I spoke last night at Berkeley's School of Information Future of Interaction Design lecture series, presenting the "Sketching Smart Things" talk I gave at BayCHI last month and at CHIFOO the month before. I'm evolving this talk, rather than doing every talk from scratch. There's about 80% overlap with the previous talks, though this time around I've added several slides to explain the origin of the Information Shadow idea by citing Tom Coates' and Ulla-Maaria Mutanen's work, and I've referenced Bag, Borrow or Steal when talking about how digital technology is shifting the nature of everyday objects into subscription services.

You can download the presentation with all the text as a 900K PDF.

(image by MGChan, found on Flickr)

That last reference shows my current interest in the way that digital networked technologies allow for objects to shift from "buy and store" model to a "rent and share" subscription model. Bag, Borrow or Steal, City Carshare and timeshared condos (thanks to Nicholas Nova for reminding me of this) are all occasional use/high price products that technology has changed the ownership model for. What's a high price niche functionality today becomes commodity functionality eventually. Netflix has done it for DVDs. In one of Bruce Sterling's original Viridian speeches from 1999, he brings it all the way don to the most commodified of tools, the hammer:

If all your possessions are network peripherals, then you have a possible LINUX model for objects in the real world. In this world, I don't buy a hammer. What I really want to own is the hammering functionality. I might as well share the hammer with my neighbor == he can't steal it, and if he breaks it, I'll know immediately. A modern hammer in this world comes built around a chip, with a set of strain gauges that determine if it is worn or broke or abused. Let's network that hammer.

Berkeley's famous Tool Lending Library did a low-tech version (the subscription price for it is the cost of owning a house in Berkeley), and Ford, DeWalt and ThingMagic are tantalizingly close with their Tool Link product:

The innovative Ford Work Solutions Tool Link from DeWalt uses RFID technology to track what's in your cargo box and what isn't. Checking Tool Link before heading out to a job site ensures all tools you need are on hand. At the end of the workday, Tool Link guarantees all the gear used at a job site is back onboard.

The Ford version is a kind of personal inventory control system, but once every tool has an embedded RFID tag in it, you can start doing all kinds of things, including the kind of subscription-based resource sharing that Sterling alluded to. Soon, though, more occasional-use products will become dotted outlines that get filled in as we need them.

[Update: Treehugger has an article that says that services like Bag Borrow or Steal are Product Service Systems by the EU. Their definition is "in essence they are a means, by which we get what we want, without needing to own the product that provides that service." I think that the term, and its PSS acronym, sounds too abstract and generic and that the idea would spread if it was called something more informative and evocative--I dunno, "library" for nonprofit ones and maybe something like "thingshare" (riffing off of "carshare" and "timeshare") for the for-profit general class.]

[Update: Phil points to Jeremy Rifkin's Age of Access as a book-length discussion of some of these ideas with the core thesis being "Property [in the age of networked information] continues to exist, but is far less likely to be exchanged in markets. Instead, suppliers hold onto property in the new economy and lease, rent, charge an admission fee, subscription, or membership dues for its short-term use." I haven't read it--it's on order now--but like much of Rifkin's work, it seems like there's an essence of truth to the idea even though the presentation is hyped.]

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink

With more than 500 BlinkM's sold in less than two weeks, we're already seeing a number of really fascinating projects. We've made a project gallery on the site to highlight some of these. If you have a BlinkM project that you'd like featured on our site, please send a note to blinkm@thingm.com (or just blog about it, we have a Google Alert that'll probably pick it up in a day or so).

Also, a bit of total self-indulgence. About a year and a half ago, SMITH magazine held a Twitter-based contest for six-word memoirs. I entered on a whim and mine got picked up (along with this image and the memoirs of some 850 others). SMITH got a book deal based out of the contest and now the book is out. It makes entertaining bathroom reading and I congratulate SMITH and Twitter for making a cultural product before pretty much anyone knew who they were.

Posted by at 7:16 PM | Permalink

ThingM's first product, BlinkM is now for sale from Sparkfun. BlinkM is a smart LED. What's a smart LED? Well, on the one hand, it's the atomic unit of ubiquitous computing: an RGB LED and a CPU. Input, processing, networking, and output in one package. If technology worked like chemistry, it would be analogous to hydrogen; if it worked like biology, to algae. OK, maybe that overstates the point, but it's the simplest device that we could imagine that represents the essence of ubicomp, and it was the one we could, as a self-funded startup, afford to develop and manufacture relatively quickly (development started in November, though it's based on work we did with WineM).

