer’s responsibility is purely social/moral? Seems wrong.)
“This is not a project-based process” (the first of many process-is-the-only-thing attitudes).
Janine Benyus (author of Biomimicry)
“no technologies are unnatural” because all are made by man, but how adapted are they to the long haul? Nature evolves “technologies” that are adapted (or kills them off).
“Context” (the world) decides based on natural selection what will last. Organisms in biomass are doing the same design stuff we are. “What in nature depents on its survival to solve problem x?”
(Lots of human problems that don’t apply: information organization? Shipping tons of goods across the ocean?)
Business shapes from coral reefs (example): cooperative, self-sustaining, local.
Questions:
Mimic form: what’s the design?
Mimic process: how’s it made?
Mimic ecosystems: how does it fit?
See solutions hiding in plain sight (in biological journals)
NOTES
What are the ethics of self-organizing systems?
What in nature categorizes, manages findability, organization of information? How far can biomimicry really help messy human endeavors?
Luis Galliano
“mythical origins of fire and architecture”
flaws can be fascinating + painful + difficult
“the horizontal Babel of sprawl” / sprawl as virus
Rokeby/ Awad (photographers/installation artists)
Dynamics of gesture/ surveillance systems – how to transform surveillance into an analysis of space. Camera pixels are really like projected “rays” of perception that touch the world, and so can be analyzed.
Head-mounted camera w/six lenses: he wants to “see everything at once”, but it produces an overwhelming sense of anxiety and sickness, too much information.
Feedback no good unless modulated: this is where emergent results appear [is this another instance of fixity being more important than flow?]
Venice piazza human flow traffic analysis. Showing only moving elements, then showing only fixed elements. [pretty, but so what?]
NOTES:
Flows: migration, energy, water. Really anything you want.
Flow comes from information feedback of perception – this is Mihaly’s flow: modulated feedback tuned to my skill level/ preference level constantly
Lars Erik Holmquist (chair of UBICOMP)
Engineer’s view of pervasive computing
Ubicomp vision is really one of connectivity between objects and contexts.
Talked about “cargo cult design”: fetish objects (planes) that appearto be real things, but aren’t (vaporware products, mockups). They are visions without technology. [ a fine point, but very obvious, and presented in sort of an ignorant way: those savages with their kooky mental models.]
Issues: interfaces, power (as in charging, using, storing), sensing.
“Smart-its” “smart” post-its. [Who freakin’ cares? Although this sounds like Microsoft’s OneNotes idea.]
Adding awareness to objects and walls. [are we seeking problems or just building solutions to things that already work?]
[maybe this just points out how hard this all is. The how is so complex and fascinating that it overwhelms the why. Why not just make art if you want to experiment?]
NOTES
Getting sick of them saying “it’s not the future, it’s now!” Where is this stuff in my cubicle, corporate, 9-5 world? Where is it for IA?
Irene Mavrommati and Achilles Kameas
From the “disappearing computer initiative”
Evolution of artifacts [how Kiesler!]
Designing artifacts that can be organized by users—modular designs of experiences through extrovert objects. “Blackboxes” that are everyday objects with a range of sensing, communicating abilities.
“Gadget world” is a specific association of smart objects, formed by a designer or by an intelligent agent.
Requires a generic architectural framework – self-identifying API for the real world.
[ sounds like a really fun programming project but not really useful or relevant. If users will “associate” objects to “build applications” should they ever realize that they’re doing it? How overtly must I participate in the design and programming of Gadget World? And why bother? What reason do I have for this kind of networking? Is it just to let my stereo know what songs are on my computer? Or home automation? Or is there something more profound here?]
Marko Ahtisaari (Nokia)
Proximity-based issues for design of mobile apps: 10cm to a room-size interaction. People use mobile phones in close proximity to each other.
A lot of telecom behavior is aimed at small groups getting together quickly in a small space (swarming).
Nokia—questions of proximity are considered by the “renewal” group, broken into these categories:
- “people and places”: social interaction is a prime driver, spaced that are overlaid with interactions / communications. Sharing: Imaging phones in Japan are often used in proximity not over wide spaces. (Take a picture of a group and show it to the group…then post it to a site?)
- “my things with me”: portable products have emotional relationship. Many items can’t be stored somewhere remotely and retrieved, but must actually be present on your person. Some digital/virtual products seem to behave this way too.
- “trust/security”: in physical space, trust and security are often tacitly dealt with. My credit card is in sight when I use it at a store. Mobile apps don’t accommodate this well yet. (Although there seems to be some reasonable expectations about identity when a SMS is sent: unless the phone’s been stolen or lost, it’s really You at the other end.)
profound user interaction challenges here: proximity is very important, personal space, personal items, personal security are part of it. WIMP GUIs don’t work. WAP-style UI not right either.