It's designed for hobbyists, designers and artists who want to add low-power colored light to their projects, but don't want to mess with pulsed width modulation or color theory. Give it an RGB number, or select a color from the color picker, and it glows that color; enter two colors, and it'll do a smooth fade between them. Want to simulate the breathing sleep light on a Mac computer but in purple, it'll do that.

Take a look at the description for the full story.

In all honestly, we're really excited that we developed and are selling this (and by "we," Tod really did all of the heavy lifting on the engineering, software, documentation and video). I know, I know, soon we will have to deal with the customer service (we're keeping it in the ex-Adaptive Path family by using Satisfaction, the company co-founded by fellow AP founder alum Lane Becker), but right now it feels pretty great.

We'd like to thank the people who helped us out along the way:

• John Houck wrote most of the Sequencer in Processing and Java.
• Elizabeth Goodman designed the initial UI design for the Sequencer
• Nathan Seidle, of Sparkfun, for advice and for the initial order (placed months before prototypes even existed!)
• Mykle Hansen, for being our first and only alpha tester
• Dave Vondle, for data sheet advice and for the first bulk order, also placed long before they actually existed
• The alumni of the Sketching in Hardware conferences, who gave us a lot of valuable advice in the early stages of the project
• David, Anders, and all of the other beta testers

Posted by at 6:13 PM | Permalink

Comment spam was causing Movable Type to regularly use up all the available memory on this machine, so I've turned off comments for now. If you want to comment on anything, send a note to 'blog' c/o this domain and I'll respond to you in email and, unless you ask me not to, I'll post it with the entry you're referring to.

Sorry. I like Movable Type and I've been using it for several years, but I don't have time to debug it right now.

Posted by at 10:52 PM | Permalink

My keynote for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference last year has been posted to ITConversations. The talk is called "The Coming Age of Magic." It's an argument for the use of magic as a user experience design metaphor when creating objects that exhibit behaviors. In other words, I believe that magic can be a useful metaphor for making ubiquitous computing devices more comprehensible and usable. My presentation takes the form of three linked arguments about emergence:

• The emergence of ubiquitous computing from market forces acting on, and in concert with, CPU prices
  
• The emergence of animist reactions to devices that have behaviors that go beyond action-reaction physics
  
• The emergence of magic as a metaphor for the design of ubicomp devices
  

Also, "Observing the User Experience" was translated into Japanese and is available from Amazon Japan.

Posted by at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This blog is primarily for me to talk about my thoughts about ubiquitous computing technology, design and the relationship between such technology and people. However, it's still a blog, so--as a change of pace--here's a list of my favorite music from 2007 (and an Amazon link orgy--sorry about that, but it's the easiest way to contextualize all this stuff...plus I get a kickback ;-).

• Talib Kweli, Eardrum. Kwali's music is smart, literate and an always thought-provoking commentary of the New York black experience. He writes about how food is important to learning ("Eat to Live"), how family links the black urban and rural experiences ("Country Cousins"), and how religions oversimplify the problems and solution ("Give 'em Hell").
  
• Arctic Monkeys, Favourite Worst Nightmare. Tight, clever and with the terrific ability to write a hook, these guys channel the Kinks, Romeo Void, and Gang of Four while being totally original power pop that's emotionally ambiguous and sensitive.
  
• Clinic, Visitations. I want someone to make a film version of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels of swinging London lunacy just so that Clinic can score it. They channel the spirit and tone of psychedelia without descending into parody and create an intricate world of 3-minute snippets of creepy, focused fuzz.
  
• Low, Drums and Guns The most aptly-named band in the world makes one hell of a downer album about war. There is rarely light in Low's world, and there's none this time around. They are angry and they have written an album-length requiem for America, but it's a lush, immersive requiem of tympani, swirling guitars and pleading vocals.
  
• El-P, I'll sleep when you're dead/Aesop Rock, None Shall Pass Paranoia and dense urban life are the center of Def Jux's universe, but they're in top form this year. These two records channel that feeling of being in an overcrowded, screeching subway car where the words get lost in the sound of the voices, the machines, the heat and the smell, and it all feels a bit out of control. El-P gets special points for one of the most brilliantly brutal videos of the year.
  
• Digitalism, Idealism Dance music seems to be alive and well in France, where Digitalism, Justice and Daft Punk keep on producing. Of the three Digitalism's record is the best. Complex, textured and still head-bopping (since, well, I listen to this most often on headphones, rather than on the dance floor). It makes me happy that people still party enough in France to sustain a creative dance music industry.
  
• Grinderman, Grinderman I've long been a Nick Cave fan, but the last couple of years of his output drifted between samey and uninspired. Here, Cave is still essentially reworking "A Threepenny Opera" as written by pirates, but it's the best reworking of the last five years, at least, looser, meaner and more fun. One of my favorite songs from the initial sessions, Vortex never made it to the final record, but it was nearly our wedding song (that was Magnetic Fields' Book of Love, picked by Liz).
  
• MIA, Kala Holy cow, what a surprise. Most novelty artists, and that's what MIA pretty much was with the last record, rarely manage a second record of note. MIA blew past that hurdle and it looks like she's well on her way to a career like Bjork's: creative, brave, weird and never dull. Great beats back fascinating, occasionally chilling stories of Southeast Asia. It takes a lot of courage to make a track about your rise to fame using polyrhythmic drumming and call it "Bird Flu." Timbaland's rap on "Come Around" nearly ruins that song, but that's about the only low point in a great record.
  
• Angels of Light, We Are Him Angels of Light (and SWANS, the predecessor band) exist in roughly the same grimy, sad universe as Nick Cave (and maybe Low), but in a noisier corner. For the last 10 years, M. Gira--the core of the band, who I've been following since his SWANS days--has been kind of dragging, but this record really picked up. Things are still nasty, brutal and not-particularly-short, but the music is much more varied and interesting. It's good to see people pull out of slumps and, as much it goes against the esthetic, it makes me happy.
  
• Black Francis, Bluefinger It's a Gen X heresy to admit this, but I've always liked the first couple Frank Black records more than any of the Pixies records. Unfortunately, he seems to have gotten lost for about 10 years. The work was good, but it didn't have that clever, intricate craziness that the first two Frank Black records had. This new record, though not quite as good as those, is certainly getting much closer. Yeah, sure it's a concept album, but really, it rocks weird with a sly grin in a way that I missed. Thank you, Black Francis.
  
• Jay-Z, American Gangster As is clear from the notes above, I enjoy watching artists mature in interesting ways, with their work as documentation of their personal changes. This is a classic example of that. It's ostensibly a concept album based on the film, but it's really Jay-Z wrestling with the internal contradictions of being successful while remaining credible to the outsider position that brought him success. He redefines "gangster" to mean "anyone who does business," saying that he had no choice but to be a business gangster, that success brings little happiness and that he's now a little embarrassed by it. It's one man's neurosis, played out in the self-contradictory, confused words of someone wrestling with their feelings.
  

• Calvin Harris, Merrymaking
  
• C-Mon & Klypski with the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, Circus C-Mon & Klypski
  
• White Stripes, Conquest
  
• Peter Bjorn and John, Writers Block
  
• LCD Soundsystem, New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
  
• Gogol Bordello, Supertheory of Supereverything
  
• John Vanderslice, Time to Go
  
• Justice, Stress
  
• Shantel, Disko Boy
  
• PJ Harvey, The Piano
  
• Iron&Wine, White Tooth Man
  
• Paul McCartney, Mr. Bellamy
  
• Fun-da-mental, Cookbook DIY
  
• Lupe Fiasco, Little Weapon
  

Happy New Year!

Posted by at 7:23 PM | Permalink

Elizabeth Goodman and I got married this weekend in San Francisco (where we live). I'm ecstatic to be married to the smartest, wisest, funniest, sweetest, most wonderful person I know. Thank you Liz for agreeing to be my wife.

(photo by Cassidy Curtis)

Thanks also to everyone who came, and extra special thanks to everyone who helped. Timothy, your forklift skills (among other things) are amazing. Thank you.

Various people took photos, here are some from Flickr:

James',Audra's,Cassidy's, Peter's,Brian's.

Thank you all, again.

[8/28/07 update: Elizabeth posted some photos, and so did I, along with some photos of our honeymoon]

Posted by at 6:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I had the honor and pleasure of being invited to give two very different presentations recently.

Yesterday, I was on a panel at the Headlands Center for the Arts on the economic side of creative work. This is something that's long interested me, but something I rarely get to discuss in private, much less in public with such panelists as Donald Fortescue, Bruce Tomb and Andrea Zittel. My presentation (400K PDF) was only a small piece of the two-hour discussion, but I figured I'd share it anyway. In it, I introduce the idea of boundary objects as a way to talk about products and projects that fall between the primarily commercial work of design and the primarily expressive work of art (though as the discussion showed, the distinction is very fuzzy). In the presentation, I mention the work of Noam Toran and although I have ranted about critical design before, I think his work is great, even though I still don't think it's really design. Also, if you were there: what I meant when I said that the high end art market (which is a market, unlike the music industry) was corrupt was that its workings (as someone on the outside) are highly opaque and that I believe it is highly susceptible to price manipulation and insider trading; if it was a regulated market, I believe that there would be a lot of playfield-leveling regulation that would be done to keep dealers, collectors and museums from leveraging their respective power in the financial and reputation markets unfairly toward people outside of the existing social network.