[very smart guy, good ideas. Is there temporal proximity, too? Something I “just sent” carries some meaning that something I “sent a while ago” doesn’t?.
Nokia as the computing platform (see M Jones’ blog entry) that’s the most pervasive and probably user-centered. Nokia is dealing with issues in a mostly human-centered and context-centered way.]
Axel Thallemer
Designed those little articulated robot insects with pneumatic legs.
A “State of the art thing designer” [whatever!]
Talking about “fluids” as literal construction tool and a metaphoric one. Computing opens the door to use fluids as building materials. Membranes- newest building material.
Talking about fluid-controlled, membrane buildings, inflatable flexible structures.
“Portable Architecture” temporary spaces made of membranes.
Nifty products – jumping shoes with hydraulics, robots with fluid-filled piston legs, bike suspensions with intelligent hydraulics, jellyfish inspired balloons.
Regular engineers have trouble with his ideas. Biomimicry in construction.
Panel, Day 1 Morning
Activities find new forms, through a technological infrastructure, not that the forms themselves caused new activities. [ this is important, if obvious, and certainly seems to be the designer’s view not the techies’ view ]
Lots of connections to Doors 6, “lightness” is almost a given now. Things that are self-explanatory, things that wake up when needed. Overall more of a balance between thinking of needs, then designing, versus blanketing the world with technology and seeing what will happen.
Is there an implicit conservatism here? People are mentioning an “old way” of doing stuff that they’re romanticizing? A “camp fire community” that’s been lost?
Sustainability can’t be inbuilt, but can be planned for. Virtual context is not sustainable in and of itself.
[panels suck! no one talks, just gives their ideas over and over!]
Berkel and Bos (Dutch design/architects from UN Studio)
Using digital tech to design new strategies for architecture.
Watching user categories over time is important for them [do personas in IA ever take time into account?]
Quantizing the flows needed to make architectures out of them.
[lots of pretty diagrams, but amazingly hard to read and use. How to make useof this data is the question. Is it just to sell complexity to clients? ]
They’re finding visual forms from categorized data, does this really work? There’s so incredibly much subjectivity here that you might as well not use the data.
[something very useful here about modeling users over time. Why is that always missing from IA personas and models? It’s especially important for social software, perhaps even more important than other aspects of personas.]
Felix Stalder (from openflows.org)
The space of flows is a recent historical condition. Dynamic movement is its hallmark, as opposed to the space of places which are static
Human action creates it [yes, it’s behavioral, not physical]
Social spaces created by movement—behaviorally—generated spaces as opposed to physical ones.
The “medium” of the flow defines its contents [don’t get this]
Instant communication engendered banal news reporting – the first telegraphed news was “the queen has a cold.” [this is simply romanticizing the past: “back when there was real news”]
The office is the main node in the space of flows – hyper control and out of control are attributes of workspaces and the space of flows
Feedback can produce surprises
Ton van Asseldonk
Organizing processes which don’t provide predicted outcomes.
“Mass individualization”: experiments show that randomly trying lots of products on the market works as well as market research [though perhaps with higher manufacturing costs]
you want infinite variety, because you can’t market segment that. An unpredictable demand requires value linked to the moments of availability, not to quality.
In Taylorism, organization and planning problems emerge at high efficiencies, but without a hierarchical boss-at-top structure, you get chaos in production. Taylorism needs hierarchy.
Mass individualism needs networked structures: some-to-some, not all-to-all communications within a company.
OVERALL NOTES DAY 1
“pervasive” vs. “ubiquitous” – designer word vs. techie’s word. “pervasive” means getting inside and around everything: the Force. “Ubiquitous” means simply everywhere, but seems somehow observable, on the surface, an added-on feature. And indeed, Holmquist described it as a union between objects and contexts, where the designers think of objects and contexts are often interpenetrated. Maybe the words aren’t so different.
There are so many unquestioned assumptions in this Doors: military uses of pervasive computing are basically bad. People with more time and money would do something essentially good with them. “Good” means social interaction, community-based activities, sustainable eco-growth. Designers imagine a better world, and technology is there so support our visions. “Hamburger Earmuffs”: today’s Ubicomp is having growing pains, “we’ll figure out the why” is a harder question than the “how.”
So far, this is the least tangible Doors. “The question isn’t x” or “the goal is not to y” is so often said, but very few real stakes in the ground or solid ideas to take away.
Posted by Andrew at November 24, 2002 04:20 PM