The second presentation (650K PDF) I gave was on sketching for frogdesign San Francisco back in mid-July. It outlines much of the work that ThingM has been doing this year and how it fits into our overall philosophy of sketching as an agile user experience design methodology.

Posted by at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over the weekend of June 23-24 ThingM organized Sketching in Hardware 2, the second installment of the conference that Matt, Judith and I put together last year (for more on that event, see my thoughts about it last year). It was a great time with fantastic presentations by an incredibly talented group of folks. I felt very privileged that they had come, some from as far away as Sweden and Japan, to our event. Thank you! I'll be posting more about the event in the coming week, but I wanted to share a couple of things.

Photos

More photos in Sketching in Hardware 2

My Intro

Hi! My name is Mike Kuniavsky.

Thank you very much for coming. Some of you have come here from far away, others are here on short notice. Thank you.

Let me get started by telling you who don’t know me a bit about myself and then telling you a little about how Sketching in Hardware started.

I’m a user experience researcher and designer. As such, I’m primarily concerned with the personal, social and cultural impact of technology and how to create technology for people. Most of my career had been spent as an interaction designer for the web. Having spent a lot of time thinking about people and technology, about five years ago I realized that the greatest impact was not going to come from the Web. Three years ago I left Adaptive Path, a web design company I had cofounded, to pursue the integration of information processing into objects that don’t look like computers. I shifted my focus to interaction design for ubiquitous computing. As I was about to leave Adaptive Path, I met Matt Cottam of Tellart at a workshop in Vienna, at the CHI conference. It was a workshop on the integration of interaction and industrial design. We got to talking and realized that we had similar visions for how that integration should work, and it revolved around sketching.

That conversation was the most direct genesis of this event, but let me back up a bit and talk about sketching, or at least sketching from my perspective.

Sketching is a fundamental process of design. Whether you make music, architecture, processes, or whatever, we sketch in some way. For me, I learned the value of sketching working with a classically-trained animator named Lawrence Marvit. He had a pile of pencil nubs of all difference colors and he’d start sketching with roughly light colored pencils, then he’d move to darker and darker colors as the idea took shape. Finally, he’d trace the final idea in either black or dark blue pencil. This was eye-opening to me, because it showed me that pencil sketches have quality that few other things have.

Lawrence and I worked together 13 years ago. When I started thinking about sketching again three years ago, I thought back to what made his work so interesting to me, and I came up with several criteria:

• They’re fast
• They’re provisional
• They preserve history

Bill Buxton recently wrote a book recently that is an excellent discussion of the role of sketching as a philosophy to the process of innovation and interaction design. In it, he enumerates a number of other qualities of sketching.

Now, think about which of these qualities hardware has. Almost none of them. As practices go, developing physical computing is nearly the opposite of sketching on paper. So what? Why is that a problem? Well, as many of us here know, sketching is not part of the production process; it is part of the idea generation process. When you sketch, you’re not working on a final product. Sketching is a process through which the sketcher explores the problem space and uncovers possibilities and constraints within that space. By being bad at being as sketching medium, electronics greatly limits the breadth of ideas we can have.

Thus, this conference. The goal of this event is to bring together

• the people who make the tools that allow for sketching in hardware
• the people who use electronics expressively and push the boundaries of how to sketch in hardware
• and the people who teach how to understand and use electronics,

and discuss what it means to create hardware sketching tools and how to make the tools we have more effective. This conference is also structured the way it is because I feel it’s important to create a community of people who are interested in this, and the way we create community is not just by listening to presentations, but by walking together, by having dinner together and by collaboratively sketching in hardware.

I also have an even broader agenda, and please indulge me in sharing it with you. I believe that ubiquitous computing is going to play a major role in humanity’s future. The possibilities for information processing embedded into objects has enormous potential for improving the lives of people and the earth. I’m very bullish on the idea, in general. But I’ve also studied people a lot, and I know that people will, on the whole, take the easiest route to a solution, without considering the broader implications that solution has on the world. This easiest route is often defined by the capabilities of the tools people use because some things are easier to do with a tool than others.

So here’s what I’ll end on:

If we are the community of tool makers whose tools will define the shape of the information devices of the world to come, then if we create tools with which it is easier to do the right thing than to do the wrong thing, the net effect will be cumulatively better than if we did nothing at all. When we create capability, we braw a boundary. We are in a unique position to draw those boundaries that can make a better world. Let’s keep that in mind.

Posted by at 3:07 PM | Permalink

Given my interests, it's probably not surprising that I collect interesting examples of mobile and domestic UI design. Much to Liz's chagrin, I have several boxes of mobile phones, laptops, electronic toys and other devices. Things I choose not to buy, I photograph:

Today, a particularly amusing addition arrived in the mail (courtesy of Ebay). I had ordered several first generation Blackberrys and thought nothing of it when the seller was from Texas. Then the Blackberry arrived:

Now, I know it's romantic speculation, but like the old adage of "if only walls could talk," what about electronic devices? Of the other Blackberrys in this lot that had messages on them the messages were from April to November 2001, the exact period of the company's downward spiral. The previous owner of this one wiped all of the messages from it, but I can only assume that this one was from the same period. If Blackberrys could talk...

Posted by at 6:27 PM | Permalink

Last Friday there were two surprising (to me, anyway) front page stories about ubicomp. First, the Economist has a special report on "The coming wireless revolution." The end of the first paragraph reads "In coming years wireless will vanish entirely from view, as communications chips are embedded in a host of everyday objects. Such chips, and the networks that link them together, could yet prove to be the most potent wireless of them all."

The next paragraph begins "Just as microprocessors have been built into everything in the past few decades, so wireless communications will become part of objects big and small."

This combination of ideas--wireless, network, microprocessor, everyday objects--is of course the core recipe for ubiquitous computing. Tod and I at ThingM have been working with RFIDs and embedded networking for a while and we think that it's certainly The Future (in terms of augmenting everyday objects). It's going to require deep changes in terms of the design of how people interact with devices and how companies create them.

One company that seems to get it is, again surprisingly, Nintendo. Or at least they got it with the Wiimote, which was featured on the front page of Friday's Wall Street Journal in a story called Magic Wand: How Hackers Make Use Of Their Wii-motes. In it, the WSJ discusses how the open standards of the Wiimote--as Tod pointed out to me, it's a Bluetooth device that uses off-the-shelf components and communication standards--allow people to hack it , including hack it to use Tod's Roomba control software (which is mentioned implicitly in discussing Chris Hughes' hack)> I think that the availability of these communication standards also allowed the company to focus on creating great interaction, rather than on inventing technology. This is the key shift: once there's enough momentum behind a set of standards, technology development shifts from hardware to software, from engineering to interaction design. At the core of these articles is a recognition that wireless technologies have matured enough that we can focus not on how they work, but what they can do for us.

(yes, I'm also amused that the WSJ called the story "Magic Wand")

Posted by at 7:33 AM | Permalink

It appears that Movable Type has been marking all comments as "junk," regardless of what their spam filtering plugin rates them at, so I appear to have not gotten any non-junk comments in weeks, if not months. I apologize. I've gone through the last couple of entries and published those comments, but it may take me a couple of days to get to the others, and there may be some that rolled off the comment list and I won't be able to find.

I sincerely apologize. I've been wondering why it's been quiet, and now I know.

If you know of a good MT solution for this, email me at blog c/o this site. Thanks.

Posted by at 9:47 AM | Permalink

I've been playing with Swivel lately. It's fun, but their "Compare" icon, an apple and an orange, is particularly apt. Here, I compare a data set I entered (the price of first class postage in the US, 1910 until today) to the Consumer Price Index. Kind of nonsensical--one is an emergent trend, the other is a set of conscious decisions by a small group--yet somewhat interesting in terms of how the our postage rate continues to lag behind all the other products (thus shutting up my complains of how it's so expensive)

Posted by at 11:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How do you define a sense of place? I've lived in the same San Francisco apartment for 11 years. It's the longest I've lived anywhere, ever. I have a great deal of affection for this neighborhood, for what was once an Ohlone settlement, and then the Spanish Mission grounds, and then a succession of immigrant neighborhoods throughout the 20th century, ending today as a gentrifying bohemia on the edge of the Castro. Walking around the spaces immediately adjacent to Ramona Ave, the street I live on, I regularly look at the buildings and think about the layers life that have happened here. A single spot may have had a shell mound, a Spanish goat grazing field, the house of a ship captain who ferried people from the east coast for the Gold Rush and settled, an Irish sheet metal worker's family, a Mexican grocer, a house of junkies, a struggling painter, a Web developer and a second-year associate at a downtown law firm. That layering is fascinating to me.

Yesterday, I decided to do a little experiment on my way to the cafe where I sometimes work and back. I grabbed a bunch of images from the San Francisco Public Library's historic photo collection of places within a two-block radius of my house, printed them, and took pictures that were as close as I could manage in a couple of minutes.

14th and Guerrero, 2007/1928

14th and Dolores, 2007/1929

15th and Dolores, 2007/1956

16th and Dolores, 2007/1929

16th and Dolores, 2007/1856

I tried to match the camera angle and the lens, but it's not a meticulous recreation. Mostly, I'm interested in documenting how the place has and hasn't changed. Really, the physical space hasn't changed much at all. There are new buildings, certainly, and in one case a particularly nice one was was burned by an arsonist in 1993, but the overall space hasn't changed much, with one exception. The trees. Holy cow is there more foliage in San Francisco now than there was even 40 years ago. You go, Friends of the Urban Forest

Here's a Platial map documenting the locations:

Posted by at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

After all of the observation- and analysis-based discussions of terminology on this blog, I decided to do a little experiment to see if there was any data that could be collected. To get an idea of how much people used which term, I first thought that I should just tally the Google references to each of the terms that refer to ubicomp and related concepts. Then I realized that that technique suffered from the unpredictable nature of the Google estimation algorithm and it didn't recognize that some of the terms have been around a lot longer than others, so there are probably more documents that refer to them, even if they're not as popular in the field today.

I decided that a better way to do this would be to buy some search engine keywords (specifically "ubiquitous computing," "ubicomp," "pervasive computing" and "ambient intelligence") and watch how many times the keyword was searched-for and how many times people clicked on it.

Here are the results from 11 days of keyword placement on Google:

OK, what do we see? I'm going to treat clicks as active interest and impressions as a kind of semi-active interest, though I acknowledge this is projecting a lot on the audience and may be conflating several factors in terms of audience composition and intention. In this analysis, "ambient intelligence" is a nonstarter in terms of active interest, although as many people searched for it as "ubicomp." Maybe it's just an academic term and my ad for ThingM (there needs to be something people can click on ;-) wasn't interesting to academics. Still, it's interesting to note that no one clicked on an ad that mentioned "ubicomp" when they had searched for "ambient intelligence."

The next finding, though, I think is the most interesting: "pervasive computing" was searched-on as much (actually a little more) as "ubiquitous computing," but clicked significantly less. First of all, I was surprised that it was searched for as much, but it gets clicked on less than "ubiquitous computing," and that puzzles me. It shows different levels of interest, or different audiences, between the terms. Moreover, the cost-per-click on it is significantly higher, which means that other people are trying to buy the term (I don't think I had any competition for any of the other terms).

Anyway, out of this small thicket of numbers come more questions than answers. Some things we can extract reliably: "ubiquitous computing" and "pervasive computing" are both roughly equally as popular in terms of interest. "Ambient intelligence" is not so popular. "Ubiquitous computing" creates more active interest than any of the other terms, and "ubicomp" is not in nearly as active use (despite its greater popularity as a tag on del.icio.us; for comparison: ubiquitous computing).

Posted by at 10:37 AM | Permalink

Continuing my project of observing how terminology shifts to describe the process of researching and designing the user experience of ubiquitous computing, I noticed a blurb in the latest issue of the IDSA's "design perspectives" newsletter. In it, they note a new service launched by RAHN, Inc., which RAHN calls "Quantitative Ethnographics (QE)." They claim this "integrates performance metrics into the analysis and illustrates innovation's positive impact on a prospective client's customer."

Apart from the error of assuming a "positive impact" before starting research, it's interesting to me how RAHN seems to be using the current vogue for the use of "ethnographics" as a term to describe user research, but modifying it by using the language of measurement (presumably because numbers and figures look better in client reports). Measurement--and the "finding of an average" that it implies--is kind of the opposite of the goal of traditional ethnography, which aims to describe culture in its complexity. That doesn't actually seem to be the point anymore. "Ethnographics" has come to mean "we go onsite and look at people." It has ceased to have the meaning it once had as an anthropological practice, and has been repurposed by the design community.

Is this is a good thing? I don't know, but it's a thing.

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Here's an idea I'm not going to implement, but liked enough to write down in my notebook 3 months ago: DRM-free music on demand using the modem port on your computer (that you're not using and will never use again). The idea is simple: control iTunes with a web browser and dial your mobile phone with your unused modem port, then--rather than connecting as a modem--you just play music over the line. In other words, use your mobile phone to play music, but rather than trying to do it as a data feed, you use the phone's audio capabilities.

Here are the elements:

1. A computer with audio out and a modem port, running a Web server; say, a Mac running OSX
2. iTunes
3. A script to control iTunes over the Web
4. The Mac2Tel circuit
5. A script to dial using the modem

The idea, if I was going to implement it, would be to build the circuit, then combine the last script with the first script to dial my mobile phone number from a home machine and start playing whatever music I've selected over the phone line. The Internet serves as the control channel, while the POTS is the primary audio service.

And, yeah, it's a total hack, but--hey--the elements are all there and I'm leaving it up the reader to put them together. (see "the devil is in the details" for more info on how to do that ;-)

Posted by at 5:58 PM | Permalink

Excuse me while a rant a bit:

<rant>

We have a new entry in the terminology haze that surrounds ubiquitous computing, Palpable Computing. Hooray! Another word for roughly the same thing, but with a twist that could only have looked good on an EU grant application:

Palpable denotes that systems are capable of being noticed and mentally apprehended. Palpable systems support people in understanding what is going on at the level they choose. Palpable systems support control and choice by people.

Their claim is that they're inverting "ambient computing," which is supposedly invisible, with a vision of computing that's more, well, tangible. They position a set of ideas that claim to show how this approach complements "ambient computing," which I find difficult to see, since there's no really developed set of ideas about what "ambient computing" is (maybe inside all the Disappearing Computer project paperwork there is, but certainly not in common use or practice outside the community of people who were given grant money by that project). Moreover, I don't see how the terms they're using as complements relate to the things they're claiming to complement:

Maybe I haven't read enough about it, but it seems to me--at first blush--like a syntactic land grab and a linguistic distinction created to justify continued funding more than an attempt to clarify concepts and move the field forward. It's kind of a shame, and I certainly don't see how it's going to satisfy their project goals, a number of which, at least, seem to be jumping to try and create technology before they've finished making a philosophical argument:

• an open architecture for palpable computing
• a conceptual framework to understand the particulars of palpable technologies and their use.
• design and implementation of a toolbox for the construction of palpable applications
• development of a range prototypes of palpable applications
• gaining a firm understanding of a range of practices into which palpable technologies may be introduced.

Further, as Liz points out, it may represent a rethinking, a retrenching, after an initially overly reductionist reading of Weiser and Norman . That reading may have led to the idea of "ambient intelligence" representing literal disappearance, rather than a philosophy for distributed information processing that meets people's needs and desires (which are sometimes to have things in the background and other times to not). "Ambient intelligence" may have now proven to be too ambient, and thus needs to be complemented with this new project, which may be as equally reductionist.

</rant>

That rant over, congratulations on the funding and all the best luck to you in your new project, folks.

Posted by at 2:55 PM | Permalink

I was pretty excited that Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal asked me to talk to her about tired.com a couple of months back. I'm even more excited that the story was in the paper yesterday (subscription required) and is available syndicated online today.

Those who read Paul's piece in Slate a couple of years back will know the general outlines of the project, but Vauhini fills in details, updates it and presents a fresh analysis. I'm super flattered. Thank you, Vauhini!

Posted by at 4:37 PM | Permalink

I wrote a short piece in the latest version of MAKE (the digital version will be available when the next version comes out). It documents an open source ball game that my friends at Platial were involved in creating. This is an actual outdoor game played with actual balls...nothing digital involved, other than the rules Wiki. Here's a sample of the piece:

They started playing standard kickball on the bocce court, but quickly had to modify the traditional rules. The bocce court was too small for there to be three bases, so they appropriated cricket's two-base system (but kept kickball's baseball-inspired system of strikes, outs and innings). From soccer, they borrowed the idea of throwing the ball back in when it goes out of bounds, and that led another important change. As Wilson says, "you can [really] bean somebody," when you throw a ball in the close quarters of the bocce court, so they introduced rules from dodgeball.

Borrowing ideas and adapting the rules became part of playing the game. With spring, bocce season started and the courts were in use on the weekends, but the bank drive-through wasn't, so it became a legitimate court and the rules changed again to accommodate it. As Wilson puts it, "It was never declared that it was going to have a collaborative rulemaking process, but that's what it was."

The rest of the issue, which focuses on games and toys, is pretty entertaining. Get your copy at the newsstand.

Posted by at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I rarely voice my opinion about things that are outside the usual design/computing/social effects axis, but--hell--it's a blog and occasionally something outside the usual topics deserves mention. Take, for instance, the current health insurance situation I find myself in. I'm a member of the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), largely for the health insurance benefits they provide through their membership in TEIGIT (The Entertainment Industry Group Insurance Trust). Now, apart from the occasional amusement of thinking that designers are entertainers, or that I'm sharing insurance coverage with starving actors, I rarely think about it and pay my quarterly premium and move on.

Now, here's the problem: TEGIT gets their insurance from CIGNA, an insurance company; CIGNA just decided to "recalculate" the premiums that the Trust pays and discovered that they've been charging freelance graphic designers and starving actors far too little. They send TEIGIT a note to that effect, and TEIGIT sent me a note. Here's TEIGIT's description of CIGNA's actions and their response (which, reading between the lines, is a combination of shock, panic and anger--all of which I sympthize with):

The revisions and recalculations have resulted in enormous rate increases for some of our Cigna groups. California rate increases average over 82%, with some increases as high as 254%. We met with our Cigna representative, and protested the new rates. We are also pursuing legal avenues and we are contacting the Governor’s Office and the Department of Managed Health Care. Please join us in protesting the rate increases by contacting your elected representatives.

(you can read the whole letter [100K PDF], which TEGIT kindly sent me in electronic form)

Basically, CIGNA decided that everyone needs to pay between roughly two and three times as much for their health insurance as they currently do, which is already a lot. What does that look like? Let's take a look at CIGNA's provisional rates for San Francisco:

(EMP = employee, SP=spouse, CH=children, FAM=family)
These are per month. Let's do the math. This means that I, EMP, will pay $10800 per year for health coverage and a family pays $32000 per year.

That, bluntly, is an outrage. I urge you to follow TEIGIT's advice and contact a representative and the Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration, the organization responsible for (I believe) regulatory oversight of health insurers nationwide. Tell them that these terms are absurd and likely designed to either kill TEIGIT in California or force them to move to another insurer, which seems like a kind of corporate blackmail or, certainly, bordering on the illegal. Official investigation by the regulators responsible for monitoring the behavior of insurance companies seems to be in order. Me? I'm looking into health insurance brokers, and I suggest the AIGA do the same: TEIGIT may not last, and graphic designers need insurance.

PS: I realize that the whole health industry in America is skewed, and that in exchange for fast access to technology and strong personal protection laws we have, in a sense, chosen to sacrifice a lot of our money. But this is ridiculous.

Posted by at 11:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Recently, Liz and I were watching Masters Of Russian Animation - Volume 1 when had one of these cultural "?!?" moments when an unexpected piece of culture neatly fits into another. Well, kind of. Specifically, several pieces of my cultural knowledge neatly came together: my childhood memories of Moscow, Russia, my parents' description of living in Moscow in the early 1960s, Jacque Tati's "Playtime" and Tetris.

The first animation on the DVD is Fyodor Khitruk's 1962 "Story of One Crime". This a film that, like Tati's Playtime, attempts to humorously interpret the anxiety of living in a rapidly modernizing world. The plot is fairly straightforward: a series of gags that show how modern life in 1960s Moscow drives an otherwise boring Everyman to go crazy and try to kill a neighbor (call it "Crime and Punishment Lite"). The animation is an excellent Modernist style where nearly everything is flat against the screen. One of the gags features a building being noisily being built in a matter of minutes as the Everyman goes about his business. The building is in what was then a standard style for the Khrushchev era. These buildings were constructed of prefabricated concrete chunks that were made off-site, trucked to the building site and assembled, block-style. Because buildings are square, but all the parts in them are not identical, this required some amount of choosing the right block and putting in the right place. I spent several formative early years living in one of these in Moscow with my parents and most of my few memories of that era take place in the yard of one. They were called Plattenbau in East Germany and make up a good chunk of most major cities in the Eastern Bloc.

You see where this is going. That frames the context for my ?!? moment. In one gag in the cartoon, as the building behind our antihero is being built, it looks a lot like Tetris. A lot. A whole like. Like, "Holy crap, that's Tetris twenty years before Tetris was invented" a lot. I grabbed some frames to show what I mean:

I know that Alexey Pazhitnov, the inventor of Tetris, claimed pentominoes as his inspiration, but I can't believe that living in the Soviet Union at the time he could not have been thinking about this building style (and maybe this very cartoon). If not, it's an eerie similarity, and I'm really amused.

Posted by at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)